The Modern Empress
There’s a discussion going on in the comments over at Tiny Nibbles right now about another in the endless line of hypersexualized deliberatedly-controversial fashion photoshoots. You know the ones I mean — they push the porn line a little bit, wait for the nattering nabobs of feminism to condemn them, pull the ad campaign or claim it was just a conceptual shoot never intended for broad release, and then sit back and wait for the viral controversy traffic to spike their brand awareness among the hard-to-reach internet-active demographic.
This particular social media marketing campaign hit pay dirt when Jezebel condemned their photography as “creepy and porno-like”; by essentially calling porn creepy, Jezebel set off half-the sex positive bloggers in the universe, and it was off to the races. Presumably there will be a big end-of-the-year gift basket arriving at the Jezebel offices from this social media marketing agency in appreciation.
I was going to stay out of it completely — call it my part of the effort to train these people to buy display advertising like their Mad Men ancestors — but in the discussion at Violet’s place, there was an interesting conversation about the submissive poses of the woman in some of the photos, and whether it would be different if the woman were dominant, and just how rare it is for these edgy fashion shoots to feature dominant women and/or submissive male postures.
Now, in fact fashion shoots that reverse the dom/sub polarities don’t strike me as all that rare, but I didn’t have examples at my fingertips. And then, serendipitously, I stumbled over a nice one — so that’s today’s blog post sorted.
This comes from a Marie Claire US photoshoot from last January. I found the photos here, and it’s actually not very sexualized as such things go. The starring model, Miranda Kerr, never shows more than a little side-boob, in one of those stupid “I’m wearing the expensive coat but I forgot my shirt and my bra” photos that fashion photographers love so much. But there’s a surf/beach theme, culminating in this powerful “empress and her slave bearers” shot which is actually kinky as hell if you look at it with any gaze more careful than “Hey, look, she’s sitting on those beefy dudes!”
(Don’t forget to click for embiggening.)
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=6008
It’s a nice pic but I personally don’t think this photo quite fits the bill of role reversal. Because the woman is partially unclothed and posed in a sexy way, the viewer is invited to admire her body more than the bodies of the men. The picture still invokes a male gaze paradigm (and blerk… I shouldn’t use that paradigm word, it’s so wanky, but it seems to fit). She may be in charge, but she’s still the object of desire in this picture.
I’ve tried to see it from a different gaze perspective but can’t really get past that. Just my interpretation, of course.
Love. This. Post.
Bacchus, I am so glad you jumped in the comments. Especially because you pointed out the marketing for what it is; a successful attempt at viral saturation. To me, that is especially important in the context of the wider discussion on the topics used for this kind of currency and who routinely falls for it (angry anti-porn feminists are easy marks, eh? just as easy as the sexually frustrated ad dudes whose ad blogs shall go unnamed).
I was more intrigued by the Jezebel commenters who contradicted the herd mentality and said things like, “Thanks for saving me a night of Tumblring for my masturbation material.” And for me, I wasn’t totally buying that the women were in submissive poses. I think female dominance is often confused for submission, especially by people who still perceive high heels, nudity, and *femmes* as signifiers of receptivity, giving up power, or tolls of ‘the man’ to restrict female agency. As you and I know from the school of Kink, these things are symbols of power-over in BDSM. And I didn’t know how to articulate it in my post, but I strongly felt that this was at work here. I didn’t see the women as inherently submissive.
Personally, when I am in heels and a man is beneath me peeking up my skirt, it is because I have spread my legs in a show of feminine power and *allowed* him to worship, even if just with his eyes. Maybe that’s why I see things so differently than Jezebel.
It was also time to call out Jezebel for being dated, but that’s also just me.
I also think that if someone wanted to play the viral game in this manner and really shoot the moon they would upend all these stereotypes and give us more obvious depictions of what we crave — such as CFNM. I see CFNM and powerful women often in Euro fashion photos, so I’m going to be sure to start floating those to the top…
Violet, the question of “what is what is dominant and what is submissive” gets tricky real fast! Especially when you consider the whole “topping from the bottom” dynamic where, given the dynamics of ongoing consent in any healthy power exchange relationship, the symbols like who is holding the whip and who is wearing the handcuffs may not actually tell you very much useful about who actually has the power at any given moment anyway.
In a lot of ways I see photos like the ones you blogged as templates — often masturbatory templates if we are being honest — into which we have to project a great deal of our own baggage in order to build a complete story about what’s going on in the photo. There may not in fact be a dominant or a submissive subject in a given photograph; dominance or submission, like beauty, could arguably be in the eye of the beholder.
The comments here made me think of this famous Helmut Newton photograph:
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