Can you handle it?

As I watched this video (below) with my jaw half-dropped, I wondered how many girls will look at this without blinking an eye?

When the main words in a song are “video phone,” and there’s a woman — actually, two — writhing around with virtually nothing on, stroking giant, plastic, phallic guns, purring “if you want me, you can tape me on your video phone,” I have to wonder how desensitized North American teens are to this BS — and how many will look up to this ‘superstar’ and want to emulate this crock of crap.

I’m a huge fan of catchy pop tunes, and I love a good dance number as much as anyone, but this is beyond. Utilizing video — perhaps our most powerful medium for conveying information and ideas to the masses — to create epic works of socially constructed, gendered lies is criminal — this is the Male Gaze, personified. (Literally: there are men with video cameras in place of heads.)

I realize that there are SO many videos like this, and ones that are much, much worse; I simply haven’t paid attention to any of them for such a long time, and watching this one today, after several years of cleansing my palate from mainstream junk, set me right off.

Well, onward. It only fuels my fire to move forward with my own aspirations of making video and films filled with conscientious, positive content that lifts women (and men) up, rather than dragging us down to this tickity-tack level of lo-fi kitsch so glaringly deprived of any wit, intelligence, or style — and, ultimately, respect.

The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.

— Marshall McLuhan

Distortions

Photo from Distortion series by Andre Kertesz

In a photo historical context, it is natural to place Kertész’s nudes in line with later experiments by Brassaï, Hans Bellmer and Paul Strand, wherein different forms of manipulation created distortions of forms.[…]

Kertész’s pictures can also be read as a comment on the space women occupy; a space which is completely destabilised due to the use of mirrors. Usually, we have no problem with identifying the physical frame around the body, but here it is not the body that is photographed, but the reflection of it in its physical surroundings. In that sense, one may argue that the pictures are not at all about the body, but about the disintegration of a spatial perception to which one has become accustomed. In that sense the pictures can be argued to have developed from the Cubists’ deconstructed and fragmented spaces. The ruling disorder becomes an attack on the endeavour to instil the human body in a lucid space, which provides it with a defined place. The body is, in Kertész’s photographs, transformed into an object we no longer have a firm grasp of; the body avoids us as a slippery bar of soap. Consequently, it escapes the kingdom of the gaze.

Pg. 9, ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ • DISTORTIONS

What an excellent interpretation of Andre Kertesz‘s innovative, seminal Distortion series. Women – and men, for that matter – certainly live in an inherently destabilized space. Consumerist-driven irrational social and gender constructs create this unhealthy, upside-down environment that has devastating effects on people.

In these works, the image is not about the subject itself – instead the focus is placed on the lens through which the subject is seen. This distorted manifestation becomes how the subject – in this case, ‘woman’ – is perceived, questioning the fragmentation that has occurred between a more authentic ‘reality’ and this final perception (distortion). The series points out how ‘true’ – real – these perceptions seen. Our fragmented, distorted view of women (‘woman’ as subject) seems organic when it is indeed not. Rather it is the result of myriad fragmented pieces haphazardly – yet meticulously and purposely – reconstructed by consumerist social constructs.

I highly recommend reading the write-up in its entirety if you are interested in learning more about Kertesz’s fantastic work in general or his Distortion series specifically.

#1 from Distortion series by Andre Kertesz

Nude is not a colour

We need more body-positive nude photo essays in the media.

Here are two for starts!

 

Century of the Self

My argument with so much psychoanalysis is the pre-conception that suffering is a mistake, or a sign of weakness, or a sign even of illness, when in fact possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people suffering; that the problem is not to undo suffering or to wipe it off the face of the earth but to make it inform our lives instead of trying to cure ourselves of it constantly and avoid it, and avoid anything but that lobotomized sense of what they call happiness. There’s too much of an attempt, it seems to me, to think in terms of controlling man, of defining him rather than letting him go and it’s part of the whole ideology of this age, which is power mad.

– Marilyn Monroe’s ex-husband Aurther Miller on psychotherapy, after her suicide:

The BBC documentary series The Century of the Self talks about the link between consumerism and Freudian psychoanalysis in the US, showing the latter to be a repressive form of societal control. I found the series incredibly informative and learned some new things about two of my favourite topics, societal constructs and consumerism. Filmmaker Adam Curtis has made a ton of other quality docos, too. Next on my list is a series called The Power of Nightmares. Happy watching!

On school

This is almost perfect, I think. (Brainpickings is the best!)

I’m not sure about the living in a commune part. Teens needs some sort of healthy guidance, discipline and boundaries. But I do love idea of letting teens have those years to be free, experience, live, act, explore, have positive sex education, time away from parents, etc.

Even though I’m not sure what the best alternative would look like, I’m confident that highschool is for the birds.

Do you think our current school system should be torn down and re-built into something totally different?