‘Flaunting’ fallacies
Women in their bikinis might just be spending a day at the beach
It’s August, which means it’s high beach season, which means it’s time to accuse famous women of ostentatiously showing off their bodies because they are wearing beach-appropriate attire.
“Lady Gaga flaunts her bikini body in a tiny bikini in the Hamptons,” reads an Us Weekly headline. “Katy Perry flaunts her bikini body on a beach in Spain,” reads one from PopSugar.
These headlines are everywhere. “Sean Penn and Robin Wright’s model daughter Dylan flaunts her bikini body while vacationing with new boyfriend.” “Heidi Klum flaunts her bikini body during fun sun-soaked day in Sardinia.”
In that last one, from the Daily Mail, Klum was technically wearing a bikini, but it was covered by a sarong in a series of pictures in which she did not appear to know she was being photographed. Her “flaunting ” consisted of: 1) Monitoring her kids as they splashed around a pool. 2) Letting her son pretend to push her in. 3) Lugging around a giant blow-up float shaped like a fish.
This is not “flaunting” a body. This is “having” a body — an immutable state that all of us who are not brains in jars must deal with.
What was Lady Gaga doing to flaunt her body? Swimming and taking selfies with her boyfriend. Dylan Penn? Unpacking water bottles from a canvas bag. How was Katy Perry flaunting her Katy Perryness? By wearing dark sunglasses and a giant floppy hat.
Sometimes the stars are apparently flaunting their bodies even when they’ve gone to great lengths to hide them: “Jennifer Lawrence flaunted her fit figure while relaxing on a yacht in the Bahamas,” read the caption of a PopSugar photo, in which Lawrence, still dripping from a swim, chatted with a friend.
The woman got on a private boat in the middle of the sea — a popular refuge for paparazzi-chased celebrities — where she left her hair uncombed, looked away from the camera and dared to go swimming in something designed for swimming. This could only have been less “flaunting ” if she’d swaddled herself in a Hamburglar costume before diving in.
So, there are your choices, Jennifer Lawrence: Either be accused of flaunting, or drown.
The trouble with “flaunting” — which means, by the way, either “dressing or behaving in a provocative way” or “displaying something ostentatiously in order to provoke envy” — is that it implies everything women do is sexual. Designed to conjure lust.
Jennifer Garner “flaunted her toned figure” when she took her son for a walk, but when her ex and co-parent Ben Affleck was himself photographed in a bathing suit, the New Yorker published a melancholy essay comparing him to “a defeated Roman senator,” or an early-19th-century oil painting.
(And, sure, we could Google our way toward a paparazzi shot of Zac Efron “flaunting” his abs on the set of the Baywatch remake — but the fact that “flaunted his body” gets about 17,000 search hits, and “flaunted her body,” gets 378,000 implies this is a way we talk mostly about women, not men.)
The other trouble with “flaunting ” is the allusion to purposeful teasing. As if it’s something egotistical women do to taunt the opposite sex by showing off what men can’t have. As if conspiring hordes of attractive women wake up, throw some Goldfish crackers and SPF 50 in a straw tote and head to the beach just so they can lure in men, then reject them.
Truly, this woman just wants to eat her snack and finish reading The Woman in the Window. Truly, she’d just as soon do it away from the public eye, but she doesn’t have an ocean on her back patio.
As recent events have made clear, women and men can perceive interactions in very different ways, and the misuse of “flaunting ” does not help clarify things.