Here’s my dressing-down for sexy selfies
Is it really empowering to take off your clothes? No, it only reinforces the idea that women can’t just be, writes Sophie Donaldson
THERE’S an episode in season four of Sex and the City in which Samantha, the sexually liberated PR maven played by Kim Cattrall, commissions a photographer to shoot her completely in the nip. Her reason is that she wants to document her fantastic physique while it’s still fantastic.
After the session Samantha frames her chosen full frontal portrait and proudly hangs it on the wall beside her front door, where it welcomes all visitors to her apartment.
This, to me, seems like a very credible reason for posing nude and one of the few instances in which a nude photograph of yourself would be legitimately empowering.
Empowerment is the catch-all term when it comes to defending a woman’s right to bare all.
In 2016, after publishing a photograph of herself completely naked but censored with black bars, Kim Kardashian was stung with negative backlash from her fans, the media and fellow celebrities, such as actress Chloe Moretz.
Hitting back at the criticism, she published a blog post to coincide with International Women’s Day, stating that: “I am empowered by my sexuality. I am empowered by feeling comfortable in my skin. I am empowered by showing the world my flaws.”
Katie Grand, editor of fashion magazine Love, recently revealed that even staunch feminist Lena Dunham thinks provocative images of nearly nude women are empowering.
So much so, Dunham wanted to help create this year’s raunchy advent calendar video series produced by the magazine.
For those of you who were lost at ‘raunchy advent calendar’, stay with me.
Started in 2011, the annual series of short videos each feature a high-profile bombshell (think Kendall Jenner, Gigi Hadid, Stella Maxwell, et al). They mostly cavort around wearing something like novelty reindeer antlers and not much else.
The videos pull in viewers by the millions, with 11 million watching Gigi Hadid’s 2016 video alone, according to the magazine.
Last Friday, the first of this year’s videos was released, with one due to be published each day in the run-up to Christmas.
It’s an advent calendar, remember?
The videos are intended to be tongue in cheek, and vary from the hammy (Kendall Jenner in a silly shark costume) to the soft core (model Taylor Hill writhing on a sheepskin rug) but the constant is a semi-nude woman.
Model and actress Emily Ratajkowski has featured in the series since 2014. Ratajkowski, who rose to fame after appearing topless in the viral video for Robin Thicke’s song Blurred Lines, has no qualms about appearing nude.
An advocate of the sexy selfie, she is outspoken about her choice to bare her body and critical of anyone who takes umbrage with this. She also frequently cites empowerment as grounds for stripping off.
It would seem, in the frenzy of de-robing and filtering and cropping and posting, the word ‘empowerment’ has been somewhat hijacked.
To empower somebody, whether it be yourself or another, is to imbue them with a sense of power or confidence. To declare yourself empowered implies power or confidence was lacking in the first place, which is why it is difficult to believe that somebody like Ratajkowski is empowered by appearing nude. Clearly, she already has confidence by the bucket load. Perhaps a more accurate reason for publishing nude photos is that they can be liberating, or gratifying, or validating.
Whether you are famous or not, the reason most people publish photos of themselves on social media is because they like the attention — but that doesn’t sound quite as eloquent as empowerment, does it?
There are many things women are made to feel ashamed about, particularly our bodies. But even more shameful is to admit you like the attention your body attracts.
In the same way that celebrities revel in a dopamine buzz from the millions of likes their sexy selfies get, often we enjoy that warm rush of welcome attention.
In this particular climate, this can be difficult to articulate because our decision to wear very little, or nothing at all, can be deeply misconstrued. It is not unusual for a woman’s attire to be used as justification for rape or assault.
No wonder we have trouble admitting that sometimes we may dress (or undress) because the positive attention we receive feels good.
Insisting that sexy selfies are an act of empowerment reinforces the pervasive notion that women cannot just be; they must constantly justify their bodies, their actions and their appearance.
Ratajkowski was so hell-bent on explaining her actions she wrote an actual essay on the subject. In contrast, when was the last time you saw a bare-chested image of a bloke captioned with several paragraphs defending his ‘expression of self ’?