Wet T-Shirts Drench Feminism
It's an endless debate whether pornography is empowering or degrading to women. It is important to look at the source of one's power and evaluate if one is gaining power at the expense of another living being. There has been a craze to go to the Patton Avenue Pub wet t-shirt contest. This is a once a week event where five lucky ladies get paid twenty dollars to dance around in a cut-up, wet, white t-shirt. The audience decides by noise which lady was the best and she wins one hundred dollars. My questions of pornographic empowerment led me to participate and to watch such a contest. I was not thinking beyond the scope of myself and how I was comfortable with my body. It is hard to deny the allure of $20 for the few minutes of discomfort while some man pours cold water on you and you dance around along for the length of a song. In the spirit of a poor college kid, I put my integrity on the line and competed for the much needed one hundred dollars.
I had no idea how such an action would affect my own empowerment or that of womyn. The fact that I felt like my integrity would be lost in such an activity should have been a clue. In an ideal society, each person's body would be valued based only on its function to self rather than the pleasure of others. This is not currently the case and instead are given attention and money based on their appearance. The problem with dancing in a wet t-shirt contest or other live pornographic entertainment is that it empowers the self at the expense of the image of all womyn. If participants could address the audience and tell them that because they are proud of their body does not mean that they are giving it away or opening it for the public's theories of value, then the innocent motives for participating might be better conveyed. However, this is not the case, and we instead need to be looking deeper into why people would feel that womyn are opening themselves for sexual compromise.
Being in a wet t-shirt contest perpetuates bad theories about womyn. When one gets money for showing one's body, essentially it is being said that the person wants or is willing to sell their body. This proabably has to do with why a man would appoach someone with a wet t-shirt contest and offer them one hundred dollars for a sexual favor. Dancing around exposing one's breasts voluntarily can give them the impression that womyn want people to stare and admire their breasts. It is viewed as an open invitiation for people to get their thrills off of womyn's body parts. It perpetuates the idea that womyn's bodies and appearances are what gives them value. Furthermore, allowing one's body to be used for sexual entertainment conveys the sentiment that womny's anatomy is there for people's pleasure and amusement, especially if the price is right. It is this devaluing of womyn that leads to oppression. If we continue to support activities that connote such ideology, then we are endorsing this belief that womyn should be valued for their physical appearance and the amount of sexual pleasure they can offer.
It is important to note that this is not a womyn's issue, but an issue of all people. Who is to say if the lady participating is any better or worse than the person who goes to watch? If the reason for going to such an event is to support the womyn, we need to be evaluating what is being inadvertently supported as well. If this is seen as a profession or a way to put food on the table, then we need to be evaluating why a person can work a full time job and still have to sell their body to make ends meet. Pornography is one of the only professions where womyn make more money than men. On average, for comparable work in most professions, womyn make seventy cents to the dollar made by a man. Perhaps instead of supporting these womyn by going to a contest or bar which endorses one, you should give your time and money to a battered women's shelter since one in three womyn are raped or abused in their life. I mention these statistics not to harp about feminism but because they are what one is buying when they go to a wet t shirt contest and it is what one is selling when participating. For every girl who decides it's empowering to show her body, another lady has a harder time gaining respect for something other than her body.
It is my hope that we will reach the point as a society where all people start on euqal terms. For now, however, womyn are fighting an uphill battle to be valued for reasons other than their physical appearance, and every time we chose to participate in an activity which encourages people to value womyn as sexual entertainers we make the battle for equal footing a little harder. Is the power or fulfillment one gets from the sexual entertainment worth all the sacrifices other womyn have to make as a result? For each t-shirt that is wet for live pornography, another aspect of liberation is being drowned.
Michelle Blau is a name to take note of, because one of these days she'll be ruling the world. She devotes her time to a volunteering for a huge variety of social justice activites (as well as being a bar-fly), and she wishes that more people would call her Ratchet.
This originally appeared in The Conscious Collective , handmade at Warren Wilson College by sarah and ginelle, Issue #5, March 2001. They can also be reached at The Conscious Collective/#7160 P.O. Box 9000/Warren Wilson College/Asheville NC 28815.
It is reprinted here with the permission of the author.
5/29/2002
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