Two Images.
September 19, 2012
1. This is what we’re capable of – but can’t seem to fulfil.
2. Now, read the above quote and then look down at the following image.
Click here to see a previous post, ‘A visual presentation…’
Question #99: How can we honestly expect to be taken seriously?
Deep Breath.
x
Questions for Us 
as long as we continue to not only participate in our own exploitation, but also manufacture it…. we will NEVER be taken seriously!
Tell me about it…now, how to get our girls and young women to wake up!
Thanks Verina x
Deep breath? was that joke intentional??
Nooo! Oh dear! Don’t make me laugh – I’m trying to be serious here!
I should remove it… 🙂
The bottom view is the postmodern spectacle – women have choice and agency and the woman represented chooses to be photographed in that way. It is a view that dominates the universities and current feminist thinking, and we see it playing out all the time in the media. From the radical femisist view, partriarchy has co-opted notions of women’s empowerment to serve it’s own ends – pornography, prostitution etc. Women want to be successful and survive and so many of us are avid supporters of the patriarchy and perpetuate the system and our own collective suffering. Added to this is the thinking that sex itself is mutable, that women as a group do not really exist and this thinking is dominating the theory. This undermines the idea of women coming together as a group with shared interests – instead the concerns of the individual dominate, and so choice and agency over the human rights of women as a class, always seems to come out trumps. If we argue against the messages of the second photos we are wowzers, uptight, hate sex, hate men or are just interfering with the person’s right to do what she is doing. I look at the two photos and wonder how quickly we have lost what we were gaining. It would be great if all women could experience that “ah ha” moment that enables them to see the world as it really is and make some changes.
I live in hope and enjoy your blog.
Wow. I am in constant awe at the exceptional way women express themselves and you have done it with this amazing comment.
Thank you so much for writing, so beautifully, about our modern predicament.
I think, along the way, women have lost their notion of what empowerment truly means and it’s becoming to our detriment.
I live in hope for that ‘a-ha’ moment too and predominantly write this blog to coax women along! …ever hopeful.
Thank you again for your comment.
Paula
Thanks Paula for the lovely and very kind words!