{"id":57695,"date":"2013-10-19T12:00:57","date_gmt":"2013-10-19T17:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=57695"},"modified":"2013-10-29T23:56:56","modified_gmt":"2013-10-30T04:56:56","slug":"does-history-repeat-itself-but-with-more-porn-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2013\/10\/19\/does-history-repeat-itself-but-with-more-porn-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Does History Repeat Itself, But With More Porn?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1990 I was still an American Culture major in college, but I was getting ready to jump ship for sociology. That\u2019s when Madonna\u2019s \u201cJustify My Love\u201d video was banned by MTV, which was a thing people used to use to watch videos.\u00a0And network TV used to be a major source of exposure.<\/p>\n

I was watching when Madonna\u00a0went on Nightline<\/a>\u00a0for an interview. \u00a0The\u00a0correspondent intoned:<\/p>\n

…nudity, suggestions of bisexuality, sadomasochism, multiple partners. Finally, MTV decided Madonna has gone to far.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

They showed the video, preceded by a dire parental warning (it was 11:30 p.m., and there was no way to watch it at any other time). \u00a0In the interview, Forrest Sawyer eventually realize he was being played:<\/p>\n

Sawyer: This was a win-win for you. If they put the video on, you would get that kind of play. And if they didn\u2019t you would still make some money. It was all, in a sense, a kind of publicity stunt. \u2026 But in the end you\u2019re going to wind up making even more money than you would have.<\/p>\n

Madonna: Yeah. So, lucky me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The flap over Miley Cyrus completely baffles me. This is a business model (as artistic as any other commercial product), and it hasn\u2019t changed much, just skinnier, with more nudity and (even) less feminism.\u00a0I don\u2019t understand why this is any more or less controversial than any other woman dancing naked. Everyone does realize that there is\u00a0literally<\/em>\u00a0an infinite amount of free hardcore porn available to every child in America, right? There is no \u201cbanning\u201d a video. (Wrecking Ball is pushing 250 million views on YouTube.)
\n\"mileymadonna1\"<\/a>
\nNo one is censoring\u00a0Miley Cyrus \u2014 is there some message I\u2019m missing? When she\u00a0talked to Matt Lauer<\/a>\u00a0he asked, \u201cAre you surprised by the attention you\u2019re getting right now?\u201d And she said, \u201cNot really. I mean, it\u2019s kind of what I want.\u201d<\/p>\n

I think the conversation has slid backward. In\u00a0Lisa Wade\u2019s excellent comment<\/a>, she draws on a 1988 article, \u201cBargaining With Patriarchy<\/a>,\u201d which concluded:<\/p>\n

Women strategize within a set of concrete constraints, which I identify as patriarchal bargains. Different forms of patriarchy present women with distinct \u201crules of the game\u201d and call for different strategies to maximize security and optimize life options with varying potential for active or passive resistance in the face of oppression.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think it\u00a0applies perfectly to Miley Cyrus, if you replace \u201csecurity\u201d and \u201clife options\u201d with \u201ccelebrity\u201d and \u201cfuture island-buying potential.\u201d\u00a0Lisa is\u00a01,000-times more plugged in to kids these days than I am, and the strategies-within-constraints model is well placed. But that article is from 1988, and it applies just as well to Madonna. So where\u2019s the progress here?<\/p>\n

\"mileymadonna2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Interviewed by Yahoo!,\u00a0Gloria Steinem said<\/a>, \u201cI wish we didn\u2019t have to be nude to be noticed \u2026 But given the game as it exists, women make decisions.\u201d That is literally something she could have said in 1990.<\/p>\n

The person people are arguing about has (so far) a lot less to say even than Madonna did.\u00a0When Madonna was censored by MTV, Camile Paglia called her \u201cthe true feminist<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whining mode. Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising total control over their lives. She shows girls how to be attractive, sensual, energetic, ambitious, aggressive and funny \u2014 all at the same time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When Miley Cyrus caused a scandal on TV,\u00a0Paglia could only muster<\/a>, \u201cthe real scandal was how atrocious Cyrus\u2019 performance was in artistic terms.\u201d<\/p>\n

Madonna was a bonafide challenge to feminists, for the reasons Paglia said, but also because of the religious subversiveness and homoerotic stuff. Madonna went on, staking her claim to the \u201cchoice\u201d strand of feminism:<\/p>\n

I may be dressing like the typical bimbo, whatever, but I\u2019m in charge. You know. I\u2019m in charge of my fantasies. I put myself in these situations with men, you know, and… people don\u2019t think of me as a person who\u2019s not in charge of my career or my life, okay. And isn\u2019t that what feminism is all about, you know, equality for men and women? And aren\u2019t I in charge of my life, doing the things I want to do? Making my own decisions?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And she embraced some other feminist themes.\u00a0When Madonna was asked on Nightline, \u201cWhere do you draw the line?\u201d she answered, \u201cI draw the line with violence, and humiliation and degradation.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not saying there hasn\u2019t been any progress since 1990. It\u2019s more complicated than that. On matters of economic and politics gender has\u00a0pretty well stalled<\/a>. The porn industry has\u00a0made a lot of progress<\/a>. Reported rape has become\u00a0less common<\/a>, along with other forms of violence.<\/p>\n

But \u2014 and please correct me if I\u2019m wrong \u2014 I don\u2019t see the progress in this conversation about whether it’s feminist or anti-feminist for a women to use sex or nudity to sell her pop music. As Lisa Wade says, “Because that\u2019s what the system rewards. That\u2019s not freedom, that\u2019s a strategy.” So I would skip that debate and ask whether the multi-millionaire in question is adding anything critical to her product, or using her sex-plated platform for some good end. \u00a0Madonna might have. So far Miley Cyrus isn’t.<\/p>\n

Cross-posted at Family Inequality<\/a>\u00a0and Pacific Standard<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\nPhilip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and writes the blog Family Inequality<\/a>. You can follow him on Twitter<\/a> or Facebook<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1990 I was still an American Culture major in college, but I was getting ready to jump ship for sociology. That\u2019s when Madonna\u2019s \u201cJustify My Love\u201d video was banned by MTV, which was a thing people used to use to watch videos.\u00a0And network TV used to be a major source of exposure. I was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":287,"featured_media":57698,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[218,279,41,98,55,2095,2093,129,120],"class_list":["post-57695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bodies","tag-objectification","tag-celebrity","tag-capitalism","tag-gender","tag-gender-feminismactivism","tag-gender-objectification","tag-media","tag-sex"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2013\/10\/Screenshot_43.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/287"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57695"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57943,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57695\/revisions\/57943"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}