Tag Archives: nudity

Facing Fascism Naked

naked woman (from the rear) dancing with cops in the foreground
photo by @DonovanFarley on Twitter

Laurie and Debbie say:

Last Friday (which only seems like a year ago), when federal officers with no IDs or agency markings were facing down crowds of peaceful protesters in Portland, Oregon, sometimes using rubber bullets, sometimes carrying people not charged with anything away in unmarked vans to undisclosed locations, a young White woman stepped out of the crowd of protesters towards the officers, and took off her clothes, except for a black face mask and a stocking cap.

The officers shot pepper spray bullets near her but not at her. She did some ballet poses, and sat down in a cross-legged yoga position. According to Richard Reed, writing for the Los Angeles Times, “At one point, a fellow protester, clothed, carrying a homemade shield, darted in front of the woman, angling to protect her. But the woman sidestepped him. He jumped out of the way, perhaps realizing that he made them both a target.”

Eventually, the attackers broke ranks and left, and the protesters dispersed more peacefully than on most nights before or since.

So what happened?

An OregonLive photographer named David Killen is quoted in the Times article as saying “It would have been incredibly painful to be shot with any of those munitions with no clothes on.” That’s just funny: it’s hardly any less painful to be shot with rubber bullets wearing a t-shirt and summer pants.

She was extremely brave, because she was willing to make herself into a singular, visible, separable target. She was banking on a very particular kind of sexism among the feds: that they would not know how to face a conventionally pretty, young, White body with the weaponry they have no conscience using on a wide variety of other bodies. She turned out to be right; but it was a gamble.

She’s been criticized for doing this at all, because — of course — a Black woman who tried the same thing would be either dead, “legally” arrested, or detained somewhere with no charges and no due process. That’s why we laud this woman for doing it: she was using her privilege, and her courage, to try and stop the violence in the moment — and it worked.

She was also part of a long tradition, not so much either the Portlandia tradition or Lady Godiva, both of whom are cited in the LA Times, but an anti-war, anti-fascist tradition of using the way powerful white men love, covet, fear, and hate naked bodies as a tactic against those men. Here’s a protest picture from July 4, 1970, when then-president Richard Nixon tried to hold a right-wing rally on the National Mall which ended up with Nixon supporters and counter-protesters fleeing in a cloud of tear gas.
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We live in a twisted, unhealthy culture where nakedness is secret, taboo, and tempting. Otherwise, no naked body would ever be able to turn away a phalanx of storm troopers.

But we use the tools we have, and we applaud this woman and all her predecessors for using them well.

Stay safe.

Manhood? Or Penis-hood?

[DISPLAY_ULTIMATE_SOCIAL_ICONS]

Debbie and Laurie say:

Photographer Laura Dodsworth has completed a major project on penises (following a project she did on breasts). She calls the project, and accompanying book, Manhood: The Bare Reality, saying “One word for penis is manhood, so it seemed a perfect starting point to talk about being a man.”

Dodsworth did some admirable things for this project: she went looking for a wide variety of models, including trans men, men with micropenises, disabled men, and at least one strap-on. If you want to learn about the variety of penises, this is great. The Guardian article linked here includes interviews with several of the models, and the book probably has interviews with all of them.

This is a project we want to like. Familiar Men taught us both a lot about men and their penises, and the subject is under-explored, especially visually. But Dodsworth made two choices which deeply undercut the value of her work:
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First, she chose headless, and surprisingly bodiless, photography. Because all the men are standing in the same position, the same distance from the camera, with their hands in the same positions, the message is that the penis is the only differentiation, and thus the penis is the man. Anything else that might be of interest about each man is invisible, and thus unimportant. (Her breasts project is done in exactly the same format, equivalently making the breasts the only interesting thing about each woman.) In the same vein, she chose to make all the men nameless: not only no full names, but no first names, no initials, no handles, no aliases. Just their age, and the picture of their penis. Dodsworth succeeds in dehumanizing her models, reducing them to a single view; the interviews dispel this a little, but not enough.

Part of Dodsworth’s narrative about both of these projects is how brave these people were to have un-airbrushed pictures of their sexual organs shown in public. It’s always brave to tell your story; nonetheless, when we read these stories and the only visual context we are given is a picture of the penis that goes with the story, we lose track of the full humanity of the person behind the interview.
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Familiar Men exemplifies photographs of men of a wide variety of ages, ethnicities and body types, showing their entire body and face to the world. In Laurie’s photography and our joint work, the penis is not the man. Where Dodsworth anonymizes, we strive to personalize.

Thanks to Lisa Hirsch for the pointer!