The Myth of Empowerment: Part Two

January 11, 2022

Is art that celebrates female sexuality and freedom also functioning as a male fantasy?

First written in May 2021, edited and revised December 2021 

Empowerment is when someone is given the authority to do something, or it refers to the process of one becoming stronger and claiming their rights and control over their own life. It’s a word thrown around in the realms of NGO’s and social justice as well as sex work and social media. It’s a word bound up in the feminist conversation and feminist art. 

Are all feminists empowered by the very nature of them being feminist and speaking out, or acting out, against the status quo of patriarchy? Are all empowered women feminists? As an empowered feminist artist can you make art that fully celebrates female sexuality and freedom and doesn’t function, in any way, as part of the male fantasy? 

Goodness, a lot of questions indeed, but questions that go nicely with these words by Margaret Attwood:

“… is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” – Atwood, The Robber Bride 

So, is everything run by male fantasies?

NOT ALL MEN

 
Last Spring, the art I was creating reflected my experience and position as a young woman in London. After the abduction and murder of Sarah Everard, my sister and I wrote a list of 60+ types of men and their behaviours which facilitate a culture that dehumanises and sexualises women, titled ‘Not All Men’. The response to this was unexpected and otherworldly. The likes, shares, and comments rolled in and after two weeks the original post had been seen by over a million people. The reactions were mostly positive, grateful, and angry because, like me, they were people (women) absolutely fed up with living in fear and shame, but amongst the 15,000+ comments there were also countless that argued, disagreed, threatened, and spouted sexist and homophobic rhetoric.

The sudden, and unintended, merging of my public and private presence was exhausting and frightening. I was labelled by my peers and strangers as someone who ‘did that kind of activist thing’ when just days before I was making collages that were seen by twenty people. ‘Not All Men’ was fearless, righteously angry, and completely exposing. I felt naked and vulnerable without having ever taken off my clothes or even showing my face.

(It is worth noting here that my decision to publish ‘Not All Men’ meant that the vulnerability was of my own making, unlike the exploitation of many women who are exposed emotionally and physically without consent or with coerced consent.)

The Instagram post was, in many ways, a form of publication (to publish is simply to make content available to the general public, so every post on social media has been published thus making every account a publication of sorts) and this made sense to me, having self-published a book in March, a zine in April, and having a particular interest in activism and the history of feminist publishing. To see ‘Not All Men’ within the wider context of publication being used to disperse feminist rhetoric was exciting and emboldening. 

The Instagram post articulated the realities of womanhood; it was a feminist artwork but surely this wasn’t a male fantasy as so much of the art centred on women is?

Sidenote: I can’t escape men and the impact they have on my life, I live in a patriarchy, and I am heterosexual, so men fill both the spaces that I want them to and the ones I don’t. Ironically, this very writing, being focused on the male fantasy, is probably a male fantasy (although I am yet to understand and express how).

Back to the viral post… of course, that so many people resonated was exciting! A good measure of how powerful something is are the efforts people subsequently go to in an effort to destabilise the creator. That (mostly) men were so incited by my words they decided to threaten my life was proof that what I had created was powerful, but did I feel empowered? 

I wasn’t sure, so I turned to Jemimah Stehli; the artist (entering the public sphere in the 1990s) who stripped off in front of her male colleagues and peers, having given them the trigger for a camera behind her. A very interesting idea.

Adrian Searle wrote for the Guardian, “For her Strip photographs, artist Stehli invited an all-male cast of critics, writers, curators and art dealers to pose for her. We posed for her, one by one, and she posed for us... Everything about this situation feels loaded, and I'm extremely self-conscious. I find myself firing the camera whenever she appears awkwardly balanced - unhitching her bra, bending to take off her shoes, untangling herself from her jeans. I guess I'm trying to wrest some power from the situation, to catch her at a moment of vulnerability, to catch those moments between moments… As much as I enjoy looking, and watching her moves, I realise she's the one in control. I take the photograph, but she's got me photographing myself, looking at her.”

The Strip series (1999-2000), a continuation of the conversation that Wilke’s had started surrounding the male gaze, is a series of self-portraits as Stehli undresses with her back to the camera in front of male critics, writers, and curators. Searle’s observation that the situation feels ‘loaded’ and that the one in power (viewer or artist) is unclear and ambiguous certainly echoes my feelings towards my emotionally naked work. However, that he instinctively tried to photograph her in states of vulnerability suggests he assumed he ought to be in the position of power and he even admits that he was ‘trying to wrest some power from the situation’. Perhaps if a woman had been photographing her, they would have fired the camera in the moments where she looked powerful, content, comfortable: would it have become a celebration of the female form and body instead of the diminishing of it?

In an attempt to wrestle back control from the digital post which, once released onto the internet, had sprung into a life of its own, my sister and I extended the original list with clarifications and some of the suggestions that we had received, and published it again in the form of a pamphlet, or zine. This zine was both in digital form (downloadable pdf) and physical (A5 booklet) and was available to purchase with all profit going to Refuge UK and Rape Crisis. In the same way that a gallery acts as a gatekeeper for Stehli’s photographs (though they exist on the internet), the introduction of a price acted as a gatekeeper for my work (though it of course was born on the internet) and, unsurprisingly, only those who wanted a physical copy for the right reasons also wished to donate to relevant charities. 

The conversation that was then opened used the first names of buyers and not anonymous keyboard warriors. The physical copies, which sat on bedside tables and kitchen counters, became conversation starters around the world with people for whom this mattered in a way that went beyond the five seconds it takes to like an Instagram post. 

How we, as women, decide to take control of our bodies, our work, our very being, once we feel that the control has been removed from us, is fascinating. Often it is by standing up and speaking out and claiming some kind of restitution from the situation. I raised money for Women’s Aid by selling the physical copies of ‘the list’, Emily Ratajowski took control of her situations by writing and speaking about it all.

Is that better than remaining silent, wrestling with the injustice and humiliation and pain on your own, or with close friends? Is either option, silence and private contemplation or wrestling back control, wholly empowering? Are we damned if we do and damned if we don’t?

 And in all of it, are we always, just by being, performing for the male gaze?