Sophia
Our Bodies, Our Causes
I am disgusted when I see women’s bodies being used to sell a product. The item being sold is almost always a useless piece of crap. Then, the women themselves are commodified—they are dressed and coiffed in order to fit society’s idea of what is appealing, and they are shown stooping to adore the piece of crap or the man who possesses it. A woman’s sexuality is used to lure remote people in: either men who are supposed to desire her or other women who are supposed to wish that they had her image.
The use of models’ bodies in advertising is one aspect of the objectification of women, which is in turn one face of the exploitation of women. This objectification means that women are seen and used only as physical objects. Like objects, they are put on display. Their true physical beauty is ignored and replaced by an empty, standardized, nearly-impossible-to-achieve beauty that serves both to lower women’s self-esteem and to dehumanize them.
Objectification serves capitalism by keeping women buying beauty products. But by trying to make women into objects instead of humans, objectification also attempts to justify a more general exploitation—whether for sex, labor or advertising.
It follows that this capitalist rationale is echoed in reference to the Earth. They try to make us forget that the Earth is alive and has inherent value of its own, and they attempt to commodify it, divide it up and sell it.
This capitalist system encourages a domination mentality, implying that since it’s OK to dominate women, it’s OK to dominate nature, and vice-versa. Correspondingly, the movement to liberate the Earth and the movement to liberate people assigned a female identity are inextricably and beautifully linked. We cannot achieve liberation by uplifting environmental causes with one hand and holding down women with the other.
Because of this, it is quite disconcerting to imagine using popular advertising’s methods to sell the environmental or animal rights movements. But surely no one would do this—every environmentalist understands the links between the domination of women and the plight of, non-human life, right? Wrong.
I recently came across a couple of disturbing examples of campaigns using women’s sexuality to sell environmental causes. We environmentalists are angry when animals are treated as possessions, yet it appears that some of us are willing to objectify women to sell ideas. We want to keep people from making money off nature—be it from fur, timber sales or greenwashing—yet some campaigns are using archaic and unrealistic images of skinny models to promote their causes.
I don’t care whether the models have clothes on or not. I love naked bodies, but the promotion of model-bodies entirely removed from reality only brings us further from a loving understanding of what nature itself has given us.
In the following instances, models’ bodies are used in a way that is harmful to other women’s self-esteem by displaying a sensationalized image of female sexuality. In addition, the women are used simply as hooks to draw people in, and the display of their bodies has no actual bearing on the issue and no place in building a more positive world for women. These campaigns focus on building environmental movements but completely fail to create a world free of oppression for all.
The first example I came across was a campaign to shut down Indian Point, a nuclear power plant in New York State. One extremely vocal man in this fight said that he was determined to find the prettiest girl on the Internet to support his campaign, and he did, indeed, find a model to stand beside him. One of their main publicity stunts—doing a photo shoot in front of this nuclear power plant—brought lots of traffic to the campaign website. Photos from the shoot, some of which were readily hung up in the power plant’s lunchroom, depicted the model posing in heels in front of the reactor, as well as lounging on a hybrid car. How could this be attracting people who really care about the environment? It doesn’t make sense to appeal to people using a method that needs to be obliterated.
Since the photo shoot last Summer, other organizers have held a festive protest to shut down Indian Point, invited anti-nuke activist Helen Caldicott to speak and thrown a “Rock the Reactors” music concert. Which works best at drawing people into a movement: a model, a speaker or a concert? Which methods are the most relevant?
Most of us have heard of the next example because of the controversy that followed it: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ (PETA) “Rather Go Naked...” campaign. One of the campaign’s billboards features a naked young woman in an alluring pose in a classroom setting, writing on a chalkboard, “I’d rather go naked than wear fur.” While it’s a relief that the giant ad is not selling cigarettes or cars, who are we trying to speak to here? How does this make all of us non-model-like women feel? In fact, how does the skinny, shaved, perfectly tanned woman feel about herself?
One of our causes is being glorified by the image of a young schoolgirl, naked, being punished. Maybe in a different context we could use images like these to explore power relationships through sex, but in this case, they are normalizing the absurd identity of “little girl” that has been used to keep women down for so long. The same line of reasoning is used to keep the Earth from being liberated: Woman and nature are both just helpless, ever-producing objects to be admired but then exploited, our resources stolen for use by the capitalist structure and the men in power.
Some of the models in the “Rather Go Naked...” ads are painted like animals, some are made up to look dead, and some are holding (Playboy?) bunnies in front of their breasts. Most of them look like that two percent of the population that fits the hairless supermodel standard. 1 don’t want to recruit people who don’t think twice about this view of women. Instead, we should focus our energy on involving people in our struggle who enjoy seeing beautiful people and animals with all the hair and fur that nature bestowed on them.
Many of the models and spokespeople that PETA uses are celebrities. While I believe in the responsibility of every famous person to open the eyes of as many of their fans as possible, grassroots movements will always be based on the work of the many real people who passionately care about them. And these activists work because they truly find happiness in the natural places of this planet or the eyes of a freed animal, not in the image or approval of a celebrity.
The two campaigns mentioned obviously learned to exploit women’s bodies from the long and pervasive history of exploiting women for commodity advertising. And now this tradition is being seamlessly passed down to the latest commercial rage: buying “green.” Already, in the ad-riddled pages of the supposedly conscious magazines sold on the shelves of so many health-food stores, women’s ever-smiling and sexualized bodies are the main selling point for all sorts of green and organic products.
There is a counterpoint to all this noxious exploitation: There are women and other people who choose to use their natural bodies in a positive way to make a point. If women’s struggles and the struggle against the exploitation of nature are so closely linked, why not turn these negative images of women on their heads, and use our self-expression and our knowledge of the interconnected struggle in front of us to advance feminist and environmental causes at the same time?
What follows are some examples of campaigns in which people chose to use their bodies to promote various environmental causes. Without selling themselves short in the process, they manage to show both the strength and the positivity of their sexuality and bodies at the same time. These projects also feature people who are already a part of the movement. They are real people, not celebrity models.
One awesome, non-sexual, body-positive project is the World Naked Bike Ride (aka Critical Ass), which aims to make the roads more welcoming to cyclists, promote bikes as an alternative to oil dependency, encourage healthy attitudes toward the natural human body and connect onlookers to all of these causes through the smiles provoked by non-threatening, naked bicyclists. I took part in this in Chicago in 2004, and in Ithaca in 2005, and the bike rides are only expanding worldwide. The annual ride, which features the motto “As Bare as You Dare!,” is a strictly platonic community affair, juxtaposing bare human skin and the glory of a breezy bike ride with the roughness of the car-ridden pavement.
The naked part of “naked cycling” has an important message of its own: We are great how we are, and we want to bring things back to the most basic, intimate level— without cars and without clothes. The use of our bodies in an environmental campaign is not at all backwards. It only becomes a problem if they are not also being used to liberate us.
Chicago-based Topless Humans Organizing for Natural Genetics (THONG)—which has been a part of various anti-biotech actions, from infiltrating biotech events to putting on a “Bio Burlesque”—is more overtly sexual and represents a sex-positive, fun and inclusive environmentally-related movement (see EF!J January-February 2005).
Next I want to mention a project that has much more complex implications. Fuck for Forests (FFF) is an online porn site (www.fuckforforest.com) started by a young couple in Norway that features activists, well, doing it. While it mostly contains footage that traditionally appeals to straight men and women, anyone can donate their homemade pictures or videos, with all proceeds going to environmental causes.
While I don’t believe that porn is inherently bad, it often blatantly degrades women. Can it have a place in raising money to defend forests, promoting wildlife, or even drawing the lines between sexuality, a healthy relationship to the human body and a healthy natural world? Recently, FFF bought a chunk of old-growth forest in Costa Rica with $100,000 they raised the previous year. Should your community or group accept money raised from such a cause? That’s a question better left for each group to decide on its own.
FFF is an underground initiative drawing in willing participants. You have to seek it out to find it; it’s not plastered on any old billboard downtown, like PETA’s ads. However, a campaign like this needs to be done very carefully; there is a bad precedent for modern internet porn against which FFF should always be struggling.
The website includes mostly women, some men, but not many other genders. A full range of body types is not included, but the people aren’t incredibly skinny (except for one of the founders, who is featured prominently on the site). The people featured are not airbrushed or implanted, and their pictures feature them doing whatever they want to be doing. The participants are self-motivated and are in it for the forests, not the money. Most importantly, they delegated themselves to be models—they were not sought out by FFF because FFF thought those particular people would bring them better ratings.
One of the most important points in FFF’s favor is that it includes open sexuality in its basic philosophy. It is not just there as a ploy to draw any schmuck in. On its website, FFF is very up front in explaining its philosophy about the importance of open sexuality. It states that FFF was started because “sexuality and nature are connected.... Open sexuality is often looked down on as something dirty and strange. We felt sexuality had been treated like nature, with disrespect. So why not use pure, open-minded sexuality to put focus on that unnatural way of treating the planet? We also felt that a lot of the established nature organizations make too many compromises... some organizations in Norway even work together with the oil industry. We felt something had to be done.”
But to find a very different form of “porn” a lot closer to home, we need look no further than our very own Katuah EF!, which made a charming, black-and-white “X-Raided” calendar several years ago, featuring photos of covert actions done in little more than an identity-hiding bandana. This calendar shows us as we really are: beautiful, unashamed of our actions and—at least some of us—happy to indulge other activists’ desires and humor to raise a few bucks.
Let’s keep it real. We need to call out any environmental organization that isn’t holding true to a no-compromise worldview, either by catering to sleazy corporate interests or by stooping to the oppressive, mainstream habit of using our bodies against us for any kind of gain. These corrupt tactics will only hold us back, now and in the future.
Rather, we need to work to liberate both our bodies and the natural world simultaneously. These struggles will succeed best when we fight hand in hand. It is only when we are all liberated that any individual among us—forest, animal, or any shape or type of human—can be truly free.
Sophia believes in nudity, love and fighting back.