A person’s sexuality would depend on their acceptance of the self, and their coming to terms with feelings and emotions generated in growing up. Knowledge about gender orientations, and acceptance of related social roles and responsibilities are a crucial part of the developmental process. The understanding helps young people become balanced, well-adjusted members of society. Thence, all of creation may be perceived living, breathing works of art. Male and female elements of Nature interact with the environment, secure in their own type of sexuality.
Erotic art imagery exalts nakedness. Nothing wrong with that really, since eroticism relates to arousing or being affected by sexual love or desire. The word originates in Eros, the name of the Greek god of love. Hence, the expression of desire should of course include love. In the present age, however, cynicism has crept in, and love is forgotten. Modernity seems to jump straight into sex instead.
Erotic art has been made the product of male sexual fantasy. The function of the female form is the sexual service of men. Sculptures and paintings, developed in the West from the nineteenth century onwards, draw attention to the female anatomy thus sexualized. Women are defined by the 3 b’s – breasts, buttocks, and belly. The artworks build upon the presumption that the modern fertility goddess aches to be touched.
To all intentions, they may as well be mindless and faceless objects. In the essay, Eroticism and Female Imagery in Nineteenth-Century Art, Linda Nochlin writes:
Whether the erotic object be breast or buttocks,
shoes or corsets, a matter of pose or of prototype, the imagery of sexual
delight or provocation has always been created about
women for men’s enjoyment, by men.
The point of erotic art is ownership – by men, of women. John Berger (quoted in Nochlin's essay) explains the trend that originated in Europe:
She is painted with extreme sensuous emphasis. Yet her sexuality is only superficially manifest in her actions or her own expression … The painting’s sexuality is manifest not in what it shows but in the owner-spectator’s (mine in this case) right to see her naked. Her nakedness is not a function of her sexuality but of the sexuality of those who have access to the picture. In the majority of European nudes there is a close parallel with the passivity which is endemic to prostitution.
Women’s personas are preyed upon, as willing or unwilling actors in the ongoing fantastical narrative of male sexual liberties. Men as a group have the power to enjoy the woman’s innocence, her vulnerability and her inability to protest her plight. Almost in the same vein, women artists themselves are deprecated. They are better known for their external relationships than their intrinsic talent. Naked and ashamed might sum up women’s social subordination in erotic art, and underscore their now characteristic low esteem.
Nochlin however, appears to blame women rather than men for the situation. She writes:
This is, of course, not the result of some
calculated plot on the part of men, but merely a reflection in the realm of art
of woman’s lack of her own erotic territory on the map of nineteenth-century
reality. Man is not only the subject of all erotic predicates, but the customer
for all erotic products as well, and the customer is always right. Controlling
both sex ad art, he and his fantasies conditioned the world of erotic
imagination as well. Thus there seems to be no conceivable outlet for the
expression of women’s viewpoint in nineteenth-century art, even in the realm of
pure fantasy.
The invasion of the social psyche has been insidious. The organization of community life institutionalized the dominance, and further, conditioned women into becoming the carriers of the culture. The projection of shame has been the most effective weapon to keep them in line and off-balanced, since the days of Eve. Individual men may distance from the perspective, but as a group, they do precious little to fix what, from the male viewpoint, does not seem broken. It is far more expedient to patronize the victim.
The imagery used carries forward the culture. Which would
women viewers identify with - the male perspective, or the low self-esteem?
Either way, the patriarchal dominance continues. Women
need to find new inspiration, to build a new perspective for the future free of objectification. Perhaps women artists could set a new
trend to break the patriarchal stranglehold on
their group. Naked is fine in erotic art – as
long as the representative women own their sexuality with pride, not in
shame, nor in service.
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