Pejic doesn't appear to have large breasts, bulging muscles, or chest hair; i.e., his chest does not display any of the sex-signifiers that we are accustomed to seeing. Apparently, that is too much for people. The Good Men Project's Adam Polaski reports that both Borders and Barnes & Noble have insisted on covering the magazine like they do Playboy. Polaski argues that this is due to our discomfort with what he terms androgyny*, and I think he's right.
Specifically, this photo makes us confront one of our most basic assumptions about sex and gender: that women have breasts and men have chests. If we can stare directly at a person's bare torso and be uncertain about which we see, then the line between the two really isn't all that sharp.
It is also telling that despite the model's apparent lack of breasts, the book chains have chosen to cover the journal because customers might mistake him for female. By this logic, a woman with a double mastectomy posing topless would be similarly censored. This would seem to indicate that we don't prohibit toplessness in women because women have breasts, but rather just because they are women. I can't decide if that's more fucked up, or just differently fucked up.
*A term which can be problematic.
I think the biggest problem for me is that Americans are still viewing breasts as sex organs. In Europe, women can breastfeed in public without getting dirty looks. Breasts can be shown on TV. It's just NOT THAT BIG OF A DEAL. Breasts are for food. Their role in sexual arousal is pretty similar in both men and women, so if female nipples are taboo, male nipples should be, too. Censoring breasts is like censoring cow udders. Get over it, people.
ReplyDelete"It is also telling that despite the model's apparent lack of breasts, the book chains have chosen to cover the journal because customers might mistake him for female. By this logic, a woman with a double mastectomy posing topless would be similarly censored. This would seem to indicate that we don't prohibit toplessness in women because women have breasts, but rather just because they are women."
ReplyDeleteI think you're largely correct. Women belong to the sex class. Women can be considered erotic doing almost anything (see the "scandal" involving Jessica Valenti's photo with Bill Clinton), and a *topless* woman is just over the top.
I will, however, dispute the claim that Americans view breasts as sex organs while Europeans view breasts mainly as tools for breastfeeding. My experience in France and Switzerland was quite to the contrary where women's breasts were given just as much sexual attention as in the US. It may *also* be true that public breastfeeding is more accepted in parts of Europe than it is in the US, but it doesn't follow that Europeans have desexualized breasts more than Americans. If anything, I found that the greater French acceptance of sexuality (compared to the US) allowed women to be even more sexualized as there were fewer barriers. I don't advocate that France should adopt American standards, but I think it's too easy to say that "things are better in Europe" without interrogation.