Monthly Archives: August 2010

BP Oil Spill, “Conspicuous Conservation,” and Brownie Points

Debbie says:

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the BP oil spill as a source of fashion photography, working from a post by Lisa at Sociological Images. Now, Lisa is back with a very different disturbing take on the greater subject.

a display of three different brown leather loafers, all "finished" to look as if they were oil-stained

These shoes are the Bed Stu “Cleanup Collection,” designed to look as though their wearers have been getting dirty on the shores of the Gulf Coast, presumably washing off waterbirds and turtles.

Bed Stu is a shoe company named to make us think of Bedford Stuyvesant (generally known as “BedStuy”), an extremely poor neighborhood of New York City. From their website (where I couldn’t find these shoes), they seem to make high-quality men’s and women’s shoes, not cheap but not priced in the skyrocket range either. 100% of profits from the “Cleanup Collection” will, they say, go to clean-up efforts in the Gulf.

As Lisa says:

This looks to me like an example of “conspicuous conservation.” The term was originally derived from the phrase “conspicuous consumption,” defined by Wikipedia as “lavish spending on goods and services acquired mainly for the purpose of displaying income or wealth.” Conspicuous conservation, then, is the (often lavish) spending on “green” products designed mainly to advertise one’s environmentally-moral righteousness.

If you wear regular shoes and donate to the gulf spill clean up, your altruism is entirely invisible. But if you buy these hideous things, everyone gets to know what a nice guy you are.

I agree completely with Lisa about the conservation angle, and the conspicuousness, and I think it goes a little deeper. These shoes don’t only say “I gave money to the BP oil spill” (and how much did the wearer really “give” by purchasing a pair of shoes for the price he would pay anyway?). They also say, if not, “I personally worked to help clean up the BP oil spill,” at least, “I am willing to represent myself as having personally worked to clean up the BP oil spill.” They convey an ethic of personal involvement and actual labor. And they convey that ethic by a clothing choice: How do I want to look in the world? I want to look like a person who would go to the Gulf and get dirty.

I didn’t personally work to clean up the BP oil spill, or the devastation left by the Haitian earthquake, or for that matter, the results of any other natural or manmade disaster. Walking off the trail in the park to pick up litter is about my speed. And thus, I would be embarrassed to wear those shoes, because I don’t want to claim experience, or virtue, or even curiosity, that I don’t have. Since all clothing makes statements, when articles of clothing are politicized, wearing or not wearing them becomes a matter of integrity. The shoes feel to me a little bit like a Disneyland ride, not the roller-coaster kind but the ones that have a flavor of simulation in perfect safety: I took a trip on a jungle boat; I voyaged through the inside of the human bloodstream.

As a group, in the U.S. and first world middle class, most of us live very clean and comfortable, and fairly sedentary lives without much adventure and without much hard labor. And we crave the rewards and kudos we would get for adventure and hard labor without the actual heat and bugs, hard beds and dirty shoes. This has been true for many decades. In fact, significant numbers of people pay for expensive adventure vacations, with or without hard work: anything from inexperienced crewing on a sailing ship to being guided up Mount Everest. Clothing choices with the “adventurous” flavor is hardly new: Banana Republic clothing and contemporary cowboy hats are two examples.

But the Cleanup Collection shoes are the first thing I’ve personally seen that add the spice of “ethical person/volunteer/donated time and sweat” to the mix. Buying and wearing these shoes is using your clothing choices to take subtle credit for other people’s hard work and lived experience. At the same time, if the money actually goes to good work in the Gulf (something that always has to be examined), I’m sure the organizations whose volunteers have their feet in the oil are glad to cash the check.

Montana Fishburne: Individuality and Representing the Group

Debbie says:

I’ve apparently come late to the Montana Fishburne party, since I just learned about the story yesterday. For those of you who’ve been living under the rock next to mine, Montana Fishburne is the daughter of acclaimed actor Laurence Fishburne, who is African-American. At the age of 18, Montana decided to perform in porn movies. Her father is furious and not speaking to her.

Montana is extremely articulate and clear about her decision. In an open letter released by Vibe Magazine, she says:

I was the one who reached out to Vivid. [Male performer] Brian Pumper had nothing to do with getting me started. I did my first video with him, but that’s it. I chose Vivid because they are the best in the business and I wanted to go to the top seller. And they have released other movies with celebrity girls like Kendra, Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian. So, I wanted to go somewhere I knew I would be safe. People have it wrong. Doing porn is not about me becoming famous…it’s about becoming successful. Porn just happens to be the industry I was most interested in, so for critics to say I’m going about it the wrong way they are missing the point. I am making a buzz in the porn industry and in the mainstream, too. It’s leading me to more opportunities, so people can’t say that I’m not going to get anywhere.

Her right to do this is not in doubt, and it’s difficult to read that quotation and question that she’s making a conscious choice. No one can say whether or not it will work out for her, but that’s true of all choices we make at any age; sometimes the least controversial-seeming choices turn out to be the most dangerous, sometimes vice versa. So my basic reaction is “You go, girl!”

Andrea (AJ) Plaid adds a layer of complexity to the story at Racialicious. After discussing her own understanding of Montana Fishburne’s choices in the context of her own history, Plaid goes on to give us some racial/ethnic context, and then finishes with a superb analysis of the role of the woman of color in pornography and what kinds of obstacles Montana Fishburne may encounter. (“What’s not getting nuanced in this statement is the deeper notion of what Latoya Peterson describes as the Montana’s and Midori’s “double marginalization”: that “black bodies are devalued, both in mainstream media and in porn…”) Read the whole piece.

In the middle of her post, Plaid analyzes how Montana Fishburne’s racial identity affects public perception of her choices.

… to hear that [Laurence Fishburne]s] Black daughter is not only a sex worker—which is, according to some people, what one turns to only “out of desperation” or is the path of “those (read: poor, uneducated) women,” though some sex workers would state otherwise–is something some people just couldn’t imagine Papa Laurence doing because he’s just too righteous for that. Laurence, like my moms, are what some would refer to as “race people” those Black people who are proud and try their damnedest to do right by The Race™, including rearing children who won’t embarrass the rest of The Race™ by, in the case of Black women, staying sexually “proper”—meaning no “laying up” and certainly not doing it on video for millions to see. And when their child shames them—and by extension, The Race™—sometimes punishment is swift and, in my mom’s and Laurence’s cases, silent.

I completely get this, and at the same time, it is one of the hardest things about being in any marginalized group: Paris Hilton can star in porn flicks and she’s just a rich white girl starring in porn flicks, but if Montana Fishburne does the same thing, she stands in for all African-American women, or at least all middle-class-and-higher African-American women making that choice. Everyone white has the option of generalizing from Montana’s choice to the choices of Montana’s whole group. Everyone of color is strongly pushed to think about how to respond to her as a representative of their choices. Individuality itself is muted by the role of representation. Individual choices and individual public actions become more difficult.

This also makes me sympathetic to the people of color who are opposed to Montana’s choices. If she cannot escape the role of representative, similarly no one who is identified as being in her groups (in this case, people of color and African-Americans, especially conventionally beautiful young women) can escape being lumped in with her to some extent.

Despite the fact that she is chipping away at the bedrock of these issues by being so public, there is nothing immediate or dramatic that Montana Fishburne can do to change her ‘assigned’ role as representative of her identified group. For me, that means that her choice is even more courageous and challenging than it would be if she was white. So, along with Plaid, “I wish her much luck and success in her chosen path.”