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shoppinghauer · 5 hours ago

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Deconstructing Conservative Rhetoric About 'Art'

So. I occasionally stumble upon the 'obviously fascist' side of tumblr, and today I discovered one of these blogs talking about what makes 'true art'. I've dissected TRA talking points before and so I shall do this one. It's a really long post, so I'm only providing screenshots of the parts that are relevant:

The first thing that struck me about these paragraphs is their similarity towards feminist analysis - specifically, what I have read in Dworkin's Pornography and Griffin's Pornography and Silence. OOP references the difference between the pornographic and the erotic. Whilst feminists would agree that pornography is dehumanising where eroticism is natural, healthy desire, that is where the similarity ends. Throughout these paragraphs you'll see how the patriarchy constructs these unspoken ideologies which feminism recognises and dissects.

A perfect example of this phenomenon is how eroticism and lust are rendered entirely separate categories. Eroticism is 'natural, healthy' sexual desire, and a 'fundamental part of the human condition'. Lust, despite also being something humans are capable of having, is separated into its own separate category, thus implying that it's not a fundamental part of the human condition. For all the right is obsessed with the left inventing language to 'redefine reality', the above is a perfect example of a patriarchal construction that has no definition outside of its own circular logic. The idea here is that there is 'good sexual appetite' and 'bad sexual appetite' and that these are conditions that are so distinct that they warrant categorisation. The complexity of the human condition and the various psychological factors that result in rape and sexual violence can be neatly isolated and packaged up as a result of the pseudo-spiritual evil force of 'lust'. Under right-wing thought, everything is categorised and simplified, so we never have to examine the construction of our world as a result of human thought processes and values and so hierarchies are preserved.

Additionally, there is demonstrated here another aspect to symbolic thought that I have discussed elsewhere: the implicit rejection of causality. The dehumanisation, rape and sexual violence caused by lust is used as proof of its inherent evil, rather than the other way around. So, then, an individualist narrative is formed of lust being the 'inner demon' that men are in struggle against: sexual violence is reframed not as something that men do to women to gain and sustain power, but instead a pseudo- - or actual - spiritual force that is inherently evil, and so women become props in men's inner struggle.

This narrativising of causality and morality as something inherent and 'above reality' allows for ad-hoc justification of anything that benefits the person. And this narrativising is present in another aspect of these paragraphs: note that pornography, and the sexual violence associated with it, is scapegoated as a 'modern' phenomenon. Once again, said sexual violence is implied to be 'proof' of the inherent corrupting (note the usage of 'perverting': a dog-whistle-esque term alluding to the corruption of the natural order) and evil force of pornography-fuelled lust, rather than an atrocity in its own right.

This is a dogwhistle towards liberal values: men, who have dehumanised, controlled, raped and impregnated women without the modern conceptions of 'pornography' for longer than written human history, imply that said rape and objectification is a product of deviant male sexuality caused by some pseudo-spiritual societal sickness - one that has nothing to do with patriarchy. Conservative men rightly recognise the evils of rape and dehumanisation in theory, but in practice they implicitly understand them to be the bedrock of male power. So it is within their best interests to deflect; to tell themselves and women that yes, men commit evil deeds, but if we religiously stick to our agreed-upon roles and hierarchies, we can at least mitigate the damage caused by men, or at least we can be psychologically comforted by believing that if we do things 'right' then we are safe. So, then, the patriarchy constructs a model of male sexual violence as something inherently aberrant and associated with the 'other': thus other violences can be justified, and atrocities within the 'in-group' can be downplayed. Whenever a man commits a heinous act we can be collectively reassured that he's 'not a real man'.

Meanwhile, the other major implicit assumption here is that within every man (and possibly every woman, although as you may notice as I share further screenshots, he never really addresses how women process the world), there lies this fundamental desire to dehumanise that is associated with sexual desire. As we've seen, he attempts to distinguish between 'good' sexual desire vs 'bad' sexual desire, and his use of 'Christendom' indicates the ideological position he holds. And once again, we see this same rejection of causality: 'good' sexual desire naturally exists within the context of 'the sacrament of marriage'. The implicit assumption here is that marriage is some inherent good, which results in the sexual desire within it being inherently good. This is of course something feminists reject outright.

And now, onto the meat of what I wanted to talk about:

So. If you thought I was stretching when I called those other things dogwhistles, then perhaps this will convince you. I'm going to take apart line by line why this is completely bullshit:

'Here the body is perfectly at rest': what does rest have to do with the erotic? Isn't a dead body also 'at rest'? I am as inherently alive as an erotic being when I'm doing the fucking grocery shopping as when I'm lounging in my pants at home. I'm being facetious, of course - the significance of this, that I will expand on later, is clearly in the desire to see femaleness as the natural opposite of maleness. Maleness is active where femaleness is passive. Men see femaleness as a pseudo-child-like state, whereby men make sacrifices to provide women with luxuries. And so, the healthy and natural state of things is demonstrated by the woman being portrayed as at rest: she is inactive, but she is content with that.

'The Venus could be clothed from head to toe, and her natural posture need not change in the slightest': This betrays the patriarchal belief about sexual desire: that men are inherently desiring and women desired, and that the female body inherently invites male lust, and therefore sexual violence. It is important that she looks as if she could be clothed, because that means she's simply naturally nude, and not posing sexually. Of course, there are deeply sinister undertones to all this: it is important she is both at rest and also could be clothed, which in short means it's important that she displays no outward signs of sexual desire. For all the waxing lyrical about her not being objectified, it is paradoxically important that she plays the role of a sexless being, being desired by the active male.

'The viewer is drawn automatically to her face, which veils her nude body from perversity': and here it couldn't be any more obvious that the female body is believed to contain some natural perversity which drives men to commit evil deeds. Men have to be reminded that women have human faces in order to remember that they're human and therefore don't deserve to be raped.

'You cannot objectify this woman, her flesh is off-limits to base appetites': This woman is literally a painting. She is literally an object. She is depicted nude for, as he wilfully admits, the 'male gaze'. Whilst in his mind, this painting demarcates a clear boundary between pornography and erotic art, a feminist would question this construction. This man is desperately attempting to justify looking at a naked woman as if it tells him something about the nature of humanity and eroticism through art. But for all his posturing about how art enriches us, all he's done is betray the same patriarchal beliefs that were likely also used to justify the painting's creation.

Also, I'd like to point out a few other aspects of this painting that to me, as a living human woman with 'flesh and spirit and entwined', read to me as distinctly un-erotic (i.e. displaying the exact kind of misogynistic dehumanisation you would expect from a patriarchal pornographic mindset):

As I've already stated, the fact that she's just lounging and showing no active interest in anything, let alone sex.

How pale and smooth she is. She looks like a fucking porcelain doll. There's no sense of her having interacted with the physical world.

The lighting in this piece is really odd - despite the huge black mass behind her that would surely place her in shadow, she looks as if she's under a bright spotlight. There's no real sense of shadow on her. She's entirely isolated from the environment around her - divorced from material reality, divorced from causality, as if to emphasise that she is there to be on display for the viewer.

The lack of body hair. She's a full-grown adult, and adulthood is where we develop our spirit of eroticism. For all the allusions to deviant male sexuality, if you didn't know any better you might be mistaken in thinking that healthy male sexuality that would require an erotic attraction to adult women with pubic hair. But pubic hair has been suspiciously absent in 'art' of naked women long before what we now call 'pornography' has become mainstream in the 'modern world'.

There are people in the background. Including what looks like a child. I notice he doesn't mention this at all. Especially since by his own admission, what makes eroticism so powerful and healthy is that it's of 'two becoming one' - but the privacy and intimacy of eroticism is surely lost when other people are depicted nearby. But I almost wonder if the existence of the other people actually bolsters the eroticism for him in a sense. Because if there are other people around, then she is further restricted from displaying sexual desire, and the presumed male in this scenario is also restricted from initiating sex: eroticism is thus separated from 'lust' by reminding the man that he can't fuck her at will. Of course, you'd think the fact that she's a human being who might not want sex would be enough to turn him off, but instead he requires external signifiers to remind him not to rape. This could indicate to us that her perceives eroticism less as an active force and more a lack of dehumanising lust. The existence of other people I think adds another aspect to this: broadly, conservatives believe that women should be private property, and liberals believe that women should be public property. But conservatives are also perfectly happy to bend rules to their will, as their entire ideological construction merely exists to preserve power. So if it benefits them to present the supposed sacred and vulnerable female body as something that's actually for public consumption, they will happily do that. The longer I consider the existence of other people engaging in their active lives in the background of this supposedly 'erotic' painting, the more I see this painting as some sort of intrinsic 'threat' to women: your body is naturally erotic, and no matter where you are or whatever situation you're in, if a man sees your naked form he views you as an object of his lust.

So I don't need to say as much about this second image, as it's mostly the same rhetoric. I will concede that he does address that she is a woman who actually does things. Curiously he says that her features are 'hardened' - hardened as opposed to what? As opposed to the other painting, where the woman looks like she's had the smoothing tool vigorously applied to her whole body? This women is still obscenely pale, with no areolas, no body/pubic hair, and nothing even resembling wrinkles. Her face looks less yassified and her stomach has marginally more definition than the other one, but to call her 'hardened' is patently absurd. This man is once again proving that for all these bodies are 'unashamed', he believes what makes a woman erotic is her being pure, untouched, inactive and - ahem - child-like.

'She too is off-limits': The overall impression we can get from these passages is that a woman has to display the most cartoonishly obvious humanity in order for a man to not view her as an object of lust (an allusion to a desire to rape her). For him, eroticism comes not from mutual desire, and instead from the thrill of crossing a boundary. The idea is that she has walls up, and there is excitement in conquering him. I've said before how men conceptualise rape and sex as functionally synonymous, and that 'consent' is merely the point at which she submits to his will: that ideologically is laid stunningly clear here; whilst this man clearly condemns rape, he processes eroticism through the same lens as rapists do - he, too, is sexually excited by the idea of her lack of consent. He, like all men, establishes a boundary at which point said excitement is morally bad - but every man who crosses a woman's boundary has the same justification.

'Theirs is not a nudity of advertising or intentional display, but instead of total leisure': he attempts to allude to the objectification of women in pornography whilst bypassing pornography's function in displaying women for male gratification. And that's what conservatives do - create arbitrary classifications for the purpose of creating some 'other' where deviancy lies. The argument of eroticism vs lust is a smokescreen so he can avoid addressing the real ideological position of pornography. After all, it's funny that he admits that these women aren't intentionally displaying themselves, when pornography where women are accidentally exposed is widespread. The idea that she is just lounging perpetuates his belief in the psuedo-spiritual inherent eroticism of the 'female form' (a helpful belief system to have when you want to construct a society where men can own and forcibly impregnate women), and it also fulfils the narrative of the erotic force of her lack of consent. We're supposed to believe that her lounging for a photo is somehow less fake than pornography - which it categorically is not, and I can't believe I had to say that. She's still posing, it's still fake, the only difference is she's expected not to show sexual desire. So if anything, you might even argue that (ideologically, at least) this is actually a bit worse than pornography that depicts a woman desiring sex and enjoying herself.

THERE'S A FUCKING BLACK SLAVE? SERVANT IN THE PICTURE. Where's her humanity, where's her eroticism? A white, extraordinarily pale naked lady gets to lounge, and its erotic that she 'could be clothed' but the black woman in mid-motion fully dressed isn't erotic? I think it's absolutely telling that in both these 'erotic' images there are whole other people in the picture. I can't say confidently that he chose these specifically because of the other people, but the fact that he's not turned off by them, the fact that he doesn't even mention their presence, speaks volumes. He's trying to construct a view of healthy eroticism that's supposedly about the connection between two real living beings and he chooses images of women showing no desire, doing nothing, next to other real human beings who aren't addressed at all. Mind you, given his political views I don't imagine he even recognises the black woman's humanity.

So these are two images that are supposedly erotic art. You wanna see what they're contrasted against?

'an unnatural and inexplicable pose that she would never hold if she was fully clothed': I will cede that women are placed in unnatural poses for the purposes of dehumanisation for male gratification. And there is definitely an element of that here - it's plain to see that the pose was chosen less because of its dynamism and more because of it showing off her bum. And the legs apart has some allusions to sexual positions - many women hump pillows in positions like this. But its allusions to more explicit things don't make it somehow less exploitative than the other images - she's equally as nude, equally the center of attention, equally on display. In fact, you could argue that she's actually less explicit here because all her bits are covered - no areola-less nipples are on display, and you could at least imagine that she has a bush.

It's funny to me that once again he prizes the idea of purity in a naked through how well he can imagine the woman being clothed. It's frankly just silly that he's trying to claim that this pose has anything to do with clothes - it's transparent grasping at straws to attempt to cover up his real desire to see women with boundaries that he could theoretically transgress. He wants to see nude women, but the desire to see nude women doesn't square with his conservative sensibilities, so he makes up this fiction that as long as she 'could be' clothed, she still has those boundaries, so she's still a viable candidate for possession by him. And to further illustrate that she has boundaries, she has to not show an indication that she wants sex, and that includes being a living, breathing, active human being: so, she must be still. She cannot resemble a clothed woman whilst naked, because without clothes the line between 'madonna' and 'whore' is blurred - so he has to find other signifiers that she is still the chaste, unsullied woman whose boundaries he desires to transgress.

'The face is another red flag, as it has no feature to play in the body's composition, and we have no reason to be drawn towards it': once again we have a clear admission that this man has such a shaky grasp of women's inherent humanity that he thinks not being able to see the face full-on means she ceases to be a subject and so becomes an object of lust. Don't get me wrong, there is real criticism to be made here: if she's looking 'off-screen', then this image is voyeuristic; at least in the other paintings there is some allusion to the existence of consent. But in this context, the woman is in a pose that, despite what he wants to claim, is clearly not designed to display herself sexually to the viewer. There's a real irony in that, actually - in the other paintings, the woman is directly looking at the viewer whilst fully naked, clearly implying that she is posing: literally on display. And yet in this context the woman is not posing elegantly and is looking off-screen, alluding to a much more natural context. It's clear his definition of 'on display' is, once again, divorced from reality - the inherent sexual nature of her body is such that moving whilst naked is enough to categorise her as 'on display'.

'Whether she is intentionally avoiding our gaze or is simply unaware of it, her subjectivity is compromised': Interesting how a woman's subjectivity is defined by her relationship to a man looking at her. You could argue that we're talking only about the context of a painting here, but it's clear from his rhetoric that he holds a much deeper ideological position that he is merely employing in his analysis of the painting: it is highly likely that he, implicitly or otherwise, views women's subjectivity in such a way.

'and we are free to engage in more lecherous mental activity': you couldn't make it any clearer: sex is something men get from women, and it's women's responsibility to remind men of their humanity so they can avoid men committing atrocities against them. Make no mistake, when he refers to 'lecherous', he is not thinking of this in moral terms - if this was about morality, then he'd have made the kind of analysis that I'm doing. He processes the world through this patriarchal ideological lens, which he exposes in the next sentence:

'This is not the body unashamed, like the Venus or Olympia. Instead, it is the body shameless.' Under the conservative viewpoint, there is the madonna and the whore: the woman whose body is capable of being shamed and yet stays pure, and the woman who has embraced her true nature of the shameless whore. The only distinction between this viewpoint and that of the pornography he denigrates is that pornography does away with the categories and claims that every woman is, deep down, the shameless whore. Both viewpoints come from the same ideological underpinning: that there is something pseudo-spiritually shameful about the female body, and that we are capable of being corrupted by sex. It's a useful viewpoint to have when you want to preserve your power through rape and want to outsource responsibility for your own actions and assuage your guilt.

'Her nudity, while beautiful, is dangerous and borders on advertisement': You couldn't make it any more clear that he does not view rape as an immoral act committed by a conscious actor on a victim. To him, her nudity is dangerous - not the beliefs or actions of the rapist. And despite his claims that our modern liberal society has commodified everything as a product (which, to be fair, it has):

it's evident that he views a woman's body as inherently a product. We can understand that he doesn't actually hate the concept of a product - but, like all conservatives, he wants it categorised. A woman's body could be advertised, but it shouldn't. Despite how much he wants to think of himself as different from those liberals wo view everything as a product, he defaults to referring to a woman being naked as 'borders on advertisement' - he, too, believes that anything, even the supposed sanctity of human eroticism, can be potentially a product.

To him, and by extension all men, the sanctity of human eroticism is vulnerable to all sorts of pseudo-spiritual and symbolic corruption - and that vulnerability is what makes it erotic. The fact that she has boundaries that can be sullied makes said boundaries vulnerable, which generates a high of eroticism. This, as with all symbolic conceptions, is a replacement for the true vulnerability of human eroticism: his eroticism as a living, breathing human being. The 'dangerous' naked woman whose body 'borders on advertisement' is entirely safe because she's just a painting, and so he's safe from having to engage with the reality that a real human woman can hurt him, can reject him. His entire self-conceptualisation as a man is structured about him being the untouchable centre of the universe - he is the presumed audience of the painting, his experience of sexual desire is not just universal but eroticism itself, and so a woman's naked body is advertisement to him. His discomfort and guilt around his desire to commit violence - that only exists because of how he is conditioned to dehumanise women - is outsourced and thus also becomes safe. All the things he likes about himself are good and healthy and natural. All the things he dislikes become narrativised into a psuedo- - or perhaps literal - spiritual and symbolic battle so he can feel that he has control over the universe. Her 'consent' is taken from her, as is her lack of consent, and instead reframed as part of his narrative - his internal struggle with the demons inside him.

When I first read this post, I surprised myself with being intrigued by his attempt to define art. I'd not really seen it done before, so even though I knew I would hate this guy I still decided to read out of sheer curiosity. Besides, it's healthy to know what your ideological position thinks and how they process the world - the youtube series 'The Alt Right Playbook' has given me great insight into the conservative worldview, which is why I recommend it at every turn. And after having read this guy's take on art can't help but think that for all the posturing about how art is enriching and gives you a window into the human experience, as opposed to 'modern art', kitsch etc which are purely products designed, to, well...

Like, this guy spent so much time trying to justify images that are clearly designed to be props that he finds satisfying to look at...

A lot of this argument isn't even terrible - I think there's an interesting discussion to be had about where the line is between art and commodification. But the conservative dogwhistling is so loud that every dog within several miles is howling - like, what's the point, here? What is the material harm caused by the commodification of art? Is this about human exploitation, about conditioning society to consume more and expect less, about training us to be less discerning so we're less susceptible to propaganda? No, it's vague allusions to taste as some psuedo-spiritual good, some inherent 'truth' that exists outside of material reality. This is the conservative viewpoint at its most transparent. He even concludes with 'then one must recognize that, like human beings themselves, not all art (and certainly not all product) is created equal' - as if he was literally tasked with the job to illustrate the right-wing mind so perfectly.

#I love the conclusions about male sexuality #Very illuminating of capitalism as well

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