You know when you’re reading a news story and you feel like there’s no hope for the world and everything is awful and fuck it I’m just going to sit on my couch and watch a video of cats playing with a treadmill on a loop for an hour? This seems to happen fairly often for me, including this week.
Recently in Seattle, a pornographer thought it’d be a supersexihot idea to go to a veterans cemetery and hang (yes, hang) women on ropes from cannons and memorial statues. The bondage porn photoshoot has led police to investigate possible trespassing violations [note: link contains blurred versions of some of the photos.]
The outrage this has provoked very clearly is at the “disrespect” of the act. That is, the specific location where the porn was made makes it disrespectful. What – you thought people give a damn about the production of images featuring women bound and hung by rope? C’mon, this isn’t the year 2390, y’all! (2390 is when the radfem revolution will be complete; mark your calendars!) Even so, there is something to that. Not so much the whole “desecrating Our War Heros™” thing as the “female humiliation is everywhere” thing. It’s not awful enough to produce this in private; nope, you’ve gotta go where people’s dead relatives are and do it there.
But wait! He has an explanation for why he had to do it there and it’s totally nuanced and artistic and stuff:
The photographer, in a statement, said his intent was for the photos to make people think.
“The title of this series is Spoils of War,” wrote Patrick Andraste in a statement emailed to KOMO 4 News. “The model is Japanese American, and some of her family was interned in the relocation camps during WWII. Her grandfather was a combat vet during WWII and a long time peace activist. (She) wanted to show that the truth of our country’s history is disturbing.”
I’d say our present day is pretty disturbing too, bro. Like, did you hear about this guy who strung up a woman in cemetery and took phot– oh, right. Also, one can do a lot to simply “make people think”… dude could throw his literal shit on the ground, photograph it, and say that he wanted to perform a visual critique of Bergsonian intuitionism. By all means, do that (and I’m sure you could even get an MFA out of it too). But of course women’s bodies have to be used as tools to communicate his ‘message’. But I’m sure I’m just missing his self-aware irony that replicating forces of oppression represents. It’s meta! Or something! It’s just definitely not problematic or rapey. Nope.
On the photographer’s website, there’s another photo set from last month depicting a woman in latex garb out on the sidewalks of downtown Seattle. The caption mentions that they were playing “terrorize the tourists”. In this particular set, passersby are not cropped out of the photos. Rather, they are fully visible, reacting to what this man has thrown into their lives. Oh, you just needed to go to the bank? FETISH IN UR FACE. For all the talk of consent and boundaries within the ‘community’, part of the thrill in this is that there are non-consenting people involved in what he’s doing. It is the erasing of boundaries that makes it appealing in the first place, knowing that you are violating someone.
And now, cats and treadmills. Because the world is hateful and you deserve better.
Against All Evidence 
2390? There are not enough cat videos between now and then. But I am damn mean enough to live to see the day…
So glad you’re back – thanks for this.
Incredible that the journalists didn’t even seem to notice the bound women.
Right?!
Great post, Lish. This is so disturbing. Thanks for your analysis.
This ties into something I’ve been thinking about. If we believe this guy’s testimony (and I’m not necessarily saying we should) then the young woman who participated believed she was making a meaningful political statement by allowing herself to be sexually objectified, exploited and humiliated. There are numerous and ever expanding examples of women who believe that they can *only* make a political statement by being sexually objectified – the most obvious example being slutwalk – but there are certainly other examples I can think of, like the young woman who posed in a window in London BDSM-style in order to make a statement against animal testing. (See: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2134555/Lush-animal-testing-protest-Woman-subjected-experiments-horrified-shoppers.html. Trigger warning for photos). And also the recent Pussy Riot controversy that Radfem Hub reported on.
Having this sex-obsessed approach completely overlooks other and generally much more effective forms of protest that women engage in – protests which actually challenge the dominant conceptions of women as sub-human rather than buying into them. The general idea seems to be to convince young women to exploit themselves in a misguided attempt at political radicalism, whilst simultaneously denying women access to knowledge about the wealth of contributions women scientists, intellectuals, academics, novelists, poets, activists etc. have made to the world, and to the cause of women, in part through (and because of) a self-conscious rejection of those very damaging stereotypes that the malestream is encouraging young female activists to reproduce.
Welcome back! This was sharply written and totally on point. Fuck yes Lishra.
And the SPOILS, I imagine, are the women? Because we’re OBJECTS. Yeah, wow. Really made me think. Think that this d00d is just another fucking TURD, that is. Won’t someone think of the long-dead dudes? FORGET the LIVING women being HUNG UP like sides of beef; DEAD MEN ARE MORE IMPORTANT!
I wish women would refuse to participate in shit like this, no matter what. I am inundated with this supposedly “geeky” burlesque shit locally, and I HATE IT. What the fuck does being geeky have to do with objectifying women? Oh, cuz it’s “retro” or some shit? Let’s bend over backwards to connect EVERYTHING with the sexualization of women.
GRRRR!!! MUST PET MY CAT NOW!! FUFFY FUFFY KITTEH! /rant
…sigh. Thanks for this post.
Echoing all the comments saying, “I’m glad you’re writing stuff for public consumption again!” Missed your blog a lot; you were one of the bloggers that inspired me to start doing the same.
I wonder: in the year 2390, will men humiliate themselves, let women string them up from trees, be socialized to sexualize themselves to death, pose naked to protest animal cruelty, and all that other bullshit?
(Haha, of course not. Feminist revolution will fix all that shit, and more, in a non-exploitative and biophilic way. Thank god the imaginations of feminists are not anywhere near as evil as those of patriarchs.)
You are so right that they are thrusting this into public, Lishra. They have been steadily working to bring their misogony instruction manual into the public sphere, — from now well-established porn-viewing in public libraries to the recent air traveler damn sure he can watch two women whipping each other in the contained public space of an airplane, while the airline (helplessly? wtf?) shrugs off complaints. They are working on the Big Transgression: bringing the private sphere into the public sphere, their Background into the Foreground. — Of course it’s because the Foreground is getting better for women that the Background is going psycho-lethal… “Depictions of female soul-extermination goes public” — NOT the headline, was it?
Thank you Lishra, for the post and cat therapy.
I am in awe and absolutely disgusted that ANY ONE would photograph women hanging…. Why do men feel they should have “Every right” to access women’s bodies for their own agendas? Also, it’s nonsense that this dood was trying to “make people think” — I am sickened by this. Thank you for sharing though, more people need to know WTF is going on with this misogynistic “subculture”