August 25, 2004

Beach Volleyball

I know this will seem minor as the subjects in this blog go but I couldn't not comment.

A few moments ago, I turned on the television to see what was up with the Olympics. As I write this, I'm looking at a men's beach volleyball game. And they're wearing loose, comfortable shorts and loose, comfortable shirts covering their abs not the teensy-bikinis that I'm sure you've already seen on the women.

(I just edited the above paragraph for the swear-words that just rolled off my fingers to describe my anger at the situation.)

I was getting ready to be upset with the women too because it often angers me to see women willingly play the eye-candy role no matter how immediate the benefits may seem at the time.

So, I check the rules to see what's allowed to be worn. And, lo and behold, the "uniforms" differ for men and women. Here it is from the NBC site:

Teammates in Olympic beach volleyball must wear uniforms of the same color. The women can wear either a one-piece or a two-piece bathing suit, though due to the typically warm playing conditions, most opt for the two-piece. The men must wear shorts and a tank top. Players are allowed to wear hats and sunglasses.

I'm not going to link. Anyway, you'll see it soon enough all over the news: the olympics website is plastered with pictures of the winning female teammates rolling around in the sand in their bikinis locked in an embrace. In other words, get yer soft-porn here.

In one sense, it looks as if it isn't that a big deal in the grand scheme of things. On the other hand, objectification and repression of women is probably one of the most important obstacles to combatting the spread of HIV, along with many other miseries plaguing the globe. The most salient point here is that objectification and repression go hand in hand, a fact many will dispute by trotting out a few young, conventionally attractive celebrities whose power is derived from their looks. I agree that for a few people those two will diverge for a short while in their youth, in other words they will derive some power from being objectified, but I hold that not only is the overall effect of objectification, even of people with conventionally desirable attributes, repressive in general, it will become repressive shortly for that person too -- obviously, because of the temporal nature of these qualities. You can see this in yesteryear's celebrities, desparately injecting toxins into their face and undergoing repeated inhuman surgical procedures trying to cling to vestiges of what gave them that ephemeral power.

Let me add an incident from last week, when I was in San Francisco, that was very striking for me. I was walking down a major street at 8 am in the morning on a quiet, sunny Sunday morning on my way to a early meeting. Almost all the stores were still closed, the little corner groceries, newspaper stands, even breakfast places were just rolling up their blinds. There, in the middle of this lazy morning, stood a porn shop, open at 8 am, neon lights and arrows flashing, already with a few people inside.

I remember thinking isn't that the saddest thing on earth.

And now a lot of people will now urge me not to be a prude -- another great victory of the objectification-camp; this accusation of prudery or wanting to repress sexuality that gets thrown around a lot as soon as one critiques the existing culture of extreme commodification of everything, including human bodies.

Since when is it prudish to be for an actually liberatory sexual-politics: one that celebrates the human body and human sexuality --in their wondrous diversity-- not to make a buck, not to degrade, not to create a perpetually insecure population of women, and not to create such desperation and distortion in men that enough of them will visit a porn shop 8 am on a Sunday morning in sufficient numbers to justify opening the store?

If that's prudery, let me join that club.

Posted by zeynep at 01:43 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

July 14, 2004

Gay Marriage Amendment Scuttled Just as the Administration Prefers

A perfect outcome for the administration: the gay-marriage amendment did not pass the Senate test. Now everyone else can forget about it while the evangalical / fundamentalist base talks about nothing else until November.

It would have been a disaster for the administration if it had passed. Actually modifying the constitution to ban the rights of a group of people irritates many people, even people who are not comfortable with the idea of gay marriage. Plus, if the debate actually continued among the general public there would be all those stories of people who were turned away from the bedside of their dying partners of many decades at the orders of estranged "family" members who had shunned their relative up until that moment. This one is not winnable for the conservatives without greatly damaging any pretense of compassion. It is, however, greatly valuable as a get-the-vote-out issue:

"Four million religious conservative voters sat out the last election, so the president's visible stance on protecting marriage is essential to turning out all of those conservative voters who pulled the lever for him in 2000 and getting those other 4 million to come out for him this year," said Keith Appell, a conservative strategist in Washington.

And I do want to say something to many progressives and radicals who show a lack of enthusiasm for the rights of gay people to marry, rightly pointing out all the problems with the institution of marriage. "What's wrong with civil unions" is often the polite phrasing I hear for "I'm too radical to support marriage for anyone, straight or gay."

Well, nothing wrong with civil unions if that is the the only available civil institution of couplehood for gays and straights alike. In fact, in a sane world, that's what it would be and people who wanted to add a church wedding or a raindance ceremony to their civil union would do so at their own discretion. But so long as that is not the case, so long as there are separate standards for separate types of couples, there is indeed much wrong with civil unions for gays while straights get to marry, even if the institution of marriage ain't always that great. Neither was there anything that great about eating greasy hamburgers at dreary lunch counters in Mississippi during the summer of 1963. Separate standards are an affront to human dignity now, just as they were then.

Posted by zeynep at 05:40 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack