*If the men*....sorry.

I would still be stunned and rather uncomfortable. And the whole audience was over 60!! Old married couples! It was so bizarre!

People can do whatever they want, everyone can dance around naked and I won't care; I just wasn't expecting it. It was called ShowStoppers, not StripperShow! Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised; there is a long standing tradition of putting women's bodies on display for lots of purposes, I mean have I ever been to an art museum or watched tv or looked at a fashion magazine? why yes, I believe I have.

There are lots of different ways to present nudity, and this way bothered me in the same way these teen pop stars bother me.

Seeing girls presented like this is different than seeing guys. We are used to seeing females objectified. We don't see men objectified this way as often, because society is all freaked out about male homosexuality. God forbid a hetero male appreciate the male form. Yet it is quite accpetable for both sexes to appreciate women's bodies. In fact, the only time when it is not socially acceptable for women to appreciate each other's bodies is when they are exclusively lesbian because they exclude men.

Personally, I'm a little squeamish about the whole body this, body that thing anyway. (whatever, people are different; I've had friends who revelled in their bodies and showing them off, regardless of whether they fit supposed ideals. Go with who you are, I say.) My first year of college, I was the only girl on my dorm floor who didn't go to male exotic dancer night. Also, one day I got this terrible swimsuit catalogue in the mail, all of the women were ridiculously buxom and contorted to show off their behinds. I took the catalogue to my friend Eleanor and we proceeded to cut up all the pictures and rearrange them in freaky collages of nude women with belly buttons or knees for breasts, etc. We pasted the new pictures to our friends' doors all throughout the dorm. It was like an exorcism of *******ized body ideals. I thought, criminy, do some women feel like they have to look like that?

Of course we do. Body ideals are important. They keep us buying makeup, new clothes, new body parts, and more catalogues. If we didn’t feel compelled to aspire to buxom Barbie standards, many corporations would go out of business. And that would be bad.

Men are visual creatures so I don’t think we’ll ever really escape the objectifying. Perhaps we shouldn’t. What’s scary is how our perceptions are shaped by all the marketing. If we all became buxom and contorted tomorrow, there would soon be new ideals. We can’t win.

What are the asterisks hiding? I can’t figure it out

hee hee, I just read it again and had to think hard for a few minutes!!

b a s t a r d i s e d


I agree that partly it is that men are visual (who is most picky about how their men look? Hello, gay men!) but mostly that it is the dang money machine. I think the whole celebrity thing is the money machine, too.

I always think of the old Doonesbury cartoon, where Nichole the feminist is explaining to Boopsie how she is being exploited by B.D., her football player boyfriend. Boopsie listens patiently and then at the end, she exclaims, "ooh, that sounds sexy! what do I have to do to get 'exploited'?!"

I mean, I read that when I was 7 years old, and I thought, way to go, Boopsie! Of course, my very favorite character was Joanie Caucus. Dare to be great, Ms. Caucus!!

It's all money machine. We're trapped by ideals b a s t a r d i s e d by the money machine.

"It's a woman! It's a baby woman!"

I always remembered that one.