This was hard to write, and even harder to post. Harder still to post publicly. Still, here it is – after having sat in my drafts folder for about four months, but thrown to the world at last.

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In an effort to help people understand privilege, its forms and complexities, I'm going to use myself as a case study. I'm going to examine a lot of the ways privilege affects my life, positively and negatively. So, while I will be pointing out ways in which I'm disadvantaged, I'm also going to try to own up to a lot of my own privilege, because it's really not a simple thing. You can be privileged in one way and disprivileged in another.

This isn't meant to be comprehensive or exhaustive. It's meant to provide a few glimpses into things people might not otherwise think about, especially with regards to the difference between who and what you are and what privilege you are accorded. It's beginning to unpack the invisible knapsack, but it's not finishing it.

It's a starting point, which will hopefully get people thinking.

So let's start.

Privilege I have

American privilege

What I am: A US citizen by birth, residing in the United States.

For one, as an American citizen I have the option of ignoring the rest of the world.

As Michael Schwalbe notes in the CounterPunch article, "The Costs of American Privilege", "Not having to think about the experiences of people in subordinate groups is another form of privilege." He puts a few points much more saliently than I could, so I'll quote him here:

People in [Third World] countries must, as a matter of survival, pay attention to what the U.S. does. There is no equally compelling need for Americans to study what happens in the provinces. And so again the irony: people in Third World countries often know more about the U.S. than many Americans do.

We can thus put these at the top of the list of American privileges: not having to bother, unless one chooses, to learn about other countries; and not having to bother, unless one chooses, to learn about how U.S. foreign policy affects people in other countries. A corollary privilege is to imagine that if people in other countries study us, it's merely out of admiration for our way of life.

The list of American privileges can be extended. For example, Americans can buy cheap goods made by superexploited workers in Third World countries; Americans can take a glib attitude toward war, since it's likely to be a high-tech affair affecting distant strangers; and Americans can enjoy freedom at home, because U.S. capitalists are able to wring extraordinary profits out of Third World workers and therefore don't need to repress U.S. workers as harshly.

What I am: a native English-Language speaker.

Well, for one, the internet is written for me. A large and growing number of nations have English as an official language, and I can be assured that I can travel a majority of the world and likely find people who will understand me. Speaking Standard American English exempts me from stereotypes which follow people who speak with other English dialects - the stereotyping of Southern American English speakers as backwards rednecks, for example.

There's an immense amount of literature available and being written in my native language. News from many countries is available in my native language - I can read the China Daily or Pravda.ru or Al-Jazeera or the Korea Herald, all in English, at my convenience.


Educational privilege

What I am: college-educated, with a BA degree from a four-year public university.

In job interviews, I will be taken more seriously than an equally competent applicant without a four-year degree. People will assume that because I've completed formal schooling, I am more intelligent than my peers who have not. And for five years, without the pressure of supporting myself 100%, I was in an environment whose purpose was to expose me to new ideas. Yes, people can educate themselves, and gain all the knowledge a university would provide. For me, it was made easy, and I was placed in an environment which made it more likely I would succeed. That's an advantage - a privilege.


Economic privilege

What I am: Comfortably employed in a salaried job, having lived in a middle-class American family all my life.

I have always had a roof over my head, a refuge from the weather, a warm place to be in the winter. Even when times were tight, I have never been in serious danger of starving. I can pay for medical care, should I need it. I can save money for my future and as a hedge against bad times.

And those things aren't even touching on the benefits I reap like being able to afford fresh, healthy food; being able to afford new clothing and high-quality clothing; being able to afford computers and internet access, which have prepared me for a more technologically-fluent workforce; being able to afford vacations and extracurriculars; being able to afford education (even if I am in debt via student loans, I am not in debt in a way which cripples me); being able to afford a car...

There are a lot of manifestations.


Thin privilege

What I am: 5'8" and usually in the vicinity of 120 pounds. (Or, for the metric-minded among you, about 1.52m and 55kg, if my converter isn't lying.)

People treat thin people differently than they treat heavier people. Having never experienced fatphobia myself, I can't set myself up as an expert (one of the things privilege does is to camouflage the ways in which it benefits you), but I do know that people tend to be less hostile to thin people. They tend to think more favorably on us, hold better opinions of our habits and even totally unrelated things like our morality and intelligence. There's a social meme that says that fat people are disgusting, which is not something I'm burdened by. This may all seem like little stuff, but having an entire society judge you on something you often don't have a great deal of control over does affect you. (For a discussion of the phenomena as it applies to racism - and please do point me toward any studies on this done regarding fatphobia, if they exist - see "Racism's Hidden Toll".)

If that doesn't convince you, here's one more, very important manifestation of thin privilege: I am more likely to be taken seriously by medical personnel. And, yeah, having the establishment responsible for keeping you alive if things go wrong take you seriously? That's something earnestly to be desired.

Privilege I sometimes have

Neurotypical privilege

What I am: ...I'm not diagnosed with anything, and I'm going to try to avoid a few cans of worms by not addressing this in terms of recognized disorders, which is what people often think of. See the following text.

This is a privilege that, when I've lost it, has made my life a living hell. When I've had it, it's smoothed the way for me more than almost any other kind of privilege in my life.

When I've lost it, it tends to be in the realm of emotions, because from everything I've observed, I do not process emotions normally. For my value of "normal" I'm using "what's expected in the American culture in which I grew up"; what is and isn't an appropriate way to experience/express these things has a lot more to do with culture than you'd think.

Dealing with my father's death is the most severe and hurtful example. During my father's sickness and after his death, the way in which I reacted to and displayed emotion (very low on the "expression" end, for one, as well as trying to avoid conflicts) was regarded as inappropriate; assumptions were made about what I was feeling and to what extent, and decisions were made based on those assumptions which, among other things, resulted in my not being informed of my father's funeral, and not being informed of his death until two days after the fact. Years later and I'm still hurting from that, though - again - you'd probably not know it to look at me.

And then there's the flip side, where I've reaped definite benefits. I was, though not exactly, very close to the neurotypical sort of person our public school systems seem to be designed for; I functioned well in a classroom setting, was able to adapt, adapt to, or employ the strategies which were mandated by the schools, and scored well above my peers on my SAT. Having a much more analytical than emotional brain served me incredibly well here, whereas school simply didn't work for a lot of the people I knew. Because I was able to perform well in school I got into a good university, I completed a four-year degree, and that's put me in a position of significant advantage both socially and economically. (See the educational privilege section above.)


Heterosexual privilege

What I am: asexual.

Asexuality tends to be a very quiet thing, unless you make a big deal of it. And because asexuality is not overtly marked, people tend to assume the default: that I'm heterosexual. I'm not subject to gay jokes, harassment, etc.

At the same time, as any decisions regarding something like marriage would take place on the basis of associational/affectional orientation rather than something sex- or gender-based, there is a chance that if I ever chose to marry, I would not be allowed to in certain parts of the country, my marriage would not be recognized in certain parts of the country, and I would be assumed to be homosexual despite the fact that I am not.

Male privilege

What I am: biofemale, identifying as agendered.

I'm relatively tall for a biofemale, on the thin and flat-chested side of things, and have fairly androgynous features. This means that, depending on length and type of interaction and what I happen to be wearing at the time, I can sometimes pass for male. Usually it's a young male - I get questions asking if I'm 18, or whatever - but it's still male. And let me tell you, as someone who was raised female? This privilege is palpable if you manage to invoke it.

And there are times when I will specifically invoke it. Walking home alone, for example, I have a much lower chance of being harassed or assaulted if I pass for male, in a town where sexually harassing female pedestrians seemed to be a fad for a couple of years. If I'm on the phone with places like tech support, they tend to take me more seriously if I can pass for male-voiced.


Cisgender privilege

What I am: Transgendered, agendered, gender-spectrumed, genderqueer.

Cisgender privilege is easier, I think, for female-bodied people to get than male-bodied people, though "easier" is still a relative term. Not only are the permanent effects of testosterone hard to cover up for a male-bodied person passing as female, but female-bodied people can wear a much wider range of clothing without setting off alarm bells. The term "tomboy" may not always be positive, but it doesn't carry half the negative implications a slur like "tranny" might.

So if I pass for male, I'm read as male and this is socially acceptable. If I don't pass for male, I'm read as a tomboyish female and this is socially acceptable. People do not tend to look at me and see obvious markers that I am a transgendered person, and being a transgendered person is not socially acceptable. A big part of privilege comes from what status people accord you when they have to deal with you.

Another part of privilege comes from how you feel and are able to cope with the world around you, though, and I don't carry as much privilege in these areas. I still don't feel comfortable using public bathrooms, because my gender presentation is neutral/male but my coworkers, friends, casual acquaintances, etc. know that I'm biofemale. Sometimes, when I'm dressing comfortably, I walk a line where I seem to pass or not pass according to what five-minute stretch you catch me in, and that makes choosing what door to walk into difficult. I often find myself in situations where, if I'm using a women's restroom, I perform a slightly exaggerated form of femininity (which I do not enjoy) in order to head off any suspicious looks when I walk in.

Privilege I don't have

What I am: biracial, with my maternal family being of German descent and my paternal family being of Nigerian.

But that doesn't really matter in most of America, which is still operating under the one-drop rule. My heritage is exactly as white as it is black, but I have never worried about being accused of lying about my race if I select "black" on a form. If I select "white", I imagine there would be social and bureaucratic hell to pay.

Police officers have asked my friends if I can speak English when I'm in a car they've pulled over. This assumption about my linguistic abilities reflects assumptions about nationality which could cast suspicion on my in areas such as crossing borders. (Or Arizona. Saddest "Zing!" ever; though I'm unlikely to be taken for an illegal immigrant from Mexico, American-born Hispanics are probably facing much the same prejudice in Arizona now, and the palpable effects on their lives would be much more severe. But that's not about me specifically, and this post is.)

I am and have been uneasy about visiting other countries. Russia especially, for all that I deeply want to go back to school and finish my Russian major - Routine attacks by skinheads and gangs of youths on foreigners and people with non-Slavic features are a regular occurrence in Moscow and St. Petersburg, increasing sixfold in 2008. It gives me a lot of second thoughts about trying to study abroad.


Monoracial privilege

What I am: biracial, with my maternal family being of German descent and my paternal family being of Nigerian.

When I went to get my driving learner's permit in Nebraska, circa 2001, one of the sections on the form I had to fill out was "race". At that time, there was no "multiracial/other" category, so I did what seemed sensible: I marked down both "white" and "black."

I was called back up to the desk with an explanation that I could only select one. I explained that I wasn't just one, and to her credit, the woman staffing the desk seemed to recognize that this was unfair, but few things in life are as rigid and inflexible as government bureaucracy. My learner's permit identified me as "black".

Even in places where a "multiracial/other" category exists, the message I can't ever help reading is that this is other, this is abnormal. No distinction exists between myself, as an African/European multiracial person, and people whose racial backgrounds might be Asian/Latino, Native American/Eastern European, Filipino/Inuit/Australian Aboriginal, Indian/European/Hispanic/Chinese/African, or any other possible permutation. The important thing to recognize, it seems, is that there are categories of races, and then there are those who have crossed them. There are the purebreds, and there are mutts. About the mutts, nothing need be said except that they are mutts.

Special notes

One of the things that seems to tag along with male privilege is the privilege to be intimidating. While this is useful in warding off some types of harassment, it can be very unsettling when invoked accidentally. When I used to walk home alone while my city was having its big, well-reported problem with people being sexually assaulted walking around after dark, I'd occasionally find myself walking down the same stretch of road, presenting as male, to all appearances following a solitary female pedestrian. As someone who doesn't want to come across as threatening to innocents, this was not a comfortable space to be in.

Privilege is not universally bad. In a lot of cases, the effects of privilege aren't things people should feel guilty for experiencing. The problem arises when they're privileges and not rights - the privilege to escape harassment, for example, is a privilege because it's a right which is denied to people like women, transgendered persons, poor persons. etc. The privilege to be taken seriously by doctors is a right which is often denied to fat people and people of color.

Passing is a way of accessing privilege.

If I pass for male, I access aspects of male privilege. If someone passes for white, they access aspects of white privilege. This can happen involuntarily as well as voluntarily, and someone can be passed as well as passing. One example of this is a person of color who's granted "honorary whiteness" by their friends - their friends will stop noticing that they're a person of color, even to the point where they'll have a moment of "Huh, they are" when it's brought up. Another example is a person with a mixed ethnic background who appears white enough that people assume they are white.

Privilege is multifaceted.

Even at its most simplistic, we can split it into two parts which have to be evaluated separately: the personal, what one experiences, and the social, what one is accorded. This is how someone with severe gender dysphoria who nonetheless passes for their assigned gender can both experience and lose cisgender privilege; feeling comfortable with one's own body and expected social roles is a cisgender privilege which they have lost, while the ability to exist and function in society without being harassed on the basis of their gender is one they maintain.

As many of you will be aware by now, I identify myself as "bisexual".

Whilst it does sometimes feel comforting to have a label to apply to my sexual identity, I often feel that it's just another attempt to box me in. People, within the straight community and the gay community, have problems with people who identify as "bisexual" - it's difficult to assign a bisexual person a position in the world. If I'm with a woman, I can be accepted within the gay community but shunned from the straight community - if I'm with a man, I can be accepted in the straight community but shunned by the gay community. It's a difficult tightrope to walk. Perhaps it would be more fitting to denote myself as "pansexual", meaning that I am ultimately attracted to personalities rather than sex; however, this would be just me postulating or trying to appear less shallow than I am, because, however big a part personality plays, the sex of the person is also something that I am attracted to.

So, if we want to use terms, "bisexual" is the best term to be using for now. 

When I was growing up, I knew nothing of the fact that there could be anything other than a man and woman together. I was not shielded from the world, not did I have strict parents, but it was just never something that factored its way into my life. I knew that "gay" was something that the children at school used as a derogatory term, but that was the extent of my knowledge. As for bisexuality - this was even further beyond the realms of my comprehension. If I didn't realise that there was such a thing as sexual identity, how could I possibly understand the fact that there were people who weren't fazed by the gender and sexual boundaries placed on them? 

As I got older, of course, I started to notice boys. What girl doesn't? I started noticing what I liked, what I found attractive about them, who was handsome and who was not etc. etc. A normal part of growing up. But there was always something there, niggling away; something that was, for quite some time, easy to ignore. If I opened the wrong newspaper on the wrong page and found myself staring at a topless woman, I would of course turn away as quickly as possible - but there was that part of me that couldn't help but look, couldn't help but retain that image and feel something that I wasn't quite expecting to feel. I had crushes on girls as I grew even older, but dismissed this as just "hormones". But it never went away, although for a very long time I could hide it successfully, because I only let the crushes on guys slip through to the top.

Of course, when I was going through my mid-teens, there was a large part of me that wasn't happy. Having gone through emotional bullying at primary school ,I had very low self-esteem and I had reached a point where I didn't really know who or what I was supposed to be. I don't know whether my unwillingness to identify as anything other than straight had anything to do with it, because of how successfully I managed to suppress the other attractions that were lying just beneath the surface. Even so, I feel now that that was one of the problems - that I was, subconsciously, refusing to acknowledge a part of who I truly was. The older I got, the more interested in gay rights I became, although at the time I felt this was just a natural affinity I had with a group who was being constantly bullied and belittled, rather than anything that could possibly be deeper than that.

There was just something not quite right. It was a mixture of things, but I did not truly know who I was. I was a little lost, I was confused and I couldn't put my finger on just what was stopping me from being happy.

And then came Ianto Jones.

It sounds incredibly stupid, or trivial, but this is the honest truth. I have recently become part of the LGBT+ Commitee at my new university (Cardiff), and the one thing we talked about was the lack of role models for bisexual students. And, suddenly, in this fictional character from a silly, campy little sci-fi show in Wales, I had myself a ready made role model. Sure, he wasn't perfect - on the contrary, he is perhaps the most screwed up character that I have had the good fortune to see on the television - but there was so much with which I identified, with which I felt a sudden affinity. I watched him go from absolute loyalty to the girlfriend whom he loved and lost, the flirtation, atttraction and beginning of a sexual relationship with a man, and then the absolute conviction and devotion with which he treated his same-sex relationship. Here, suddenly, was a young man with issues (like me) who had had relationships with/was attracted to both sexes (like me, although I had never realised) and who seemingly had no problems with the fact that, yes, he did in fact like men and women. A whole new concept had opened up for me, and it was through him that this new term - "bisexuality" - was suddenly plucked from obscurity and flung into my lap.

   Ianto Jones loved both, equally  

And so I began to come out of my shell. I began to realise that what I had been suppressing all these years was indeed an attraction to women, alongside my attraction to men. I just had never acknowledged it before. And, with that slow realisation, I began to gather a greater sense of who I really was. As I began to acknowledge it, I began to change my physical appearance to match how I felt inside - whereas before I'd been the stereotypical quiet girl, with long hair and glasses to hide behind, now I determined to cut my hair short and ditch the glasses in favour of contact lenses. The final result you can see quite clearly in my current icon.

I’m going to put most of this behind a cut tag. Not because I’m ashamed or anything but because I do sometimes remember about keeping things safe for work and even when it’s just text, talking frankly about sex tends to stand out. *laugh*

So, I was on the phone last night with (I don’t know if she wants her name public so I’m leaving it out in the meantime!) about the hack gender project – which is totally awesome, y’all, you should check it out – and we were talking about strap ons.

Not, like, exclusively about strap ons but that was the primary lead in to talking about sex as a fat person in general and about some of the challenges and some of the fat-specific circumstances and about shame.

I’m so over being ashamed of sex. I STILL feel this little frisson of nerves that, if I talk about sex or being sexually desired, people aren’t going to believe me. But I try to push past that and talk about it anyway because I think being vocal about this stuff is one of the very best ways we can normalize it.

That’s really the point of this entry. I have a pretty varied sexual past (the hardest part of talking about this is actually the idea that family might in some way, shape, or form read about it *laugh*) and I’ve tried a fair number of things. I’ve done it all while fat.

I tend to think of sex as a sort of creative process. It’s fun and it’s messy and sometimes things don’t go well (in the sense that you can be unskilled or the bed breaks or the mood is just totally broken by something someone says – and, yes, I’m looking at my husband on that one and I love him for it because it is FUNNY – or you try something and it just doesn’t do anything for you) and sometimes we get nervous about it but at the end of the day, it’s meant to be pleasurable.

I had what I tend to think of, after taking an informal survey, a pretty unusually liberal sex education. I started sex ed in 4th grade in Cherokee County, GA. It was the 80s, right at the height of the AIDS panic. I remember, clear as anything, taking the permission slip to my mother and having her sign it – as she did so, she said, “Now, remember, if you have any questions, be sure and ask the teacher!”

So it isn’t like I come from a family where frank talk about sex is the norm. *laugh* That story cracks me up but it also really highlights why I think a solid sex ed program is schools is so important. By the end of my Georgia public school education (which was 7th grade because we moved to Thailand after that), I’d handled anatomical models of both reproductive systems, learned about different sexualities, gotten some pretty decent biological foundation knowledge, and watched a bunch of animated cartoons about masturbation and wet dreams.

I really wish I could find those cartoons, y’all.

I came from a religious tradition so I actually actively chose not to have sex for quite a while after I graduated high school. My inherent self-loathing was a factor, sure, but I have to be honest in retrospect – I had plenty of opportunity for bad relationships. *laugh*

Even that didn’t do much to actually protect me though – like so many other women I was raped by the person with whom I was in a relationship. It wasn’t a particularly violent encounter but it was in clear and direct opposition to my repeated “No.” I felt guilty for a while (the religious background helped with that, frankly), but at the end of the day, that was his choice. It took a lot of work but I stopped feeling guilty.

I’m not particularly good at initiating discussions like this. But I think it’s worth the effort. Worth it enough that I’m fumbling along, trying to figure out how to bring it up so we can talk about it, pull back the curtain a little bit, and shine some sunlight in on all those vampire coffins of hidden shame.

To quote Salt-n-Pepa (and, really, you know it’s a good day when you get to quote Salt-n-Pepa), let’s talk about sex. What do you want to know? What do we need to find out?

Hello, I'm Shannon (as I assume you know already) and I identify as asexual.

The brief explanation is that asexuality is an orientation (or perhaps lack thereof) that involves not experiencing sexual attraction.

However, the brief explanation is boring and quite possibly not so helpful, as asexuality is something of an invisible orientation, and it's quite probable you've never heard of it before and don't really get what it entails.

Also, the brief explanation doesn't let me ramble. And well. That's just terrible.

So let's start again.

There's this thing called sexual attraction. Some people experience it towards guys, others towards gals, or both, or whatever. But there are also people that just don't experience it in general, towards anyone. No, I'm being serious. Don't worry if you don't get it--I admittedly struggle with the idea of sexual attraction on a regular basis, and I honestly don't really get it still. But you don't have to "get" things like how airplane wings work to admit that they can get a giant airplane off the ground, and all I'm hoping for is that by the end of this you can admit that asexuality is a perfectly viable orientation (and that it's the one I believe fits me).

I've heard a bit about asexuality around the Internet for a while now (two years maybe...?) but I figured for a long time that I was "normal" and that most of the sexual...things in society were simply exaggerated. Imagine my surprise when I mentioned my lack of interest in kissing (it's...kind of unappealing to me. a lot.) and was informed that this is apparently not normal for most eighteen-year-old girls. Huh. Who knew? I didn't.

So that was the first time I really considered asexuality as an orientation to apply to myself. I guess it wasn't such a huge step. I was already playfully known as asexual among a couple of my friends (I split in half each year but my clone ends up dying from lack of sufficient cereal in our household). I spent a few weeks lurking around an asexual forum and reading up on FAQs and information, and about six months ago I tentatively stuck an "asexual heteromantic" sticker to my mental checklist of Things I Am.

Hold up, what's this heteromantic thing? Basically, in the same way that there is sexual orientation, there's a romantic orientation that can be used to describe which gender(s) you're romantically attracted to. Because yes, some asexuals do want to have relationships with people--we just aren't interested in the sexual part. Being asexual heteromantic means that I can indeed get the occasional crush on a guy (occasional in this context meaning about once a year) but I don't get these feelings in a sexual context and am not sexually attracted to anyone.

I suppose that is a factor in my general disinterest in the idea of having a relationship. Sex and sexual attraction is just such a huge part of 99.9% of relationships, and it's a part that quite frankly doesn't appeal to me (and actually repels me a little). Even if it's agreed to wait until marriage to have sex, it's expected at some point. And while there are asexuals that don't mind sex or can even enjoy it (remember, the important bit is they don't experience sexual attraction) I am not convinced that I am one of them, and even then a relationship with a sexual can be problematic, with the sexual feeling hurt that the asexual isn't attracted to them or willing to initiate sexual encounters. Finding an asexual boy that I'm romantically attracted to would be nice, but asexuals are such a small portion of the population (something like 1%) it's fairly unlikely, and I'm currently not interested in putting forth the time or effort to seek out a relationship.

I suppose there will always be some people that think that asexuality is just a result of a late bloomer, never having tried sex, or just not finding The One, and so is simply a phase that I will grow out of. To these I just want to say:
+I'm nearly nineteen years old (well past the age people start to experience sexual attraction). There are also many asexuals that are in their thirties (at least) and to peg them as people who still haven't "bloomed" is...a little silly.
+Virtually everyone experiences sexual attraction before their first sexual encounter.
+If sex was a prerequisite to deciding orientation, nobody could claim they were heterosexual until they also had sex with someone of the same gender (because how else would you know you wouldn't like it if you haven't tried it...?).

So...yes. TL:DR no sextiems for me please.

Move over Elle McPherson, there is a new ‘The Body’ in town, and it has got abs to die for.

I was never a massive Ronaldo aficianado. I knew he had a great physique, but there was something about his slightly puggish, prissy face and lack of anything particularly unique about his countenance that meant he never really turned me on. Until now. This new ad for Armani Jeans shows the footballer as the adonis he truly is. And he knows it.

The advert is interesting on a number of levels. As Mark Metrosexual Simpson has pointed out, not only does it play on the narcissism of the modern, gym-toned, fragrant, man, and our growing acceptance of the objectified male body in contemporary representations, but it also features, on screen in the form of the watchful chambermaid, the ‘female gaze’ . I think if Laura Mulvey saw this ad she might have a heart attack.

If the woman was not on-screen, the promo would be a noteworthy and sexy as hell example of the metrosexual revolution in action in contemporary capitalism: Men’s bodies being used to woo customers, male and female and everything else, and ultimately sell product. Top-ranking buffed footballers are products, just as much if not more so than the classic supermodels of the 1980s and 1990s.

But here in the form of this svelte and foxy maid comes a more subversive addition to the melting-pot of our visual pleasure. At points in the film (can you tell I have watched it a few times? ahem!) she is viewed by us, the audience, mainly in the background, so as not to distract us from The Body. But then the point of view shifts and we see Ronaldo wandering round the hotel room, as if through her eyes. It is easy to remember countles ads featuring women stopping traffic, and men on building sites whistling at sexy chicks, but it is only recently that women have been shown on-screen to objectify and look at men with desire. The ones that spring to mind for me are the ones set in offices where women workers enjoy the arrival of a hunky delivery boy. But I can’t think of another advert off-hand where it is a single woman who owns and occupies the ‘gaze’, especially not so surreptitiously.

The maid doesn’t hold the gaze for long though. She is also seen, sometimes via the camera’s gaze, and briefly through Ronaldo’s, as an object herself. The archetypal sexy but disposable maid figure, seen from behind, stretching to reach with a duster, or bending down, searching for that elusive t-shirt the footballer has lost. (Doesn’t he have anything else he can throw over his offending torso??). It is a competition between the two for the role of the object of desire. A dance, a fight. Ronaldo’s tactic is sheer, physical force. Don’t you dare take your eyes off me, cries his perfect form. The woman is a little more subtle (as women, sometimes can be). She hides his t-shirt when she finds it, prolonging our torment by The Body. But this also gives her more time to become the object of his, of our desire. The fact that Ronaldo acts as if he has not even seen her, and at one point looks right through her, adds a kinky dimension to this scenario. The hardcore perverts amongst us can be forgiven for letting our imaginations wander to the point where he is actually deliberately treating her like an object, like the invisible, low-down, chambermaid that she is. And for finding that very hot.

The advert ends with Ronaldo still t-shirtless, but a blurred figure in the background, with the woman’s face framed in the foreground, as she leans, prone, over the sofa, waiting, looking like the cat that is about to get creamed.

I know I have interpreted this short jeans advert in my own, twisted vision, and have projected my own desires onto it. But in doing so I think I can make a valid point about ‘metrosexuality’ and objectification in our culture. No matter how much men become narcissistic, marketable objects of desire, women will never become ‘un-objectified’. So when an attractive woman and man appear on screen, there will be some kind of tussle for our attention. And in this tussle, something interesting happens, as we all grapple with our own position in relation to them. I was surprised here, to find myself drawn to the woman, even in the face of such a towering inferno as Ronaldo. Does this point to my latent ‘bisexuality’? Or does it relate to my ‘kinky’ side, seeing through her the potential for a ‘scene’?

I have been discussing this advert as if it were a piece of pornography, which, of course it is. This I find funny from a purely personal perspective, because when it comes to moving images, I really generally dislike pornos. The sight of people fucking, over and over and over again, and working out all the different combinations of where to put a dick in a hole, bores the tits off me. But the suggestion, the promise, the hope of a desire being fulfilled, shot in black and white to high production standards with beautiful models…now that turns me on. Feminists lament this ‘pornification’ of our culture, where sex sells everything, and everything sells sex. But I find it interesting and even exciting to see the tropes and styles of pornography disseminating so successfully into our mainstream culture. Maybe it is linked to the blurring of identities that the metrosexual inadvertently achieves, a breaking down of that false boundary between ‘porn’ and ‘art’, ‘good sex’ and ‘bad sex’. ‘moral’ and ‘immoral’ sexualities. I know there lies at the heart of all this fluidity, a bottom line, capitalist intent. But the side-effects are what interests me. The margins have always been the centre of my world.

Apart from the obvious, commercialised, commidified narcissism being sold to us on a daily basis, there is another downside to this hyper-objectification of advertising and visual culture. Once again it is visible via the wonderfully obvious objections by feminists to our brave new world. Organisations such as OBJECT (Get it??) are ignoring the blatant flaunting of male sexuality by The Body (as stubbornly as Ronaldo refuses to acknowledge the maid) and insist that it is women who remain objectified by male-dominated commercial society.

Feminists talk of a ‘backlash’ against feminism, shown in part via the continued sexualised imagery we see of women in the media. It is possible to look at this situation the complete opposite way, and see contemporary puritanical feminism, as a backlash against the metrosexualising, and ‘democratising’ of sexualities in our fields of vision. The feminists want to keep women as objects, because that is what justifies their project and their cries of male oppression of women. Lobbying for restrictions on lap-dancing clubs, campaigning against the opening of ‘Hooters’ restaurants, attempting to ‘End Demand’ for prostitution, are all campaigns by feminists in the UK, which can be seen in the light of this ‘backlash redux’. I wouldn’t be surprised if feminists claimed the Armani advert was misogynist, and made it into some kind of rape fantasy of the maid by Ronaldo (oh, no, that is just me. Sorry!)

But it is in America that I think neo-conservative ideals and feminists join hands so scarily. Melissa McEwan , an influential US based feminist activist with tendrils that scale the Atlantic, has written:

‘Rape culture is the objectification of women, which is part of a dehumanizing process that renders consent irrelevant’ .

This suggests that objectification of women’s bodies is a societal accomplishment that makes any negotiations between individual women and men over sex ‘irrelevant’. Women are already raped by the ‘male gaze’ so they can’t consent to sex. It is a 21st century version of the ‘heterosexual sex is rape’ argument of 1970s radical feminism. Laura Mulvey probably would have a heart attack if she heard that, too.

In America, and increasingly in the UK, there are growing numbers of campaigns against Street Harassment and sexual violence against women. The focus of these campaigns is to admonish men for catcalling women, for touching them in any social situation, and to prioritise and exaggerate the threat of rape by men of women. A friend of mine has linked these campaigns to the ‘social control’ of public space, via things like smoking bans in pubs, restaurants, and some streets in America. It brings to mind a very dystopian picture, whereby, if these anti-objectification feminists get their way, it could become illegal for men to even look at women in public. A policing of our desires taken to Orwellian, or probably Foucauldian extremes.

The irony, already noted a long time ago by Patrick Califia is that this kind of anti-objectification feminism just objectifies women to the point of idiocy. One anti sexual-violence campaign states that in a rape case, ‘the woman’s body is the crime scene’. Possibly one of the most de-humanising phrases I have come across in relation to women. We are presented as perpetual victims, caught in the omnipresent, violating male gaze, with no agency to either resist or enjoy that gaze, let alone to have one of our own.

The problem Miss Marple is attempting to solve, is just what is the relationship between our opportunity to ogle Ronaldo’s gorgeous body in Armani ads, and this Nazification of attitudes towards the objectifying of women- from feminists, conservatives and the tabloid-driven media. The competition for status as object between Ronaldo and maidie in this piece of representation is erotic, subtle. But it hints, as advertising tends to do, at a more sinister struggle, over how our desires and our ‘gaze’ can either be liberated or controlled in capitalist post-modernity.