My life in books

Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy of the Visible”, Linda Williams
Pin-up Grrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture, Maria Elena Buszek

Where do I begin to even approach the issues surrounding the multiple meanings of the depiction of women as sexual people in North American society? How can I hope to do any kind of justice to all the words that have been spoken and written about women as subjects and/or objects of desire, of the gaze - male or female – that fixes itself on female images of sexual expression, reception, assertion, invitation.

If only it could be as simple as this: people, for the most part, like sex. They like having sex, and often, when they aren’t having sex, or when they’re preparing to have sex, or thinking about how they’d like to have sex, they enjoy looking at images of people having sex, or looking like they might want to have sex. Some people like to look at men, some at women, some at couples or groups. Some like to look at the kinds of sex they’d like to have, others prefer looking at kinds of sex they would never in a million years consider having.

But because we have brought a specific kind of power relationship into this whole sex thing, to wit, the idea that people of one sex are more powerful than people of another sex – instead of admitting that there is some kind of power dynamic in all relationships, and working with that – the meanings of looking at sex and people in sexual situations gets all mixed up with ideas of social power and control, and suddenly you’re wondering if people are looking at other people because they think they own them, or because they don’t see them as people but as objects, and all sorts of other questions about what it means to like looking at people and thinking about sex while you’re looking.

These two books are about some of the ways that people look at pictures of other people doing things that are intended to be in some way sexual, and some of the ways that people present themselves or allow others to present them as people who are doing things that are intended to be in some way sexual. They explore all those tricky questions, such as whether it is empowering or demeaning to have other people look at your picture and think about sex. And they demonstrate that the issue is complex, and the meanings, both social and personal, of looking at sexual images for the purpose of pleasure, go far beyond the simple but all-to-common argument that all pornographic images represent male objectification and degradation of women, because they are made by men for men by the means of oppressing and humiliating women. There’s some of that, but there’s a whole lot more, too.

As Buszek comments in Pin-up Grrls that “the hand that creates does not necessarily control – and that there are great pleasures to be found in exploring this contradiction.”