The Myth of Empowerment: Part Three

January 18, 2022

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

First written in May 2021, edited and revised January 2022 

THINGS THAT BOYS HAVE SAID TO ME, MADE INTO ART.

Unable to ignore the most violent, ugly, and personally attacking comments underneath the post that went viral in March 2021, I began to use them in my artwork and to collage with screenshots of them (see some less violent ones below). These works became another leaf from the ongoing collection of works casually titled ‘Things that boys have said to me, made into art’, which includes a collage, (‘Desperately Blue’ because a boy I fancied once told me my eyes were ‘desperately blue’ and, as I’m sure he intended, I turned to jelly) and works inspired by the line ‘She’s more likely to be an ex-wife than anyone’s girlfriend’ (make of that what you will).

‘Things that boys have said to me, made into art’ also includes a zine: a collection of poems, from my own series ‘Love in the time of Covid’, revolving around relationships that emerged, evolved, and broke between March 2020 and April 2021. I found that writing, illustrating, and binding them into a physical object was a way to process, and protect, the events and the memories.

(I followed those same steps again, just before Christmas, with everything I wrote about one particular boy; 75 days worth of words got printed out and glued together and turned into a neat little booklet. Books have beginnings and ends. So did this. A vain attempt to trick my brain into closure! He got to see it by the way, we both process through words and creating, and I promised that anything I wrote about him I’d show him before it went public. It’s not yet anywhere public.)

It is significant that I don’t really ‘publish’ the poetry on my Instagram account, by keeping it to physical copies I am able to control the distribution and who receives it (unlike the ‘Not All Men’ Insta post, which took on a life of its own). Whilst my writing is not sexually explicit in any way, it portrays both a strong-willed version of myself and one who is submissive and sometimes used by men, and Margeret Attwood argues that both versions are part of the male fantasy. All this writing does make me feel powerful, with no real vulnerability since identifying details are often carefully hidden. I’m not quite baring my soul and I’m certainly not baring my buttocks. Is this empowerment?

John Berger’s ‘Ways of Seeing’ has contributed to my questions around how a woman is moulded by the patriarchy, which influences her own view of herself, and thus she cannot create work that isn’t marred by the expectation of man and influenced by the programmed desire within her to pander to the male gaze. 

“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself… From earliest childhood, she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so, she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life.”

I interject here to note that though I receive, always, a barrage of encouragement by women about my work, I spend hours and hours pondering and fussing over what has been said and not said about my work by the important men in my life. I feel I have been taught to value the opinion of a man over that of a woman, (the exception being my mother and sister, whose opinions are above all others!). I’m unlearning these tendencies slowly. Back to Berger:

“Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.... men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus, she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”

So, my writing about men is undoubtedly catering to the male fantasy, I’m sufficiently fuelling the collective male ego. Even when the description leaves the man in question looking less than heroic, he was still clearly taking up space in my head and part of me is still clearly tucked under his thumb. How awful. The fact that I am acutely aware of when and what these men see of my artwork leaves Berger absolutely proved right – I am watching myself, my work being an extension of me, being looked at by men, and it can be all-consuming.

 P.S. Hello to all the boys who read this and looked for references to themselves. Oh, the irony…

P.P.S Amusingly, my eyes (thanks mum for the genes) have inspired everything from poems to songs to paintings (and I certainly have my favourites), so if you think you’re the boy who I made ‘Desperately Blue’ about, think very carefully about what adjective you used when you complimented my eyeballs. Bisous! x

Reminder: I love men, I fall in love with men, and some of my very favourite people are men! I’m just trying to work out how to sit with the conditioning of a patriarchal structure when it comes to art, and with the knowledge that every day I am at risk and at a disadvantage simply by NOT being a man. Which is quite unfair.