Taking your clothes off, the unexploited way

A Scottish woman who lived with domestic abuse for eight years decided to raise money for the organization that helped her by getting her friends together to make a playful, nude calendar to sell. And while the local chapter of the Scottish Women's Aid found the project empowering, the Edinburgh office deemed the photos degrading to women and forbid the local branch from accepting the profits from sales.

Watch a video news report on the story by clicking the screen shot below:

Lily Greenan of Scottish Women's Aid says:

It'd be a bit hypocritical to be standing up publicly and saying we're against all forms of violence against women and all forms of exploitation of women and then endorse a calendar which uses female nudity as its basis for raising money.

In her article, "Why I Love Porn" for the November/December issue of THIS magazine, younger feminist and pornography consumer Alison Lee writes:

Growing up on the bridge between second- and third-wave feminism was a puzzling thing. I revered the anti-porn feminists who gave me my early education in women's studies - they knew, like I did, that women were being systematically harmed, and that it had to be stopped. At 15, I thought that watching porn made you hate women.

By 16, I wasn't so sure. Younger feminists were taking a broader view of sex and sexuality, including a more open attitude toward porn. Third-wave feminists were more concerned with fighting for sex workers' rights than condemning pornography as a whole. While these schools of feminism weren't mutually exclusive, I had a hard time holding them both in my head without it raising significant questions. Was I supposed to support the hard-working woman in front of the camera, or feel repulsed and sorry for her as an exploited object?

The answer seems pretty obvious to me: Repulsion and pity helps no one. It harks back to the beginnings of the field of social work when upper class women, often church-affiliated, visited poor women in their shacks with the aim of gently modeling a better way of life. Repulsion and pity, especially when channeled into charitable aid and rescue missions, serve the needs of the helper by reaffirming their worldview far more than they serve the needs of the person deemed to be in need of rescue.

As a gay, male sex worker, the anti-porn and sex-work-abolitionist wing of feminism boggles me. It is so out of step with my own culture's attitude toward sex, sexuality and nudity. It seems so sex-negative and body-hating, not to mention dull, reactive and self-victimizing -- is this the best future we can imagine for ourselves?

What does the Scottish calendar girls story say about our culture? About our comfort with our own bodies? About the amount of safe space we allow ourselves to celebrate and be proud of them? Is nudity necessarily synonymous with exploitation? How do we break cycles of body and sexual shame if, in all contexts, being naked means you're either a casualty of the patriarchy or you're normalizing someone else's exploitation? At what point can I take off my clothes and feel good?

Check out some of the photos from the calendar below and let me know what you think in the comments section: are these images of exploited women?








[via Contexts]