Exploitation, or Liberation?
No, this is not the standard 'all porn denegrates women' line. It's about the fine lines that exist between acts which liberate and those which exploit. (And if you thought the Erotica Vs Pornography debate was confusing... hold on tight!)
For example, let's look at breasts. As a woman who looks at lots of porn sites, I see more boobs than I ever did in high school locker rooms & college dorms. I also have a nice pair myself. Let's look a tit, I mean a
bit at the history of boobies. The recent history anyway. The nipple of the iceberg that is breasts.
In the 60's, those darn liberated women rebelled against the establishment & burned their bras. (Well,
women didn't so much burn them, as toss them aside.) Bras were not seen as garments of support, but devices which held them down - a figural term not about their figures... err, well, it was & it wasn't...
Bras represented the chaffing patriarchal system - underwires & inequality rubbed women the wrong way. And those old 'Bird Dog Bras' (those that made pointers out of setters) told women they needed those Maidenforms to conform to the male standards of beauty. Taking them off, women were free to bounce, jiggle and sway... they became loose women.
As loose women, they said 'no' to saving themselves for marriage. And not just sexually either -- they began to think of their lives as more than baby making machines & wives. They considered what they wanted to do with their lives. They had more sex. But were also seen more as not just sex objects, but sexual providers & entertainers.
The act of bra burning was to be a liberating one, which somehow culturally became a new way to
exploit women even more.
All this begs the question, "Do women own their own boobs?"
I'll spare everyone the implant discussion, and go straight to a health issue (somewhat related, but honestly, I'll avoid the complications of implants) -- Breast Cancer.
In
"The Eye of the Beholder Keeping Beauty Away From the Beast and Sex Away From the Rest of Everyday Life" David Steinberg speaks of, among other things, the
The Breast Center Fund's program to increase public awareness of breast cancer -- and how the campaign was pulled due to public reaction.
Images which should have been viewed as statements on public perceptions, to change the way breasts are viewed as fashion statements, were disliked for being disturbing and inappropriate.
The photos were artistic & tasteful. In fact, not unlike those
taken to empower survivors, or those by
Matuschka. In a world of internet porn, I wonder to myself why this area of erotica has not been more explored. I don't mean like the few websites I found who listed
this scary set of photos as 'sexy', but rather sites for couples to explore the beauty of a woman, even if she has less than two breasts.
Like a real couple
having sex for the first time after breast cancer surgery or a mastectomy, the images would be tender, profound...
The closest I found was this: Titman
"When a woman undergoes a mastectomy (when she has her tit cut off, idiot), one of her primary worries is her sexual desirability. Will her man continue to find her attractive? Will he reject her in favor of non-lopsided women? Titman is the male answer to mastectomy—and ladies, the answer is reassuring. Some men actually like women who've had a tit or two cut off. They like to trace their tongues along the stitches, they like to hump the scars left by a radical mastectomy. In short, they find you even sexier than "whole" women — so sexy they may even surprise you one night and, in the words of the new rock anthem "Kitties, Pussies, Titties" (available on the audio CD), "handcuff, blindfold, ain't I witty, cut cut cut cut off her titty. I'm a Titman."
So
Supervert describes
Blam 3 by Negritude.
Tasteful, or tasteless?
The issue of breast removal as clearly liberating or explotative is not a clear-cut one.
However if the lack of breasts is a problem, you know the presence of tits is going to drive most people even crazier.
Many websites are attacked &/or blocked for
having images of breasts on them, even if the site is a health site.
So it's no wonder some folks are all upset about the
annual blogger Boobie-Thon for breast cancer. It can't be empowering. It must be explotative.
So, I bet the new
Boobs For Bourbon Street will also be hated by many. No matter that in New Orleans women have shown their tits for strands of beads. Raising donations will be bad, bad, very bad.
So, boobs, are they ours, to do with as we please, be it liberating or self-explotative... or do they belong to the public, but not in the public realm? Who and
What Are Breasts For? I, for one, would like to be kept
a-breast of the situation.
Whatever it is, let's be up-front about it, shall we?
Now that I've gotten that off my chest,
watch a clip of a big titted blonde get fucked. Samantha says she likes it deep, but she is obviously more than a bit uncomfortable when she gets it!
(Clips from
Boob Squad.)
