In a recent interview at The Consensual Project, I was asked if I’d ever seen any “…videos, images, or sound bites that have provided [me] with valuable sexual health information.” I recounted this experience:
There is one video I saw, when I was about 21, that stands out in my mind even today… The filmmaker asked about 40 women to stand naked, side-by-side, on the edge of a stage. The camera captured the appearance of their bodies from about the neck to the knees, no faces, just bodies. (I don’t know if it was ever publicly available, but if anyone can send it to me, I’d be thrilled.)
Think about how rarely you actually see a new (near-)naked body that is not a model or the equivalent (actress etc). With new sexual partners, perhaps. And if you’re straight, this is (probably mostly) going to be the body of the other sex. At the gym perhaps? But you’re not supposed to look, so you probably don’t look closely. I realized when I saw this video (it probably lasted all of two minutes), that I had never really seen women’s bodies outside of the mass media. I didn’t know what women’s bodies looked like. And I had been comparing my body to that of actresses and models. I realized that day that things about my body that I thought were horrible deformities were completely normal. Even though the bodies in that video were all different, they were also very similar, and my body looked just like theirs in some cumulative way. From that point on, I knew I wasn’t gross. A simple lesson. And so important, but a really hard one to encounter in a powerful way.
I was reminded of this story when I saw a photograph by Spencer Tunick. Tunick specializes is getting large numbers of naked people together, arranging them, and taking pictures. Most of them seem more polished than raw, but this one, featured at BoingBoing, seems to reveal bodies in some of their variety and similarity simultaneously. It’s worth a good long look at each body; each is a precious point of push back against mass media’s representation of the female form.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Comments 28
am — September 3, 2011
The only thing that seems to be common among us is the paleness of our bum :).
But another therapeutic environment can be life drawing. It was a revelation to me - i saw and observed in details old bodies, fat bodies, skinny, muscular, and all were beautiful because of the strong or sensitive shapes they formed, the harmony of the anatomy. The most boring bodies to draw were actually what the media promotes, because the particularities are erased to flatness. I recommand this experience to anyone.
Amy — September 3, 2011
Sorry, but they seem pretty homogenous to me. All white, mostly slim, mostly young. Is this really body diversity? Yes, it is important to see real people's bodies and not just models, and this is contributing to that. But i worry that people think that this is diverse. Is there really such a narrow range of acceptability that this photo is being held up as having an important social message?
Doctor Jay — September 3, 2011
the comments on Boing Boing seem typical tho.
Anonymous — September 3, 2011
Any examples that include not-white people?
Maggie Glass — September 3, 2011
I would also recommend the film BREASTS. It used to be streaming on Netflix, I think, but no more. Wonderful and affirming.
http://icarusfilms.com/new2004/bre.html
Cocojams Jambalayah — September 3, 2011
Um, no. As others here have already commented, just about all the bodies shown appear to be relatively slim and White. (The woman in the back of the photo may physically present as being a Person of Color, and there may be one more person who might also present as a Person of Color, but this photo is HARDLY revealing bodies in all their variety...But then again, this photo was taken in Belgium. However, there are some People of Color in Belgium-not many but some of us are there, too.Here's an excerpt from http://afroeurope.blogspot.com/2009/04/black-people-in-contemporary-belgium.html
"(10% of all Belgians live in the capital)... Brussels has large minorities of North-Africans (predominantly
Moroccan), Congolese, Rwandans, Burundians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians,
Turkish, Greeks, Poles and many more. The overall majority of these people speak
fluently French next to their mother tongues...Most Africans who migrated to Belgium during the last decades came from the
former Belgian colonies in Africa (Congo/Zaire, Rwanda or Burundi)."
blogromp — September 3, 2011
There are no people with dark skin in the picture, there is only one fat person, there aren't any visibly disabled people, and there aren't any elderly people.
The problem is not this specific image (although, because people who don't fit into the beauty standard are constantly devalued, this would affect who would agree to participate in a project like this), but rather that the lack of people without skin, size, ability, and age privileges wasn't even noticed.
Lance — September 3, 2011
The thing that strikes me about Tunick is that he's typically overwhelming the viewer with the mass of bodies--the above photo is actually kind of atypical in that regard--so while I get a positive message, it's not "look at the variety of forms" but rather "the naked body can be so ubiquitous that it can seem wholly normal and unremarkable" (and not, say, eroticized).
In general, though, for this sort of thing, and for the message of "people come in a wide variety of types", I prefer Greg Friedler's "Naked..." series, in which he takes ordinary people and photographs them twice, first dressed and then naked. I can't find anything useful on his website, but http://fmmsimnotyou.blogspot.com/2010/08/greg-friedlers-naked-new-york.html?zx=dc8952c77ee66a25 has photos from "Naked New York"; http://untitledartshow.com/?p=585 has, nearer the bottom, several photos from "Naked Las Vegas".
Christie Ward — September 3, 2011
Check out this artist: http://wickedoubt.deviantart.com/art/Freedom-Of-Choice-50980064
Leanneschwartz — September 4, 2011
Shape of a mother is a great collection of "real women" images.
Taylor Wray — September 5, 2011
You could say that has to do with mental health, maybe, but it's a bit of a stretch to put a self-esteem-boosting photo in the category of "sexual health."
David Estlund — September 5, 2011
And for the persons of the male persuasion: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_929eZ9v4gLk/TESHhJagxvI/AAAAAAAAAU4/yDc6UWp54hk/s1600/SPENCER+TUNICK+1.JPG
Leslie — September 6, 2011
I have been similarly comforted by experiences seeing lots of different female bodies, primarily in public bath houses in the former Soviet Union. I suppose it's an environment sort of like the gym, in that you're not "supposed" to look, but the way they're set up, you're spending a couple of hours walking around naked from sauna rooms to bath rooms, sitting naked on little stools to scrub yourself, waiting naked in line for the shower, etc. You can't help but see, and there's always a variety of people there, from little girls to grandmas, with every kind of body you can imagine (well, every kind of body belonging to someone who would be directed to the women's side of the bathhouse). The first time I went, it made me feel so much better about my own body, and really made me wish we were less uptight about nudity in the U.S.
Beauty is in the eye… « Duty To Inquire — December 14, 2011
[...] and stomachs look like. The project reminded me somewhat of this post I read a while ago in the society pages. These projects also seemed related to this idea of exposing the bodies of normal women. [...]