The Objectification and Dismemberment of Women in the Media

Kilbourne (2002) pointed out that advertising is a 100 billion dollar a year industry. Each day we are exposed to more than 2000 ads. Advertising can be one of the most powerful sources of education in our society. Many women feel pressured to conform to the beauty standards of our culture and are willing to go to great lengths to manipulate and change their faces and bodies. Kilbourne suggests that women are conditioned to view their faces as masks and their bodies as objects. Through the mass media, women discover that their bodies and faces are in need of alteration, augmentation, and disguise. In addition, women are taught to internalize an observer’s perspective of their own bodies. This phenomenon is called objectification (Fredrickson & Noll, 1997). Advertisements are loaded with objectified women, and only recently have the effects of objectification been explored. However, the effects of the dismemberment of women in advertising have been neglected. Dismemberment advertisements highlight one part of a woman’s body while ignoring all the other parts of her body. Dismemberment ads portray women with missing appendages or substitute appendages. Of course the ads are only symbolic of dismemberment, but the symbolic imagery creates nearly the same effect. This study highlights the nature and implications of objectification and requests a similar exploration of the nature and implications of dismemberment advertisements. It is important to note that advertisements are not the cause of the problems, per se, but they contribute to them by fostering an environment in which the selling of women's bodies is seen as acceptable.

Fredrickson and Roberts (1997) coined the term, objectification theory, which suggests that our culture socializes girls and women to internalize an observer’s perspective on their own bodies. When young girls and women internalize an observer’s perspective of their own bodies, they live much of their life in the third-person. This is called self-objectification. In other words, females learn to be more concerned with observable body attributes rather than focusing on non-observable body attributes such as feelings and internal bodily states. Fredrickson and Roberts (1997) suggest that appearance monitoring, which is present in self-objectification, can increase shame and appearance anxiety and diminish awareness of internal bodily states. These experiential consequences may contribute to the development of several mental health risks, including eating disorders, unipolar depression, and sexual dysfunction. The subsequent studies attest to the negative implications of objectifying the female body.

In relation to intimacy and sexuality within male and female relationships, Brooks (1995) discussed the effects of the centerfold syndrome that is defined by five principal characteristics: voyeurism, objectification, trophyism, the need for validation, and the fear of true intimacy. Brooks mentioned several possible causes of the centerfold syndrome such as biology, instinct, and survival of the fittest. However, it is exceptionally interesting to note that of all the possibilities mentioned, Brooks found the socio-cultural explanation to be the most probable. Brooks claimed that the centerfold syndrome is a product of the way in which men have been taught to think about and experience relationships, intimacy, and sex. The widespread sexualization of women in our culture easily lends itself to the adoption of the Centerfold Syndrome. Men are not the only ones who have adopted this harmful attitude towards relationships, intimacy, and sex. Women can just as easily adopt a negative self-image and attitude, perpetuating the negative stereotypes about women, sexuality, intimacy, and relationships (Brooks, 1995).

Indeed, the objectification of women is evident in our society where women are constantly sexualized, but the dismemberment of women has yet to receive the consideration and exploration it deserves. Kilbourne (2002) suggested that the dismemberment of women is a monstrous problem in advertising. Dismemberment ads focus on one part of the body, e.g., a woman’s breasts. Typically, dismemberment ads employ female body parts for the purpose of selling a product. Dismemberment ads promote the idea of separate entities. These ads overtly and covertly encourage a woman to view her body as many individual pieces rather than a whole. Dismemberment ads leave many women feeling that their entire body is spoiled on account of one less than perfect feature. If a woman has less than satisfactory legs, then her potential for beauty is spoiled. In other words, if every body part is not flawless, then the possibility for beauty is ruined. As previously mentioned, girls and women are conditioned from a young age to view the body as a “work in progress” or something in constant need of alteration. Instead of being satisfied with their body as a whole, they concentrate on what separate entities they lack. Many women compare their bodies and sexuality to the eroticized images that are plastered on billboards and television and in magazines and movies (Kilbourne, 2002).

Undoubtedly, the sexualized portrayal of women in the media has significantly negative outcomes. These negative outcomes are not only affecting adult women but also young girls. Females are buying cosmetics and beauty products at increasingly younger ages. Recently, researchers have begun exploring self-surveillance, body shame, and disordered eating tendencies in preadolescent females and found that girls as young as seven are showing signs of disordered eating and self-surveillance (Good, Mills, Murnen, & Smolak, 2003). The media affects some women in subtle ways (unconsciously), and other women are affected in a more direct way (consciously). The problematic representations of women in the media deserve our immediate attention, consideration, and research. Future studies should include: further exploration of the relational barriers between men and women, the centerfold syndrome and its effect on human intimacy, the appeal of physical sex to women and its relationship to the dismemberment of women in the media, the relationship between dismemberment ads and body shame and body dissatisfaction, the relationship between dismemberment ads and eating disorders, and the relationship between dismemberment ads and depression.

http://www.kon.org/urc/v5/greening.html

"self surveillance"

One central tenet of Foucault’s conception of power is that it cannot be located; it is everywhere and therefore also inside us (Foucault, 1997b: 108). Power relations produce the subject or, to be more precise, they instill in the individuals a historically determinedrelation with themselves (Rose, 1999: 243). In fact, any practice of surveillance entails self-surveillance as its historical counterpart and it is this simultaneity that accounts for the acceptance and legitimization of power relations.

The enlargement of the concept of self-surveillance implies associating it with practices of the care of the self. These practices require the stipulation of the part of the individuals that must be cared for and worked upon, a movement which corresponds to the production of an ethical substance (Foucault, 1985). In other words, self-surveillance is also based on the cultural postulation that certain thoughts and actions are dangerous or unwholesome to the constitution of the individual as a subject.

Enlarging the concept of self-surveillance also entails assuming that there is no neat line distinguishing power from care. The crucial point is that individuals usually problematize their thoughts and behaviors through beliefs held as true in their historical context. Hence, those who exercise power attain legitimacy by presenting themselves as helping us in caring for this part of ourselves that threatens our constitution as subjects. After all, they only intend to prevent us from straying away from the ‘correct’ path (Foucault, 1997d). Moreover, as the part of the self that demands care is ‘problematic’, one’s constitution as a subject entails an adversarial relation. Individuals must struggle against themselves in order to act according to ‘truth’ (Nietzsche, 1968: 480-482). Once again, if beliefs depend upon the context in which they are generated, struggling against the ‘problematic’ portion of the self in order to act according to ‘truth’ can be viewed as behaving as a given culture expects one to behave.

Our argumentation begins by highlighting a theoretical difficulty found in the usual reading of Foucault’s description of the Panopticon. The difficulty lies in how to conceive the nature of self-surveillance induced by the panoptic tower. We contend that self-surveillance does not depend only on an “invisible but unverifiable” power (Foucault, 1979: p. 201), but also on normalizing judgment.


The majority of authors that deploys the panopticon as a historical background for new surveillance techniques quotes or rephrases passages in which Foucault defines the major effect of the panoptic tower. One often cited passage refers to the major effect of the Panopticon: “(…) to induce in the inmates a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault, 1979: 201). In another passage, Foucault wrote:

He [sic] who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection (Foucault, 1979: 202).

The Panopticon can be conceived as technology, first, because as an architectural arrangement, it substitutes human surveillance by an opaque but visible tower; and, secondly, because it renders power automatic by promoting self-surveillance.

The decisive question lies in how to conceive this self-surveillance. The nature of the compliance with power rules and values is what is at stake here. We believe that the strange proximity between the Panopticon and the “Big-Brother” is rooted in the understanding of self-surveillance not as care of the self, but as self-monitoring (Lyon, 2001: 114) or, as Norris and Armstrong ingeniously put it, as “habituated anticipatory conformity” (Norris and Armstrong, 1999: 6).

Putting ourselves in the prisoners’ situation may be the best way to shed light on the theoretical problems posed by these readings. What would it mean to comply with power through “anticipatory conformity”? We would certainly try to act according to what power expects from us, but we would only do so because we would be aware of the possibility of being observed. We would act differently if given the opportunity to escape power’s eye. We would resemble “docile bodies”, but our docility would only be apparent, a mask that we carried as long as we thought we were being observed.

To put it differently, we would internalize power’s eye but we would not identify with its values. In reality, instead of an unfolding of ourselves in consciousness and its object, our conduct, we would experience a threefold partition of our interiority. We would distance ourselves from our behaviors and look at them with power’s internalized eyes. However, there would be an additional detachment: a part of ourselves constituted by our consciousness and desire would be sheltered from power’s eyes.

Concretely, we would act considering the possibility of observation and posterior punishment and objectify our conduct accordingly, but we would not believe that by acting thus we would be doing what is best for us. Self-surveillance would be, in fact, experienced as surveillance of an internalized, but identified, other upon us. Although normalizing judgment can be understood as an infra-penalty that partitioned an area that the law had left empty – the vast domain of gestures, attitudes, quotidian activities, tasks, discourses, uses of time, habits, etc. – its real novelty resides in the fact that these micro-penalties are not addressed so much at what one does, but at who one is (Foucault, 1979: 178). Besides constructing the dangerous bridge between fact and value and thus associating knowledge with power, the normalizing judgment also operates the passage from action to being, extracting from individuals’ behavior the identity of each and everyone. The norm is an immanent law – an observed regularity and a proposed regulation (Foucault, 1979: 179). In schools, for instance, the average time spent by students to conclude a task is first observed and later becomes a rule: those who are too slow fail. This failure does not concern only the inobservance of a rule; it also concerns the value of individuals, conferring upon those who have failed an identity that can vary from the bad student to the abnormal.

Douglas’ analysis is insightful. It allows us, for instance, to make sense of a series of social movements directed against the tobacco industry and fast-food companies. The arguments deployed for holding these industries accountable for individual suffering are well known and fit well both Douglas’ analysis and the nexus here proposed between risk and addiction: in order to protect their interests, these industries knowingly put individuals at risk by exploiting frailties in their self-control. Still, there are two major differences between Douglas’ thesis and the arguments here developed. The first is straightforward: risk related to lifestyle is also and principally a means of placing the burden of caring for the future on individuals’ shoulders.

The generalization of the risky self provokes the emergence of a new relation between past and future. Human genetic mapping and life habits make it possible to anticipate, among the countless illnesses/diseases that may affect an individual and among the multiple ways of dying, those that are more probable, as well as the means we may dispose of to avoid their emergence. In presenting itself as anticipation of accidents and turbulences that may abbreviate our journey in this world, this scientifically defined possible determines limitations to be observed in the present. Life now depends on knowing how to behave in the distance between everything that may happen and what is more probable of happening; it depends on the restriction of possibilities – and not upon their invention and posterior realization. The aims of human action have indeed changed since the time in which terms such as progress, revolution, liberation or even cure organized the sense of the future.

from: link

Sousveillance

Sousveillance (pronounced /suːˈveɪləns/ soo-VAY-ləns, French pronunciation: [suvɛjɑ̃s]) and inverse surveillance are terms coined by Steve Mann to describe the recording of an activity from the perspective of a participant in the activity,^[1]

Inverse surveillance is a subset of sousveillance with a particular emphasis on the "watchful vigilance from underneath" and a form of surveillance inquiry or legal protection involving the recording, monitoring, study, or analysis of surveillance systems, proponents of surveillance, and possibly also recordings of authority figures and their actions. Inverse surveillance is typically an activity undertaken by those who are generally the subject of surveillance, and may thus be thought of as a form of ethnography or ethnomethodology study (i.e. an analysis of the surveilled from the perspective of a participant in a society under surveillance).^[2]

Sousveillance typically involves community-based recording from first person perspectives, without necessarily involving any specific political agenda, whereas inverse-surveillance is a form of sousveillance that is typically directed at, or used to collect data to analyze or study, surveillance or its proponents (e.g., the actions of police at a protest rally).

wikipedia

REBIRTH OF THE CRITICAL (1st draft)

And your surface is hard. And I can’t get through. Voices speaking as if under bed sheets. I can’t get through. Sounds disappearing before they are registered. My ears tickle. I can’t get in. I can’t get through to you. You are closed land. Fence after fence across your spine. Your body is closed off. Your legs pound against the floor in rhythms that won’t be changed. Your eyes flicker, your jaws clatter. I can’t get though.

It pours out of you. Words and feelings of ‘it’s like this it’s like this it’s like this’ and I lean towards you to meet your ocean of words washing over me. I can’t get through to you. I start at your feet and work my way up. I turn your feet, while words pour out of you. I pinch your legs, and scratch and penetrate the soft skin around your thighs and kiss your tummy. All the voices hollow melodies.

Your fences are strong and it gets harder and harder for me to get close, I can’t get through, I can’t stop your all endeavoring words. You appear from all sides with lulling streams of sound and meaning that make my eye lids unbearable. It has to stop, you will listen. My ears tickle. It has to stop.

And your surface is hard. I try to keep your mouth shut, I try to scream so lightly that we have to close our eyes and I kick and I strike your neck. Because I can’t get through, I can’t get through, I can’t get through.

The fences grow like trees that surround you and I begin to speak.

Faster and faster. I wrench your body and I get hold of your hands, brake your fingers and I pull your hair and ever so gently I push my fingers into your eyeballs. I lick your cheeks and your forehead. Your pouring words become little husky hisses. Coughing conclusions which seem obscure. Your throat dries out. My teeth pinch through the flesh of your tongue. You have to stop, it has to stop. The fences and harbors tremble. You rattle. Your hard body shivers of strain. And the fences shudders and the harbors sway all the way down your spine. Ears tickle. Your muscles surrender like heavy and exhausted animals and while my words, softly creates melodies your chest trembles as if it were of a birds’. I can’t get through. The rhythm is within you, and I can’t get through. I can’t reach this mechanical inner even though I repeatedly pound my fists into your chest. You have to stop, you have to stop because I have something to say. I can’t get through, I can’t get through.

Private Logic

Griffith and Powers (2007) explain, Private logic, a term Dreikurs and H.L. Ansbacher each adapted from Adler’s “private intelligence,” describes the fictional line of reasoning proceeding from private meaning, that is, meaning premised upon the person’s private and unique valuation of self, others, and the world, and what life requires of him or her. Private logic, as if reasoning that dysfunctional, erratic, and anti-social behavior is necessary, is the fiction of a hidden argument. Private sense in a pattern of conviction is not conscious. It is an artifact of the psychotherapeutic transaction, revealed by indirection, as if particular thoughts and ideas were operating to require self-defeating or otherwise damaging behavior….In Adlerian therapy an individual’s behavior (thought, feeling, and action) is explained to the client, as if it were a conclusion required by a private logic, as client and therapist uncover the private meaning which the client has relied upon for answering such questions as: (a) What kind of person am I? (b) What kind of a world is this? (c) What must I, as a person such as I am, do in a world such as this is in order to make a place for myself? In sum, the effort to clarify the private meaning asks, “What would have to be true to make an otherwise particular, peculiar, and socially senseless pattern of behavior, intelligible.” The Individual Psychologist thus assumes that the person is acting as if the behavior were an intelligent response in the situation, according to a private logic, answering the requirements of a private meaning. (p. 81)

Dreikurs (1973) saw private logic globally, saying “it comprises all unconscious ideas, concepts, intentions and goals upon which the individual acts.” He said, “The fundamental interpersonal conflicts are reflected in the intrapersonal conflict between the conscience, which recognizes the social obligations, and the personal desires, which may stand in the way of cooperation. The conflict between the individual’s private logic (private sense) and his conscience (common sense) may be resolved in three ways”: as neurotic, psychotic, and psychopathic.

Private logic is the particular, orderly way a person thinks and thus acts in keeping with his or her ideas, concepts, perceptions and apperceptions, intentions and goals, held knowingly or not.

link: http://carterandevans.com

Alexander McQueen Spring 2010

from the minute 1.30

Oren Ambarchi - Alma (possible music)