DeeTee with AlBee

- Or “The Fine Line between being a Feminist and being a Hater”

An episode of Southpark has recently aired which aside from being hilarious, as always, carries an important message for the feminist anti-photoshop debate. It is best summed up by a dialogue that takes place between Mr. Mackey and Wendy after Wendy has made fun of Butters for believing that Kim Kardashian actually appears like her photoshopped images in real life. She is called into the counselor’s office:

 MACKEY: But Wendy, Kim Kardashian is considered to be an extremely beautiful woman.

WENDY: Well, she’s not in real life. She’s a hobbit.

MCKEY: Have you ever stopped to consider that maybe you are jell?

WENDY: I am not jell. And I happen to be the biggest feminist in school.

MACKEY: That may be true. But there is a really fine line between being a feminist and being a hater, Wendy.

Throughout the episode we witness Wendy’s fight against the use of photoshop in social media. Being furious at the boys at school for not seeing that their celebrity crush, Kim Kardashian, appears this beautiful only due to a skillful use of retouching software, she decides that this practice is harmful to her and her cheerleader-friends, because it establishes unrealistic ideals of beauty.

It is only thanks to Wendy’s anti-retouching  campaign that her friends find out that one can obtain a flawless image of oneself simply by using photoshop and (unsurprisingly) they all photoshop their images and post them online. This new development is met with great enthusiasm by the whole school and to Wendy’s big surprise, settles the self-image-problem: No matter how unattractive someone is conisdered to be in real life, a retouched picture is enough to push their self-confidence and convince everyone into thinking that they are good looking.

Basically, what is presented in this episode are two prominent points of view: The critical, essentialist point of view of a body-positive feminist that judges photoshopped images of women to be propagating unrealistic ideals and thus forcing her to adhere to this ideal making her unhappy (or in the worst case anorexic) and the supposedly naive girl’s perspective which follows the trend of the times and is willing to digitally deconstruct her body to approximate her appearance to the status quo of beauty.

Although at first Wendy’s view seems to be more emancipated and progressive (after all,  it argues against standardizing patriarchal beauty norms), I will argue that it is a naive opinion based on wrong and outdated understandings of the nature of the photographic image, an incomplete knowledge of the history of emancipation and feminist theory in general. This radical abolitionistic view in fact effectuates the very opposite of what a feminist position should be intending: It undermines the principal ideas of postmodern/post-structural feminism and causes a restriction of the free expression of female identity.

By discussing the ontology of the image and the history and theory of emancipation I intend to show that photoshopped images are quite contrary to common sense and carry an important emancipatory value for the woman of the 21st century.

WHAT IS A PHOTOGRAPH

 In order to sufficiently evaluate the meaning of the digital image-manipulation, one must first define what a photograph originally was perceived to be before such techniques were available. To do so, I found it useful to draw three important theses on photography as a medium from Susan Sontag’s and Villem Flusser’s photographic theory .

———————————– Villem Flusser

————————————- Susan Sontag

1) Both Sontag and Flusser note that although the photographic apparatus was invented in order to obtain an objective caption of the phenomenological reality of our world, it turned out to be the opposite.

 “Photography was invented to give an objective image, but since the camera is coded, it is even less objective than a painting.”  (Villem Flusser, 1990 Lecture in Kunsthalle Budapest)

So, although we tend to see a camera as a sort of copying machine of the world, the image produced far from depicts reality for several reasons:

In her essay The Heroism of Vision (1977), Susan Sontag notes that right from the beginning of its existence photography was not about capturing reality but more about discovering what is beautiful in the world. A photograph, Sontag states, is never an objective caption but an effort of the photographer to combine the two categories of beauty and truth. Actually, the very fact that a photographer chooses how he points his camera (besides all the other choices he makes) means that he inevitably imposes his own preferences on the photographed subject.

Thus, photography is falsifying reality for the sake of it’s own aesthetic needs. It is always an aesthetical interpretation of the world and this interpretation, be it on the side of the photographer or the person viewing the photograph, is always ruled by taste, conventions, and ideology.

————————- The Tank Man

 Sontag not only uncovers the photographs inability to properly  capture reality, but she also declares this weakness of telling the truth as photography’s greatest power. “The Heroism of Vision” is what she calls the camera’s ability to transform reality into something beautiful and this, she argues, is the reason why it became so popular in the first place. This new kind of popular vision, “photographic seeing”, reconciled the human mind’s need for truth with the need for beauty, which was a revolutionary achievement.

  2) Just due to this quality of falsifying reality, Flusser states the medium of photography is irreconcilable with the discursive nature of the political consciousness.

„The ideal was that there is history and there is a photographer and when he steps back from history into something which we might call mystical transcendence, a photograph emerges. But there is a problem. The moment you step back from politics into image you can have no point of view. The political point of view is lost because the moment you get out of politics you can see that every event has many possible points of view.” (Ibid.)

Consequently, the photograph showing only one view of reality is by its very essence of no use to any kind of political discourse which naturally has to take into account a multitude of view points. The image is not a political medium.

————— Soviet Soldier raising flag on the Reichstag

3) Furthermore: Sontag describes photography with having the negative quality of objectifying the captured motive.

“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.” (“In Plato’s Cave,” 1977)

Thus, a photograph for Sontag reassesses people into objects which can be subjected to symbolic ownership. She adds that this is also true for photographs considered to depict non-idealized versions of reality.

“Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still life of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.” (Ibid.)

By that she reveals how “newer” approaches (the essay was written in the 1970s) to photography have a number of ethical issues. It forces aesthetics on documentation of emotions which creates a distance between the viewer and the subject.  So even photography that we consider to awaken in us other feelings besides the appreciation of beauty (i.e. compassion)  is not doing so in reality. The photograph of the Vietnam Napalm bombings exemplify how the photographer’s aesthetic vision on a dramatical historic event attenuates its disastrousness by making it beautiful.

——————- Children fleeing from a burning Vietnamese village

———————- Man falling from the World Trade Center

The three aforementioned theses taken into account, the photographic image no longer appears as an naive neutral product of objective documentation, as it is believed to be by a lot of people. It turns out to be rather an act of hiding reality than revealing it, an idealizing, aesthetic vision that is irreconcilable with the political discourse and unable to show anything but beauty, an agressive act of metaphorical objectification.

Hence, I argue that this image by its very nature is not able to meet the political demands of feminist discourse . It is an apolitical, idealizing medium that can’t be a platform for treating political questions.

Consequently, the feminist  effort to ban  photoshop from the photographic medium out of the belief that an un-manipulated photograph is somehow less ideologically charged or more respectful to the inviolability of female identity is at its very core paradoxical. Furthermore, it restricts this medium’s artistic potential that always results from its ability of showing the subjective, idealized point of view of the photographer.

ANICONISM

————– Mohammed receiving his first revelation, his face is hidden

Given those specific qualities of the photograph, wouldn’t the ultimate solution to stop the objectification of woman be to forbid the distribution of images of woman in general?

Although this seems absurd, it is interesting to notice that in some  religiously oriented countries it is a widespread trend that women are only pictured partially or not at all in visual media.

An example  is the beauty contest “Eyes of Arabia” which was held by OLAY in Saudi Arabia. Due to obvious restrictions of the public expression of feminity (both in “real life” and in media), the company invited Saudi women to submit a picture showing merely their eyes. Though it may seem like a romantic idea, (perhaps due to its romantic presentation on the website), it is nevertheless evident that this approach  is not implicating a greater respect that is addressed to women. This practice is, in my opinion, just a continuation of the effort to reduce a woman’s social power by erasing her presence and making her invisible. In this case she is reduced to a pictorial metonymy, an ideal of beautiful mysterious eyes, that can only look but not act or react.

 A more extreme example of this erasure is the case where in a Saudi version of the IKEA catalogue from 2012  the pictures were retouched and women were deleted, leaving behind only depictions of men and furniture. Seen in connection with the relatively un-emancipated position of Saudi women it becomes very clear that this sort of modern  iconoclasm is the fruit an of unprogressive view of a woman’s role in society and is common sense in some of the most patriarchic religious societies.

So let us finish this thought experiment and add the prohibition of the depiction of all human beings to the depiction of women just for fun. What we get is the concept of aniconism.

 At this point, it is very interesting to take a closer look at this intellectual construction, which throughout history has been practiced in almost all abrahamic religions. Back in the days when religious institutions had a lot more influence in people’s everyday lives, it was common to prohibit representations of the natural and supernatural world.  (We still can witness it now in mosques and Protestant Christian churches). While i am not trying to consider this aniconic mode as a possible future for our society, it is nevertheless interesting to find out what could have been the underlying reason for such a radical prohibition:

All religious imperatives  forbidding the depiction of something are undertaking an effort to avoid Idolatry. Idolatry is understood as the worship of an idol or a physical object as a representation of a god. And the god mustn’t necessarily be the classical omnipotent divine figure, but it can imply any concept or idea that can be an object to worship, as states the following quote from the Catechism of Catholic church:

“Idolatry not only refers to false pagan worship. Man commits idolatry whenever he honours and reveres a creature in place of God, whether this be gods, or demons (for example satanism), power, pleasure, race, ancestors, the state, money etc.“

Accordingly, the concept of aniconism finds an interesting meaning when seen in connection to the iconism of the photograph and its worship of beauty standards: Aniconism and its negation of  the physical materialization of ideals turns out to be the most evident antithesis to iconism’s automatic and necessary idealization of the objects it depicts.

THE DECONSTRUCTION OF FEMALE IDENTITY

So are we, coined by the omnipresence of the image condemned to be a godless, superficial society worshiping but condemnable ideals? No.

I think it is important to get used to the thought that the medium of photography is predestined to represent only a restricted amount of ideals, which simply happen to stand in immediate connection to the ideal of beauty. Since we can’t (and frankly don’t want!!!!!) the photograph erased from our everyday lives, what we have to change is our relation to it. We have to discharge it from its heavy political and ethical ballast and maybe see it more as a playground of self-expression that can take on the most banal just as the most unusual forms. And none of them is more or less legit than the other.

Now talking about photoshop: besides the most evident paradox of professional lighting techniques and skin smoothening lenses not being under attack of essentialist feminists, although they equally represent the manipulation of reality, one can actually find a rebellious core in the ideas represented by the act of altering an image. While I understand that it may not accord to everyones taste or be perceived as very disturbing to see images altered beyond physical possibilities of the human body, I try to look at it in relation to various feminist theories and can’t help but see a very strong affirmation of the self-determined and free woman in the act of retouching.

I think that the essentialist argument stating that “a woman is what nature has made her” goes against the idea of emancipation. To point out a really banal example: when we look back in history we realize that what really got promoted as women’s equality was the development of contraception and abortion methods. And while I by no means claim that there exists a rule that a woman who refuses to have children is a more emancipated/progressive than one that does, I can with 100% conviction say that the imperative of the idea that “you are what nature made you“ is against the idea of emancipation and unprogressive, and goes against the driving force of any emancipatory effort which has always been to step out of nature’s shadow and establish a cultural framework for your existence: To be free to define yourself by any means.

So, while one can find the reason for not prohibiting the practice of retouching in the ideas of second wave feminism (“a woman has the right to ignore nature’s laws to live the life she wants/to be who she wants”), one can find an affirmation of it in third wave’s post-structural feminism’s ideas, more specifically in Judith Butler’s gender theory. In her book “Gender Trouble” she, by explaining why female identity is a socially and culturally constructed phenomenon, opens it up to potential evolution and  resignification. By giving insight to the construct of  both the female and male roles, she frees all cultural beings from the constraints of rigid, heteronormative gender roles, granting them the freedom of self-determination.

This of course is not as simple as it seems to be, because we are constructing our identities by reiterating social codes. Consequently, an important question emerges:

“That the power regimes of heterosexism and phallogocentrism seek to augment themselves through a constant repetition of their logic, their metaphysic, and their naturalized ontologies does not imply that repetition itself ought to be stopped—as if it could be. If repetition is bound to persist as the mechanism of the cultural reproduction of identities, then the crucial question emerges: What kind of subversive repetition might call into question the regulatory practice of identity itself?”  (Gender Trouble, Butler)

—————– Judith Butler

So what could this subversive repitition be? The repition of the phallogocentristic, female ideal, that makes evident that it is nothing but a copy of a cultural standard?  Yes, we already concluded that the static, idealized, apolitical photograph may not be the proper medium to illustrate the transformative nature of identity simply because it is motion- and timeless, and cannot illustrate a process. But there is a medium that posesses those qualities: The moving image.

Its discursive nature and temporality allows a proper treatment of this topic. A good example is the media-transparent work of Haroun Farocki who in his movie “The Image” documents the meticulous and ridiculous procedures of a Playboy photoshoot by deconstructing the ideal of the nude body. 

—————– Still from Haroun Farocki’s “The Image”

Or if talking about a more popular genre, there are Youtube tutorials of Photoshop and other retouching software which serve as a perfect visual parallel to the idea of a constructed identity and a perfect base for a discourse of female identity as a reiteration of social codes. And as Butler taught us:  The mere fact that identity is accepted as something constructed makes it an object to potential change.

What also might add to this cultural pessimism is the awareness of the unpleasant fact that the female identity is oftenly constructed by a man or according to “the Male Gaze”, symbolizing a gesture of male dominance, that a lot of feminists wish to overcome.

Laura Mulvey, a feminist film theorist once wrote: “It is said that analysing pleasure or beauty annihilates it.“  So my advice would be: Analyze and master the creation of beauty, and by doing so deconstruct it! 

(A wide variety of Apps already exist that allow even to the most digitally uneducated person to get an insight into the process of  the construction of an ideal.)

————————– Visage Lab, Mobile-App

The emancipated woman does not eye the photoshopped image with suspicion. She sees in it the embodiment of ideas that are essential to the history of female emancipation. Like Wendy’s friends, she senses the freedom in being able to digitally construct an ideal image of herself, to create a perfect pictural alter ego in virtual space. Just like Wendy does in the end, she must let images be images and leave them to the realm of beauty. And, maybe, stop being jelly at Kim Kardashian.