Since
they were old enough to understand words, I’ve been trying to teach my
daughters the nature of permanence, as it relates to the World Wide Web.
The Internet is forever, I tell them; the public is brutal, and they
need to keep their clothes on whenever a camera-equipped device is
around. Those spring break pictures on Facebook will be the first thing
the Senate Judiciary Committee sees when it’s deciding whether to
approve their nomination.
At
least, that’s what I grew up believing. After all, Miss America Vanessa
Williams was forced to give up her crown in 1984 after nude photos of
her appeared in Penthouse. Nudity had consequences and, for women, they
weren’t good ones.
But
now, in the worlds of politics and pop culture, boudoir shots and even
sex tapes have gone from guaranteed embarrassments to occasional assets
to, sometimes, barely mattering at all. Watching the events of the past
few weeks unfold, I wonder if maybe I’ve gotten it wrong. When is a
naked picture a problem for a woman? Maybe never — so long as she’s the
one wielding the camera, or she looks good, and her husband’s not upset.
As
the world knows, last week, our Republican presidential contenders quit
tussling over whose private parts are bigger, and moved on to the
equally compelling question of whose wife is hotter.
To
briefly recap: Before last Tuesday’s primaries, a “super PAC” called —
you really can’t make this stuff up — Make America Awesome ran ads
on social media targeting Mormon voters in Utah. The spots showed
images of Donald J. Trump’s wife, from a 2000 photo shoot with British
GQ. “Meet Melania Trump. Your Next First Lady,” read the text, over a
shot of a sultry, nude Mrs. Trump, curled up on a fur. “Or, You Could
Support Ted Cruz on Tuesday.” (Ted Cruz was not pictured.)
Even
though the ad didn’t come from the Cruz camp, Mr. Trump was furious —
which was more than a little ironic, given the vigor with which he’s
been posting provocative shots of his nemesis, the Fox anchor Megyn
Kelly, who posed for GQ in a short black slip dress and red high heels.
Mr. Trump has retweeted
one of his supporters, who called Ms. Kelly a “bimbo,” and has said she
lacks the gravitas to question the candidates. Evidently, in
Trumplandia, being scantily clad means you’re no longer qualified to be a
journalist, but being naked means you’re perfectly qualified to be
first lady.
And on it went. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump slammed
“Lyin’ Ted” for being behind the Melania ad, and threatened to “spill
the beans” on Mr. Cruz’s wife, Heidi. The next day, no beans were
spilled, but Mr. Trump retweeted a meme of a picture of Melania, looking
appropriately model-rific, juxtaposed beside Heidi Cruz, looking
probably a lot like I do when I need my roots touched up and I’ve had it
with my kids. “No need to spill the beans,” text with the photos said.
“The images speak for themselves.”
Continue reading the main story
We’re changing the landscape of oil & gas
by looking at the bigger picture.
by looking at the bigger picture.
And
what do those images say, exactly? Oh, right: Mr. Trump is obviously
better qualified to run our country, because his wife was a professional
model.
Mr. Cruz was swift to defend Heidi Cruz’s honor, tweeting,
“Donald, real men don’t attack women. Your wife is lovely, and Heidi is
the love of my life.” It sounded chivalrous, until Mr. Cruz kept
talking. He called
Mr. Trump a “sniveling coward” and a “New York bully,” and praised
Heidi as “an unbelievable mom.” Mr. Cruz denied that his wife was the
object that Trump supporters were calling her — an unattractive woman —
by saying that, in fact, she was a different kind of object: the love of
his life, important and valuable primarily in terms of her relationship
to him, and “off bounds,” and in need of protection, just like their
children.
By Friday, Mr. Cruz had moved from defending his wife’s honor to defending his own,
calling a tabloid report that accused him of extramarital affairs
“garbage” and blaming the Trump camp for the story. Which means that
soon the Twitter mob will probably stop scrutinizing Heidi Cruz and
start in on the rumored mistresses.
In
this strangest of primary seasons, women exist primarily in terms of
their relationships to the men they marry or question or critique. They
can either be beauties or beasts or “the love of my life.” They can be
“crazy” or “losers,” “fat pigs” or “dogs.” They can be mothers and
daughters. They can be the currency with which you buy voters’ belief in
your machismo and alpha-maleness, or they can be the sand you kick in
the face of a “New York bully.” In every case, whether they are assets
or liabilities, they are objects. In no case are they people.
What’s
the political significance of a naked lady? When the Utah ad went
public, it wasn’t long before the predictable calls to leave candidates’
families out of the fray were joined by charges of slut-shaming, and
the insistence that a grown woman can pose as she wishes; that as long
as it’s her choice, it’s empowering.
Melania
Trump might have chosen to pose for GQ, but there’s nothing empowering
about the way her husband’s opponents have repurposed her modeling
portfolio as revenge porn. Which is precisely what Mr. Trump has done
with Megyn Kelly’s GQ shots. Neither woman deserves to suffer for having
made the choice to get in front of a camera.
MY
guess is that neither one will. Twenty years ago — or even as recently
as 2004, when the Federal Communications Commission fined CBS $550,000
after Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl halftime “wardrobe malfunction” — to be
female and naked was to be afraid. But now, our biggest reality TV star
is Kim Kardashian, a woman who spun a sex tape into gold, a woman who
posts nude selfies, then twirls on her haters, while her fans come
roaring to her defense, claiming that she has subverted the male gaze
because she’s the one creating the image and she’s the one sharing the
shot.
Sign Up for the Opinion Today Newsletter
Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary
from Op-Ed columnists, The Times editorial board and contributing
writers from around the world.
When
a collection of naked celebrity pictures were spirited out of the
cloud, then leaked to the public in 2014, it was the hacking that
shocked people, not the existence of the pictures. Not even a Disney
princess like Vanessa Hudgens had her career derailed by repeated leaked
nudes.
The
would-be first ladies will survive nudity, and mockery, but both of
them have been diminished, stripped of their personhood and reduced to
objects. They have been flattened into human baseball cards, to be rated
and traded, compared and assessed, and their worth depends not on who
they are or what they do, but on how good they look and how much their
husbands love them.
Never mind that Melania Trump speaks multiple languages and is a successful businesswoman, or that Heidi Cruz
has an M.B.A. from Harvard and had made a name for herself in the
worlds of both politics and finance. What matters is that Melania is hot
and that Heidi is beloved.
It’s
enough to make a liberal feminist, a mere spectator to the Republican
debates, long for the days of Carly Fiorina. At least then the
Republican primary could boast one woman who was a candidate, not just a
wife and a mother, or a face and a figure — a person, instead of a
thing.
Jennifer Weiner is the author, most recently, of the novel “Who Do You Love,” and a contributing opinion writer.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
No comments:
Post a Comment