And just when the flap seemed to pass. . .

This blog is supposed to be on historical topics, but strays more than a bit, as the occasional reader would well know.  A couple of days ago, I blogged on the flap de jour, the saga of the young celebrated and good looking females who found that their private embarrassing photos had been posted to the planet on the Internet.  I was amongst those frequently criticized people who caste a measure of blame on the naive. . . well not so naive, young women who undertook photographing themselves without the benefit of clothing or allowing it to occur.  Well, I'm still criticizing them, but for the same nuanced reason I was at the time, which is now amplified today.

 

Rosy the Riveter, who remains a popular American image. . . and who forms a better role mode now some 70 years after the image became popular than the current crop of pop icons do.  Or at least I hope she does.

Yesterday the celebrated female adult child of a well known Armenian American deceased lawyer, who rose to fame as a celebrity lawyer, was announced to be fully appearing, if you follow me, in the British edition of an American journal that ostensibly caters to "gentlemen".  One of the British newspapers, which are themselves rather sleazy on occasion, proclaimed that now at least the voyeur would not be engaged in voyeurism, and could partake in the view "all night".

Great.

Okay, why does this matter and why do I care.  So some offspring of the well known and successful wants to sell her looks? So what?  So young women pose for the compromising and it gets distributed, so what?

Well, here's why it matters.

I have a daughter, and I have a large number of female cousins. They're all extremely intelligent women, and I want them to be judged that way.

Now, I know that we as a species do take note of looks. And men do more than particular.  But how those looks are presented, and in what form, really matters.

There is a reason that at one time if you wanted the same images that you can now ogle for free on the Internet you had to go to a sleazy little hole in the wall store and buy a journal that was wrapped in a paper bag.  It was regarded as indecent and the contents were likewise regarded as indecent.  And the fact that they were regarded as indecent meant the standard was clothed decency.

Women certainly weren't held equally in society, but its the women who grew up in that atmosphere that were able to benefit from the slow change in the work place that came about for women.  If the only image of women that had existed at the time was that which appeared on war machines of the era, it wouldn't have happened.

Starting really in the 1950s, but getting really grossly amplified in the 1970s, the image that women have had to contend with has become really corrupted.  By the 1990s, in spite of their advancement in the work place, women had become so objectified that there was an expectation that they'd give of themselves cheaply in ways that they once held absolute.

So that's why this matters.

It's well known that amongst young women today disappointment is endemic.  No wonder, treated as objects and subject to expectations that they'll consent to be toys, they live in a world in which their appearance is taken more seriously than their views and brains.  That's wrong.

Every time a woman sells her image, if its an image of that type, to appear as a toy in a journal, it reinforces that view.  Any many, no matter how debased his situation, is now free to view her as his property, in his mind.  And every time an image gets released that reinforces the idea that men are able to capture images of their girlfriends in that fashion, it reinforces the expectation that every girl must do that.  

The biggest obstacle that women face in western society, is women.  Just as blacks had to contend with the Stepin Fetchit's of their era, which reinforced a stereotype of them that they had to work desperately hard to overcome, as they were trying to overcome it, every woman famous for being famous who sells her images for public gaping does the same thing.  And, to make matters worse, in an era of global communications and interactions, every western woman who does that, in an era when the west remains the richest region of the globe by far, reinforces that view of women in spades where it's part of the local culture to start with, and provides ammo to those societies that hold women down in the name of protecting them.

So, sisters. . knock it off.

Postscript

I wasn't going to update this post, and for right now I'm not going to bump it up, in light of really important things going on in the world, but as I can't help but comment on something I saw in print, I'm converting the comments I made into postscripts, and adding a new one.

Postscript II

 This seems to have largely died down, thankfully, as a crisis de jour, replaced one again by the more serious topics of Russia in the Ukraine and the Islamic State's Caliphate ambitions, but on one final note, I saw a comment somewhere in a journal about how this will not impact the careers of the two most famous individuals who were depicted in this nonsense.

I hope it doesn't, but it will forever, I'm afraid, impact our view of them. The phrase "loss of innocence is way overdone, but here there's clearly an element of that when we have two young women, both who, to some degree, are portrayed with a clean, intelligent image, and in one case at least is found in photos she's apparently sharing or were designed to be shared with a male whom she's dating, so to speak. Granted, that's all private conduct, but for a person barely out of their teens, it really wipes away in a blunt and cheap fashion the aura of innocence that people would prefer to have, and forces us all to acknowledge another.

Now, granted, there a lot of people, apparently, who have committed the same trespass and don't have to be subject to public view, even with that view is essentially forced, but that's the point. The lesson here is probably to reflect on the conduct in its entirety.

Postscript III

Froma Harrop, an independent columnist whose columns I generally enjoy, wrote on this article in a column appearing in today's paper.

Harrop, who is nationally syndicated, took a position quite close to mind, putting us both in the "blame the victim", in part, camp that has received a lot of criticism. Indeed, Harrop goes further than I have here in blaming those who took photos of themselves, even suggesting that the release of such material might not be wholly due to theft, or perhaps the theft was somewhat invited. I doubt that, but at any rate, Harrop, a liberal writer, comes down here in the same area that I have.