Hennessy Youngman kicks around the question, should art be beautiful?
If you liked, more from Youngman:
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
Cross-posted at My Own Private Guantanamo and Jezebel.
Of the many nicknames I’ve acquired over the years, there’s one I’m reminded of today. The name was given to me by a bully shortly after I entered the sixth grade. I had been a fat kid since elementary school, but as puberty began to kick in, parts of me started growing differently than expected. The doctors said I had gynecomastia. “Man boobs,” or “moobs” in the jeering parlance of our popular culture.
But my bully simply called them “tits.” And so this also became my name in the school hallways.
I was Tits.
He would pass me in the hall and catcall “Hey Tits!” and his buddies would laugh. Sometimes, if he was feeling extra bold, he might actually grab one of my breasts, and squeeze it in front of the other kids. Not everyone laughed. But many did.
As direct as this bullying was, growing up with gynecomastia was characterized by smaller insults. Most kids would just ask “Why don’t you wear a bra?” Even adults could be cruel. “Are you a boy or a girl?” I was often asked.
When wearing shirts, it was crucial that they be loose fitting. If a T-shirt had shrunk in the dryer, I would spend hours and days stretching it out, so that it didn’t cling to my body. You can see fat boys do this every day. Pulling at their shirts to hide the shape of their bodies, but particularly their breasts.
As a fat kid, and one who hated competition, I learned to loathe sports, and especially, physical education. The one form of exercise which I enjoyed from childhood was swimming. Unfortunately, as my breasts grew, so did my shame about removing my shirt. At summer camp, I never set foot in the swimming pool. I knew that taking off my shirt would bring ridicule, and that leaving it on while swimming would show that I felt ashamed of my body. So, I pretended that I was above swimming — that I was too cool for the pool.
By high school, I had developed remarkable powers of verbal self defense. I absorbed cruelty and learned how to mete it back out in sharp doses. There’s no doubt that this shaped the person I became, for better and for worse. In high school, I managed to carve out a social niche for myself. The bullying stopped. But the shirts stayed loose-fitting. I rarely went swimming.
The doctors thought that perhaps I suffered from low testosterone. I found this funny, since my sex drive had been in high gear since the time I was a sophomore. I assured them that this was not the case. Finally, the doctors said that my excess breast tissue was probably just a result of being fat. Lose the weight and the breasts will go away.
So I lost weight. I don’t remember how much. But by senior year, I was slender. Girls were starting to talk to me. I was more confident. And I still had breasts. After graduation, the doctors congratulated me on my thin body. Now it was time to get rid of my breasts.
In the first surgery, I was placed under general anesthesia. The doctor made a half moon incision under each nipple and cut out the excess breast tissue, finishing the job with some liposuction. Unfortunately the surgery wasn’t a complete success. My breasts were smaller, but lumpy, and my nipples were puckered. It took a second surgery to make everything look “normal.”
I was nineteen. On New Year’s Eve, I went to a party and got drunk for the first time in my life. There, I met a girl who took my virginity. She was too drunk to insist on taking my shirt off. This was a relief, because under my shirt was a sports bra, and under that layers of gauze. My chest was still healing from the second surgery. In many senses of the word, I was still becoming a man.
I’m reminded of this recently, oddly enough, after reading one of those “humorous” snarky news stories that pop up in the right column of The Huffington Post. Perhaps you’ve seen the photo making the rounds. It’s of Barney Frank’s “moobs.” The photo inspired similar stories at gay culture site Queerty, Gawker and Slate, which used the incident as the pretense for a scientific column.
While all of these nominally liberal sites pay lip service to the dignity of gay and transgender people, they miss one thing that is very clear to me. Aside from the obvious fat shaming in these stories, the fixation on “man boobs” reveals our culture’s obsession with binary gender. As I noted on The Huffington Post’s comment thread, before a moderator whisked my comment away, “the only breasts The Huffington Post approves of are those of thin, white female celebrities.”
Here’s one of the many comments Huffpo didn’t delete:
It’s culturally ubiquitous. PETA, for example, is a habitual offender:
Men are supposed to have flat chests, hairy bodies and big penises. Women are supposed to have large breasts, thin hairless bodies and tidy labias. (If a woman’s labia are too big, it just might remind us that, with a little testosterone, the same tissue would make a penis.)
We have all the evidence we need that biological sex and gender are not as rigid or fixed as we imagine. There are intersexed people. There are transgender people and genderqueer people. There are millions of men and boys like me, who also have large breasts, or gynecomastia, a medically harmless (though socially lethal) condition that your insurance just might pay to correct. The prevalence of gynecomastia in adolescent boys is estimated to be as low as 4% and as high as 69% . As one article notes: “These differences probably result from variations in what is perceived to be normal.” You think?
We’re so entrenched in that snips ‘n snails bullshit, that we can’t accept bodies which don’t fall on either extreme of the gender continuum. Transgender men and women encounter these attitudes in direct, and sometimes life-threatening ways. And, given the misogyny that pervades our society, these pressures are even harder for women and girls, whether they’re cisgender or transgender. Their bodies are hated and desired in equal measure. When my bully grabbed my breasts and called me “Tits,” he was taking what he wanted. He was also reminding me that I was no better than a girl. I was beneath him.
With the explosion of social media and the surveillance society, body policing has gotten much more intense. We live in an age of crowdsourced bullying. I cannot imagine what it would be like to grow up as a boy with breasts in 2011. I suppose I’d spend hours in Photoshop digitally sculpting my body, to remove fat from my face, belly and chest before uploading my profile photos. If I were a fat girl, I might become very skilled at using light and angles to disguise my less than ideal body, to avoid being dubbed a “SIF” or “secret internet fatty,” by my tech-savvy peers. I would probably become vigilant about removing tags from unflattering photos and obsess over remarks people made about me on comment threads.
Twenty years have gone by, and I miss my breasts. As a chubby adult male, I still have a small set of breasts, but not the ones I was born with. The two surgeries also deprived my nipples of their sensitivity.
I’ve often joked that if I knew I was going to become a performance artist, I would have kept my breasts. The breasts I have now are smaller, but still capable of stoking the body police. I once scandalized a fancy pool party in Las Vegas simply by taking off my shirt. I realize that, as a man, it is my privilege to do so. In most parts of our society, it is either illegal or strongly frowned upon for a woman to go topless. (Female breasts are either for maternity or for male sexual pleasure, not for baring at polite parties.) Perhaps my breasts, which remind people of this prohibition, invite a similar kind of censure.
I’ve performed naked enough in my adult life to know that the body police can always find a new area to target. I was recently stunned to hear porn actress Dana DeArmond describe me during a podcast interview as a “fat lady” while her host Joe Rogan openly theorized that my small penis was somehow connected to my feminism. Rogan’s view of gender is so restrictive that he can only conceive of male feminism if it is in a feminized body. (This is probably also why men who support feminism are often dubbed “manginas” by misogynists.)
There might actually be tens of thousands of words devoted to describing my fat body and small penis on the internet. It’s almost a point of pride. Now, I don’t just use my sharp tongue for self defense. I also use my body itself, as an argument, and as a provocation.
I am Tits. Got a problem with that?
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Matt Cornell is an artist, performer and film programmer. From 2000 to 2004 he was a business consultant in San Francisco for outsider artist eXtreme Elvis. Matt lives and works in Los Angeles. Contact him at matt@mattcornell.org or follow him @mattcornell.
This four-minute video reports research showing that, even if we’re not aware of it, most of us have unconscious biases against short men. (It’s also a great description of Implicit Association Tests.)
You, too, can take any multitude of implicit association tests. Simply go to Harvard’s Project Implicit.
Borrowed from The Social Complex, a heightism blog. See also guest posts from The Social Complex introducing the concept of heightism as a gendered prejudice and discussing heightism (and other icky stuff) at Hooters.
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
April 15th was World Art Day. A museum in Stockholm, the Moderna Museet, celebrated with what appears to be a chocolate and red velvet cake in the likeness of a caricature of member of a generic African tribe. The cake was designed by an artist, Makode Aj Linde, who wanted to draw attention to the practice of female genital cutting, which occurs in parts of Africa (and elsewhere). Accordingly, the cake was in the shape of a woman’s shoulders, breasts, belly, and genitals; it was covered in black fondant. The head was the artist himself, painted black with cartoon-ish eyes and mouth reminiscent of American minstrelsy. Neck coils tied it all together. 
The Swedish minister of culture, Adelsohn Liljeroth, was asked to cut the cake. Playing along with the “art,” she began at the clitoris. After slicing herself a piece, she fed it to the artist (it’s unclear if that was planned or improvised). Each reveler carved out more and more of the genitals, revealing brown and then red cake inside. With each cut, the artist let out a yell and cried. People attending the exhibit reportedly gawked and generally went along having a good time.
Kitimbwa Sabuni, a spokesperson for the National Afro-Swedish Association, called the cake a “racist caricature of a black woman” and criticized the event, writing:
The ”participation [of the minister of culture], as she laughs, drinks, and eats cake, merely adds to the insult against people who suffer from racist taunts and against women affected by circumcision.”
The minister shrugged rhetorically, saying ”Art needs to be provocative.” On his Facebook page, the artist was nonchalant, writing about the above photo: “This is After getting my vagaga mutilated by the minister of culture…”
I will go on the record saying that this is obviously racist, trivializes genital cutting, is wildly insensitive to women who have experienced cutting, and fails to accord any respect to members of communities that practice genital cutting. It’s a shameful mockery.
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UPDATE: It occurred to me that it’s possible that the artist intended to trap a mostly white audience into participating in this obviously racist game, all with the intention of revealing that they would. Sort of like Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, where the fictional African American tv writer, asked by his White boss to write something “Black,” wrote the most racist thing he could think of… only to discover that audiences loved it. So perhaps the artist meant to provoke the same sort of horror that Bamboozled provokes in its real audience. And that is provocative indeed. But I’m guessing that this message will be lost on the vast majority of people at the same time it provides a satisfying opportunity to object to something obviously racist (as I did); meanwhile, more subtle discrimination and institutionalized racism remains un-examined.
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One of my main areas of serious academic research involves trying to understand how Westerners think about female genital cutting, and what motivates them to understand it in the way they do. I must say, though, that I am at a loss to explain this. My research on American perceptions of the practice (not Swedish, notably) suggests that we take the practice extremely seriously, framing it as (one of) the worst human rights abuses imaginable. From this perspective, this approach to raising awareness — from the party-atmosphere symbolized by the cake to the almost comical and obviously fake protestations from the artist/actor — takes the issue far too frivolously for comfort.
Caricaturing Africans, however, and seeing them as lesser humans is also part of what drives American condemnation of genital cutting. U.S. discourses often frame Africans as either ignorant or cruel. We routinely dehumanize both women and men in these discourses. They are seen more as objects of intervention than human beings. Accordingly, it doesn’t surprise me too much that the (mostly White, Swedish) people viewing the performance felt enough distance from the practice of genital cutting to enjoy their cake. Nor does it surprise me to hear at least some of them dismiss the concerns of the spokesperson for the National Afro-Swedish Association.
The video, in all its glory:
Thanks to Sharla F., Samira A., and an anonymous reader for sending in the tip to this story!
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
In our post devoted to vintage douche ads, we present a number of examples of such ads that warn women that if they do not take steps to control their smelly, disturbing girly parts, they risk permanently alienating their male partners. Such ads encourage women to feel shame and anxiety about their bodies, which require constant vigilance or they become offensive to men.
Jeff S., Saed A., and Yvette send in a Indian commercial for Clean and Dry Intimate Wash that includes the same theme. The commercial starts out with a despondent-looking woman who cannot get her male companion’s attention. But a quick shower is just the trick; Clean and Dry apparently lightens as it deodorizes, with the word “fairness” appearing as the darkish smudge on the cartoon image magically disappears. According to the product description,
To be used while showering, its special pH-balanced formula cleans and protects the affected area, and even makes the skin fairer. Life for women will now be fresher, cleaner, fairer!
And presto! She’s confident, sassy, and suddenly has her boyfriend’s full attention; all is right with the world:
Via Jezebel.
Lisa C. and ad industry insider Tom Megginson sent in a set of classic paintings altered by artist Anna Utopia Giordano. Each of the paintings feature a female nude; in Giordano’s versions, the women’s bodies fit the mainstream aesthetic of today: thinner and with larger breasts. Without criticizing either body type, I’m interested in what lessons we can take from these comparisons.
Lots more at Giordano’s website.
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
In 2010 we wrote about how gender ideology inflects even the most “objective” of spheres. In this case, we featured four examples of anatomical illustration, portrayals of human beings used to educate viewers about biology. In each case, while the man faced forward with his weight evenly distributed on his two feet, the woman placed her hand on her hip, cocked a knee, or even turned slightly sideways. In other words, he was posed in a masculine way and she in a feminine way.
When we see this kind of gendered posing in drawings that are ostensibly neutral, we are being told that our particular historically- and culturally-contingent version of masculinity and femininity is natural.
In this vein, Courtney S. sent in a Design by Hümans Size Chart. The chart is supposed to help buyers decide what size to purchase, but the accompanying images do more than just illustrate how measurements are made; by torquing the female torso, they send a message about gender too:
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
I recently had the pleasure of reading Peter Stearns’ Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West. The book chronicles the shift in American history from a plump to a thin ideal. The beauty of Stearns’ book is his resistance to reducing the shift in norms to a simple cause. Instead, he traces the changes to conflicts between capitalism and religion, the backlash against women’s equality, industrialization and the devaluation of maternal roles, fashion trends, the professionalization of medicine, our cultural relationship to food, and more.
Stearns is quite specific in timing the change, however, pointing to the years between 1890 and 1910. In these 20 years, he writes:
…middle-class America began its ongoing battle aginst body fat. Never previously an item of systemic public concern, dieting or guilt about not dieting became an increasing staple of private life, along with a surprisingly strong current of disgust directed against people labeled obese.
I thought of Stearns’ book when I came across a delightful collection of photographs of exotic dancers taken in 1890, the year he pinpoints as the beginning of the shift to thinness. From a contemporary perspective, they would likely be judged as “too fat,” but their plumpness was exactly what made these dancers so desirable at the time.
More at Retronaut.
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
© 2012 Sociological Images
