BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


Underground > Head Shop >

Depictions of violence as "sexy", "arousing" etc- what's going on here?

  
 
All Acting Regiment
10:04 / 30.10.06
Okay, so over in this thread we talk about and pretty much roundly condemn the Sony advert with the white lady fighting the black lady, with the tag line "White is back", which somehow advertises a video game console. We criticise it in terms of race, and then I say:

As well as the racism issue, what do we think of the burgeoning (possibly post-Kill Bill) trend for images in adverts etc for what Flyboy calls "sexy fighting" (which is always between women), an example of which is shown in these adverts?

I'm troubled, because on the one hand there's that lesbian overtone and it's good that something other than het sexuality gets acknowledged but...no, it's not being "acknowledged" at all, is it? It's just that: an overtone, and it's being turned into wank fodder used to sell crap to teenage boys. Why no men sexy fighting?

We could even question whether fighting should ever be portrayed as sexy, but, well, we all enjoyed Captain Jack and several of us seem to be interested in kinky stuff, which two examples both involve sexuality-as-or-connected-to-violence (some kind of violence anyway, perhaps not "real violence"?)...so I think that's a question that might teeter a bit close to hypocrisy, and possibly needs it's own thread.

And that's what this thread is right here. Now, as usual with my threads, I'm working with a very vague set of ideas, so I guess we'd better find some concrete examples. I'll keep them work safe, both for me and for the University IT people reading this from their room as I type (hello).

To start with there's the aforementioned Sony adverts. Then you've got the film Kill Bill which would seem to take it's queue form a number of sources that also involve eroticised violence in some form or other- while I don't know the names of any exact works I'd guess that there's several Westerns and Japanese anime tropes involved. Then of course there's Hentai. Also He Man.

So, taking as our starting point that there probably is something violent about quite a lot of sexuality (but to what degree and how is unknown), what's going on with these here cultural products and what do we think about it?

Oh, there's also DANGER around this topic. Namely the fact that I almost found myself damning some of these aforementioned as nasty stuff whilst excusing, say, The Naked Lunch or A Clockwork Orange as "proper works of art", and was just about to post that when I realised I was excusing the category "things I like" from blame. So don't do that.
 
 
illmatic
10:23 / 30.10.06
Allecto, I think you should try and narrow down your context a little bit, and specify exactly what you are objecting about. What specifically do you dislike about which specificcultrual product? Can you say why you find some cultural products which include violence as more acceptable than others?

At the moment, it's just too broad. Your remit would include just about every depiction of sex and violence in our culture. Which aren't all "bad", surely?
 
 
All Acting Regiment
10:53 / 30.10.06
I know, I know. The problem is I just don't know what to think about most of these things, and I was wondering if people had any strong views on the examples I've given.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
11:00 / 31.10.06
Off the top of my head: there's a pretty hefty men sexy fighting theme running through western culture starting with the ancient greeks. How do people think that differs from the current occurence of female sexy fighting? Does it bring it on to an even keel or is the commodification of sexy fighting a problem because of women's status as less than equal?
 
 
MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!
12:43 / 31.10.06
Could somebody give me some examples of "sexy" and "unsexy" fighting?
 
 
Good Intentions
10:12 / 01.11.06
There is definately strains of the glorification of casual violence popping up, a bit more than there was in the 90s. Something which I find worrying myself is the proliferation of "extreme" martial arts and self-defence regimes, things like Krav Maga which insist on doing as much damage to the opponent at any cost. This is worrying because (1) these aren't maximally effecient or effective martial arts, meaning that those doing them for self-defence are getting a raw deal (2) abovementioned culture for the glorification of casual violence. Compare this with martial arts in the public sphere up till about 2000, where people almost shamefully admitted that you could hurt people doing this stuff and the emphasis on the spirituality of it all.
 
 
petunia
11:51 / 01.11.06
Allecto - I'm unsure about what question you are trying to ask here...

Are you:

- Trying to explore the reasons behind the current trend towards eroticised imagery of women in fighty situations?

- Trying to find a line between the imagery which is 'good' honest kinkysexy, and that which is just exploitative 'teenage wank fodder'?

- Trying to ask what (if any) imagery of this kind is acceptable?

- Trying to ask why there is less of this imagery involving men?

Or

- Trying to ask something else that i haven't noticed?


If it is the first question, a simple clue could be found by
taking the phrase 'fighty situations' out of the sentence. 'What are the reasons behind the current trend towards eroticised imagery of women?' yeilds quite obvious answers along the lines of 'because it sells' and 'because people like eroticised imagery of women'. Fighty situations are ones that involve a lot of the noises made during sex. People also get sweaty, and clothes are sometimes torn. And as you say, there probably is something violent about quite a lot of sexuality. Sex sells.

There are perhaps interesting undertones worth exploring to do with or culture's increasing acceptance of 'strong women' and the double edged sword held in this acceptance. Prior to the movement towards liberation for women, it may well have been unthinkable to use imagery that shows them as strong, willing individuals (strength and will are somewhat required of the fighty archetype), so this imagery is somewhat indicative of our culture's 'acceptance of the female'. Of course, this 'acceptance' is shown through the commodification of sexuality and woman, so...

There is also the slight undertone of the rape fantasy being played out in some of this imagery. The use of this fantasy becomes sublimated by the fact that two women are used, rather than a man and a woman. Women are, of course, 'safe', so the rape fantasy becomes something kinkysexy and not worrying or 'properly violent'. Again we see the underlying assumption of women as weaker and not capable as proper agents in an act of violence. Any act they try to commit here isn't 'proper' and is thus 'sexy' because it's just play and women are there for sex, aren't they?

The playing out of the classic hetmale fantasy of woman's subjugation [to man] becomes 'okay' because the woman fighting/subjugating in this act of violence is doing to to another woman. Of course, the hetmale hides in the background here, directing the film or writing the advert, so the power relationship (male dom, female sub) is not lost but becomes meta instead.

The teenage wank fantasy here becomes a lot more palatable because the male actor becomes voyeur/director instead of rapist. If it were an act of direct male-on-female sexyviolence, the (unknown, average hetmale with sublimated fantasies) male would be confronted with his taboo desires, which would be a bit awkward for him. Much better the whole thing stays subconscious.

This obviously ties with the second possible question:
'Where is the line between the imagery which is 'good' honest kinkysexy, and that which is just exploitative 'teenage wank fodder'?'

It could be argued that the wank fodder relies on certain unexplored assumptions based on the weakness of the female, the sexiness of the female, the sexiness of the female when she fights/has to subjugate, and the sublimated role of the male as 'overdom' in all this.

What we could classify as 'proper kinkysex' stuff would usually be a lot more explicit its awareness of the fantasies it conjours.

Obviously, there is no straight line here and there are obvious crossovers. For instance, i might get off on the Sony advertisement while acknowledging that i find the idea of a black-on-white-girly-fight-and-possible-rape highly arousing, or i could get off on kinky porn while pretending i don't actually find it sexy.

As for what imagery is/isn't acceptable; that would be a moral question. I'm not sure how one would go about answering it.

As for the relative lack of the malesexyfight, we probably have answers in a lot of what i have said above. In general, a patriarchal hetronorm society isn't so keen on mansex. Womansex is okay because women are sexy (duh), so two (or more!!!1!) women doing sex/sexyfight = more sexy. As long as the womansex ends in a good healthy desire for cock, all is well.

Nasty mansex/sexyfighty gets highly sublimated. We find certain evidence of the sexyfight in sport (boxing, mostly), and many martial arts films feature highly toned men all greased up and topless. But the sexyfight is rarely eroticed in an overt manner. Sexyfight between men seems to pull a lot of the 'wrong triggers' for a lot of hetmales. Most of the straight guys i know found Brokeback Mountain a lot more difficult to watch than other portrayals of mansex. They seemed to find real issue with the fightysex that happened in this film. Perhaps the thought of the whole subdom thing, when brought solely into the male realm leaves many men feeling a little vulnerable, or just turned on in a 'bad' way.
 
  
Add Your Reply