This week Please Like Me and former Neighbours actress Caitlin Stasey launched her feminism website herself.com (warning: NSFW). The site features nude photos of various women, including Stasey, accompanied with interviews about sexuality, gender and body image.
Stasey is a proud feminist. She has previously called out Bindi Irwin for telling women to cover up, is a big supporter of the #freethenipple campaign and frequently tweets about sex and female issues. The 24-year-old wants to use her website to “reclaim the female body”.
But when I asked a female colleague to read an interview with one of the women featured on Stasey’s site, she immediately became distracted by the naked photos accompanying the piece.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just can’t stop staring at her boobs.”
Herein lies my problem with the tack chosen by Stasey to “reclaim” the female body “without the burden of the male gaze”, by publishing numerous nude photo shoots.
Getting naked on the internet only ensures that your body, rather than your brain, continues to be the focus.
And one of feminism’s greatest battlegrounds is trying to divert attention — particularly male attention — away from women’s bodies and onto the things they say and think. A website covered in photos of breasts and vaginas does little to help this cause.
If you put naked shots of yourself on the internet and expect any other reaction apart from people ogling your body, you’re naive.
Stasey’s noble aim — to give women back their bodies — has been lost here. By putting naked photos of yourself on a public platform, you are simply offering your body up to the world for scrutiny and judgment. You are complicitly foregoing total ownership of your figure and inviting others to weigh in.
It’s a sad but inevitable truth that we still find nudity fascinating and distracting. Conversations about a woman’s breasts — of which I have had many today — often overtake those about her work or what a lovely person she is.
How many of the thousands of visitors to herself.com do you think have done anything but scrolled through naked photos of beautiful women and clicked away before actually taking the time to read the interesting words that accompany them? Very few, I imagine.
I agree with Stasey when she says, “Women’s bodies are taken from them, dissected, scrutinised, and then sold back to them — we are expected to foot the bill of societally influenced perfection.”
But she’s wrong in thinking that more naked photos of women — even if they love the pictures — will change the way we view women in the world.
We are taught to be ashamed or embarrassed if our body doesn’t resemble the ideal figure marketed to us by advertisers. Billions of dollars are spent trying to tempt us into buying products to ‘fix’ these so-called problems and achieve a near impossible ideal.
If you want other people to stop talking about, judging and taking ownership of your body, don’t put naked photos of yourself online and invite people to talk about them. Make them talk about something else. You only succeed in fuelling the beast that shames and commodifies female bodies.
What do you think? Comment below.
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