What else
is in the teaches of Peaches?
Abstract
This article is based on the research
that suggests a relationship between overt sexuality, sexual objectification of
women, and the struggle for power from a feminist perspective. The
present essay uses pop the icons Peaches and Marilyn Monroe to examine this
relationship. It cites studies that attribute sexual objectification to
misogyny and acceptance of sexual violence in college men as a result of
viewing objectification in music videos and notes the early feminist’s attempt
to put an end to the pleasure that is experienced when viewing a woman as a
sexual object. Objectification of men is also looked at, in particular in
pornography targeted towards heterosexual women. The positive effects of sexual
objectification are noted, but ultimately, the negative effects are greater.
Peaches is a well known Canadian Pop/Punk performer whose particular brand of hyper-sexuality
is intended to provoke thought and challenge the norms of current, popular
music. She does so quite cunningly with her lyrics, album titles costumes and
onstage antics in a satirical way that never fails to entertain. Her
performance pushes the boundaries of gender and sexuality in a way that is
comical, edgy and cool. Peaches identifies as a feminist and has even given
lectures, interpreting her work from a feminist perspective. It is this fact that has prompted me to ask
the question of whether or not the way she chooses to objectify herself moves
the feminist movement forward, or just disparages women. My research began with
the intent to prove that female artists who choose to objectify themselves are
empowering their audience, but my findings, for the most part have proved the
opposite. There are some examples of performers like Peaches who are successful
in their attempts to liberate their audience through self-objectification, but generally,
sexual objectification of women has a number of undesirable effects that I will
point out in this essay.
The role that Peaches
plays with her performance is the sexual liberator of her time. As far as pop
music goes, Peaches is the only female artist I can think of that is
challenging issues from a feminist position. Her on stage performance sexually
charged. She often wears little more than her pink underwear or some sexy
lingerie. Her popularity is largely due to the success of her album The Teaches of Peaches (2000). “Fuck the
Pain Away” is the first track on the album and is considered to be the
breakthrough hit. In the song, Peaches exclaims, “Suckin’ on my titties like
you wanted me, calling me all the time like Blondie, check out my Chrissy
behind it’s fine all of the time” In her album Fatherfucker (2003) she dons the cover in a full beard (See Fig.
1). The title of the album is meant to diffuse the term “Motherfucker,” which
has become socially acceptable. The patriarchal order of our society as a whole
gives a lot of power to the term, but most of us will never consider its
meaning. When you think of it, the term motherfucker is disgusting, but when you
hear the term fatherfucker it implies incest. What Peaches is doing with these
efforts to shock and provoke (quite cleverly) is force us to look at the way we
perform gender and sexuality.
Fig. 1. Peaches on the cover of Fatherfucker (RockDizMusic, Fatherfucker)
First wave feminism
fought for equal political, economic and social rights. One of the things they
rightfully opposed was sexual harassment. But as Bruce Labruce acknowledges “The biggest
mistakes made by orthodox feminism were its attempt to legislate and control
sexuality, both male and female, and its tendency to cast men in the obligatory
(and biologically-determined) role of rapists” (Labruce para 10). He notes the
problematic with casting men in this role, and goes on to explain the negative
effects concealing sexuality as a means of combating harassment. He accredits
the current state of hyper-commodification of women to the death of “Orthodox,”
or first wave feminism. In other words, the emphasis that the feminist movement
placed on diminishing the sexual objectification of women, combined with the
“death of feminism” has produced the opposite desired effect. Women are being
commodified more prevalently now and in other types of media. Even in clothing
ads, women are being portrayed as submissive objects of desire for men to
consume (See Fig.2).
Fig. 2. Example of the Male Gaze depicted in
Dolce and Gabbana clothing ad (WEB MAG, “Dolce and Gabbana ad”)
Laura Mulvey’s psychoanalysis of cinema from a
feminist perspective is a key example of the first wave feminist’s desire to end
the sexual objectification of women. One of her contributions to feminist
psychoanalysis is the concept of the male gaze. The male gaze can be described
as when women are filmed by men and depicted as secondary, submissive objects
of desire to be saved by the male protagonist, thus validating him and
providing visual stimuli to the audience. In discussing Mulvey, John Storey
notes “Mulvey concludes her argument by suggesting that the pleasure of popular
cinema must be destroyed in order to liberate women from the exploitation and
oppression of being the ‘(passive) raw material for the (active) male gaze’”
(qtd in Storey 106). This may have been true in a time when women had less
priveledges and rights than men did, but there are also instances in the past
when sexual objectification was used a tool to liberate women from the
oppressor. This liberation, however; seems to come only when sexual
objectification is a choice being actively made by the woman being objectified.
Marilyn Monroe is a prime example of a woman’s
liberation through sexual objectification. Monroe (originally Norma Jean Baker)
was discovered while working in a factory during World War II and began her
career as a model in the mid-forties. After some screen tests, a name change
and some cosmetic procedures, she took on roles in Hollywood movies. After the
war, many other working, middle-class women were laid off from their
jobs as skilled factory workers, and the media pushed them to celebrate their
unemployment by containing them in their homes as caregivers in the ideological
construction of domesticity. Commercials, ads, television shows and even movies
that Monroe starred in were designed to make domesticity seem normal to women.
But what Monroe represented in her persona was something completely different.
She was glamorous, sexy and seductive. You couldn’t imagine her doing housework
and she reportedly didn’t. Monroe was able inspire change with her sexuality.
In her article “The Horizontal walk: Marilyn Monroe, CinemaScope and
Sexuality,” Lisa Cohen explains:
[W]hat was new and
powerful about Monroe's star image was that it ‘combined naturalness and overt sexuality’…she effected to the dynamics of…"the Playboy discourse" of heterosexuality, and…despite its desire to
shock, was ‘attempt[ing] to integrate its [idea of] sexual freedom into
suburban and white-collar life’ (267-278)
Here she notes Monroe’s appearance in the Playboy magazine and its
effort to liberate its audience from the buttoned down, uptight ideology of
post-war Middle America. Cohen concludes this point by recognizing the contradictory
results of mass media’s attempt to contain women in their homes through
domesticity. Women ended up going out and finding jobs to be able to afford the
household items that were marketed to them. As women were being liberated from
domesticity, they were also being liberated by sexuality by Playboy and sexual
icons like Marilyn Monroe. But sexual liberation has its price. The
commodification of women has some very undesirable effects.
Sexual objectification
of women in in mass media and the resulting shifts in men’s attitudes is the
subject of the article by Jennifer Stevens Aubry et al. This article is based
on studies posed by the authors and other scholars in the field. They define
sexual objectification as treating a human being as a body that is valued
primarily for its use or consumption by others (362). They cite studies that
explain the phenomenon of priming, or the instance of media consumption where
ideas that share related meanings are triggered for a short period of time and
used to process subsequent stimuli, and attribute this to the activation of
stereotypes or stored schema about women that directly sways judgements on
other social concerns (363). Their research indicates that sexual objectification
activates the schema of women as sex-things, and as a result, affects young
adult men’s sexual beliefs and attitudes about sexual violence. In this study,
the focus on female objectification in music videos shows that women are
predominantly portrayed in sexually submissive positions. They acknowledge that
this type of misogyny is more actively displayed in rap and hip hop videos, but
it is also shown in pop and country music videos and that the majority of
sample videos by females artists contained some form of self-objectification. They
conducted a study whereby a group of college students (mostly male) were
invited to watch a variety of popular music videos by female artists that
contained some form of self-objectification and were asked to critique them on
the following criteria:
- Adversarial sexual beliefs (when women’s sexuality is considered manipulative)
- Acceptance of interpersonal violence
- Rape myth acceptance (places responsibility on woman who put themselves in compromising situations
- Sexual harassment attitudes (measuring the validity of harassment as a concern for women)
- Liking of the music video
Based on these studies, they
claim that videos where female artists sexualize themselves “prime” the schema
of women as objects to be used solely for their bodies and that the consequence
of this behavior will result in negative attitudes towards women and an increased acceptance of sexual violence towards them (369). In their conclusion they
claim “As expected, the results showed that exposure to sexually objectifying
music videos primed male college students’ adversarial sexual beliefs,
acceptance of interpersonal violence, and, at a level of marginal significance,
disbelief in the legitimacy of sexual harassment” (374). In other words, they
argue that women, who choose to objectify themselves unknowingly perpetuate
men’s negative attitudes towards women and indirectly promote sexual violence.
So now the line between actively choosing to objectify one’s self and being
placed in a submissive role as per the “male gaze” has become non-existent in
respect to the commodification of women which in turn, results in the
disparagement of women in general. The finding in this study difficult to argue
with, but more research is needed to observe what the positive effects of
female sexuality in music videos are.
On the other hand, meaning could be derived from
objectification in a number of ways. In an attempt to level the playing field,
Peaches endeavors to turn the gaze back on men. In his review of Peaches album Fatherfucker entitled Peaches: word to the Fatherfucker, Bruce
labruce states:
Rather than
berate men for their sexual urges and beat them down for salivating over
women's breasts, Peaches encourages them not only to get involved by swinging
their own dicks (on Fatherfucker, in the song Shake Yer Dix, she invites guys
to do just that, the same way that girls are always encouraged to shake their
tits and asses), but also to lay back, relax, and allow themselves to be
objectified, just like women do (Labruce para 11).
In
this passage, he recognizes Peaches attempt to level the playing field by
promoting the objectification of men. Labruce goes on to argue that once we
accept the fact that both sexes are objectified and choose to enjoy the
attention, we will experience sexual freedom.
Sexual objectification of men is becoming more
and more prevalent. You see it in movies, tv, ads
and
there is even a market of pornography geared towards heterosexual women. In her
article entitled “Women’s Porno: The heterosexual female gaze in porn sites
“For women,” Terrie Schauer examines the way that pornography geared towards
heterosexual woman is viewed. Her study uses a textual analysis woman’s porn
and adopts Judith Butler’s Foucaultian analysis as a means of evaluating how
stimuli produced by watching porn can define what pleasure is for the viewer.
The findings assess what constitutes porn geared towards straight women,
straight men and gay men and how they differ in content. She notes the problems
with the porn industry’s failure to show the whole truth of sexuality in
respect to violence and male dominance that is portrayed in heterosexual male
porn and compares them to porn geared towards women that does not contain the
patriarchal norms of male porn. In her psychoanalysis of porn Schauer
recognizes:
For Foucault, cultural knowledge and
power are tied…Official or popular statements that give people a vocabulary to
speak about aspect of cultural experience can act as a means of legislating,
policing, and normalizing the types of human interaction. Citizens of a culture feel bound to address a topic – like sex –
via the established vocabularies and discourses set out by pornography,
sex-education classes, medical and psychological discourses (46)
In other words, in
order to change the way women are depicted in a negative way in porn, we must
analyze it and create a dialogue that might remove some of the taboos of
mainstream pornography. Knowledge is power and those who are better informed
can make better choices.
In conclusion, Peaches attempt to liberate her audience through self-objectification are valid, but there are many other variables to consider. The efforts by first wave feminism to abolish the type of pleasure taken from viewing a woman as a sexual being have been met with contradictory results. There examples of how overt sexuality has proven to be a positive thing (even for the feminist movement) but overall, the negative effects outweigh the positive. Further research is needed to examine these positive effects, and how the objectification of men will have an impact on reversing the male gaze.
Work Cited
Aubrey, Jennifer Stevens, K. Megan Hopper and Wanjiru G. Mbure “Check That body! The Effects of
Sexually Objectifying Music Videos on College Men’s Sexual Beliefs” Journal of Broadcasting &
Electronic Media 55.3 (2011): 360-379. Taylor & Francis Online. Web. 1 Nov. 2011
Cohen, Lisa. “The Horizontal walk: Marilyn Monroe, CinemaScope, and Sexuality” The Yale journal of
Criticism 11.1 (1998): 259-258 Yale University and The Johns Hopkins University Press. Web. 8
Dec. 2011
Labruce, Bruce. "Peaches: word to the Fatherfucker. " C Magazine 81 ( 2004): 14. ProQuest. Web. 31
Peaches. The Teaches of peaches. Kity Yo, XL (2000) Compact Disc. 5 Dec. 2011
Oct. 2011.
RockdizMusic. Fatherfucker. Blog (2011) Web 5 Dec. 2011
Schauer, Terrie. “Women’s Porno: The heterosexual femal gaze in porn sites “for women” Sexuality &
Culture 9.2 (2005): 42-64 SpringerLink. Web. 1 Nov. 2011
WebMag “Dolce and Gabanna ad” photograph. Web 4 Dec. 2011
