Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

of bleary, boozy, bottle-brandishing dick-frenzy aren’t, actually, bothering anyone much: women still commit only 14% of violent crime in Britain and America, but we’re still blamed for engendering social breakdown, when all we ever wanted to break down were creaking edifices of moral judgement and sexual repression.
     
The new fun police
    This reanimated puritanism is thrown into ghoulish relief by an insistence on the absolute libertinism of modern culture, whereby any overt challenge to the erotic orthodoxy of the advertising and porn industries is seen as somehow ‘anti-fun': a wearisome distraction from the emerging utopia of Western liberated hedonia. The frigidity of mercantile eroticism is the ghost at this feast, which is why nearly every public conversation about sexual morality fails to distinguish between consumer culture’s brutally identikit traffic in sexual signs and sex itself. The assumption behind the sententious moral message preached by ‘family values’ spokespeople is that because we are surrounded by images of erotic capital, more actual sex, in the moist and panting sense, must be being had. This is in no way the case. What surrounds us is not sex itself but the illusion of sex, an airbrushed vision of enforced fun-fisting sexuality that is as sterile as it is relentless.
     
    Advertising surrounds us with what are supposed to be images of sensual pleasure: from adverts for Herbal Essences to the iconic, forty-year campaign for Cadbury’s Flake bar, white women’s faces are caught in what we have come to understand as a rictus of simulated bliss, their eyes elegantly closed, perpetually turning away as if in embarrassment at the orgasmic effects of product X. But something is wrong with the picture. One of the finest modern acts of counter-culture in its purest sense is the website Beautiful Agony, a group project wherein anonymous contributors submit short videos of their faces at the point of orgasm. Watching hairy Australian biker dudes and grungy middle-aged ladies snarling, chuffing and grimacing like chimps in heat, one realises the magnitude of the lie being perpetrated by mercantile eroticism. The collected videos, hundreds of which are submitted every month, have one thing in common: none of them would make you remotely more likely to buy a bar of cornershop chocolate.
     
    In Jean Baudrillard’s assessment, the first task of sexual counterculture under late capitalism must be
     
to distinguish the erotic as a generalised dimension of exchange in our societies from sexuality properly so called. In the ‘eroticised’ body, it is the social function of exchange which predominates. The erotic is never in desire but in signs. This is where all modern censors are misled (or are content to be misled) – the fact is that in advertising and fashion naked bodies refuse the status of flesh, of sex, of finality of desire, instrumentalising rather the fragmented parts of body in a gigantic process of sublimation, of denying the body its very evocation. 3
     
    The ‘fragmented parts of the body’ that Baudrillard describes are a key feature of advertorial eroticism: disembodied parts, particularly of women, are fetishised as symbols of a sexuality that they cannot access. Shampoo suds run down naked torsos in soft-focus; lingerie is stretched over moronically thrusting groins; and everywhere, on book-covers and cereal packets and boxes of sanitary towels, disembodied legs in stilettoed high heels emblematise a cutesy, feminine consumer imperative that edges to replace genuine erotic impulse in as sincere a manner as that in which O’Brien in George Orwell’s 1984 vowed that the party would destroy the orgasm. To paraphrase Orwell, if you want a vision of the future of feminism, imagine a high heel coming down on a woman’s face – forever.
     
Learning erotic capital
    The distinction that Baudrillard draws between erotic capital and sexuality itself must be understood as a real feature of contemporary sexual mores. Young people growing up with pressure to perform in every aspect of their lives find themselves aping a robotic capitalist eroticism that has little to do with their own legitimate desires.
     
    I have a vivid memory of being impelled, as a grumpy fourteen-year-old, to take part in a musical competition with other girls in my school year in which we all performed a version of a popular music video in front of the rest of the school, in the name of ‘House