One of my professors earned her PhD for her study of Images of the World and the Inscription of War (which was quite a wonderful coincidence to find out he was coming to our university).
Photography and “image-making” comes into play for a significant portion of the essay, and objectification especially during the part where he deconstructs a photograph of a woman taken during one of the “voluntary” roundups of Jewish people in pre-war atrocities.
After reading the essays on your link I fell into an internet rabbit hole, It turns out the trailer that I saw initially was from Images of the World and the Inscription of War, it was not labled by whoever had put it on Youtube.
From another essay:
“Images of the World and the Inscription of War explores the way that image analysis and image production are themselves part of a global worldview whose impulse is inherently one of control, management, organization along determinist, linear terms. Photography and manufacturing as well as concepts of labor – the reduction of people to pure components for use and replacement or destruction underpin modernity. Images join the other instruments that have framed the rise and fall of cities and civilizations. The digital acceleration of technology the world has seen since the film was made has only intensified the main points the film addresses.”
There is the critiquemydickpic Tumblr (so very very NSFW) that looks at said pics from an art perspective. The person running the site does have some art bona fides and makes some good points in the commentary.
She (pretty sure it’s a she) often calls for less objectification to make the photos more attractive, pointing out very close-up “log” shots can look objectified, even clinical. Conversely, some very good photography of dicks gets submitted on a regular basis.
Penises can be attractive, but yeah, even for someone you don’t know, context is everything.
“If I don’t loudly object to the idea of being sexually attractive to a man, other men might think I’m gay.”
The fear isn’t chiefly about the hypothetical gay viewer, it’s about the heteropatriarchal response to the situation. And, given the historically murderous nature of that response, the fear is not totally irrational.
That’s what I grew up with, in a nutshell. If you don’t think gay stuff is gay then you must be gay. I live literally on the other side of the planet now.
Wait… are you saying the fear is if they don’t loudly decry something as “gay” then they are assumed to be gay and thus risk violence against themselves?
I bet these are the same men who loudly declare #notallmen too…
Its so interesting to me, on the one hand women are lying and sexism isn’t real and just take a compliment jeez, on the other hand if you don’t say #nohomo you’ll get beat up. Thats just mind boggling.
In my school it wasn’t a fear of being perceived as gay, but a fear of physical details passed around the school because it happened a lot. Oddly enough the group consensus on homosexuality was better than mine was in high school.
Some time ago I was complaining to my SO about co-ed sports in schools, and that I felt there were certain groups of boys who pretty much ruined all kinds of sports for people who had never played them outside of school.
I still think it’s true, based on what I saw happening in a youth co-ed community basketball league. My husband then told me about a “game” in which one guy would make a circle with his thumb and finger, and the last person to notice would be beaten…
I experienced this firsthand sometime around 4th or 5th grade, when I was first experiencing spontaneous erections (the horror). I must have been seen at the urinal at some point, because I remember an instance where one of those gangs of kids formed around me to interrogate, because it must have gotten around that my penis was rather large. Kids can be pretty harsh.
So often it feels like shows have sex scenes so that the (hetero male) audience can watch. Even the Bilquis scenes play into this a bit. But h ere I found it very un-objectified in that the audience was watching, but the scene was wholly for the characters.
I’m very much enjoying the series so far. Aside from some occasional clunky dialogue, it’s been really fantastic. And I was blown away by Anansi last week. That kind of monologue is just something you don’t see on television.
There is surprisingly little gay sex in popular culture.
One of the many things that disappointed me when reading Walkaway was that gay sex was conspicuously absent. There was every other kind of sex imaginable, even when it didn’t drive the plot (LOL), but no gay sex. I can’t imagine that there wouldn’t have been any male-male sex among any of the main characters, especially in the world Doctorow created. But I guess gay sex is icky so we can’t write about it or talk about it
I’d imagine most guys would outgrow that at some stage, but I honestly don’t know. I see it less an less as I get older, but maybe that’s because I associate with these people less and less.
[quote=“LearnedCoward, post:367, topic:100802”]
So often it feels like shows have sex scenes so that the (hetero male) audience can watch.
I think that the emergence and acceptance of the “Gay Male Gaze” has been huge for heterosexual females. Even now lesbian sex is still being co-opted for straight men. It’s exciting to be seeing depictions of sex morph into other perspectives.
