Thursday, Sept. 04, 2003 - 12:25 a.m.

Let Loose the Twins!

And free Mumia while you're at it.

As you may recall from my last post, a DJ from a local Eugene radio station goaded women in the audience at the Evanescence concert to, "let loose the twins!" I had never heard that phrase before, so it took me a minute to translate: he was requesting that they bare their breasts, preferably in the direction of the stage. And not as a pragmatic reaction to the oppressive heat inside the theater, but solely as a means of sexual signaling toward the heterosexual men in the bands, perhaps as a token of appreciation for the music played, as a kind of gratuity.

I was horrified and disgusted when he said that. I labeled it, "sexual harassment" and deemed it WRONG. I guess I was needing beauty and harmony. Those needs were not met because I thought the DJ was not showing the kind of respect and fairness I would have liked him to show to the majority of the people in the audience. But perhaps in a different context (like if an equivalent request had been made to males as well by a female DJ) I would have thought it all perfectly peachy.

Or would I? Was I just habitually recoiling, due to my puritanical upbringing, at the notion of eroticizing the sweaty masses? Now that I think back, the situation was more complex: the DJ speaking was saying that the singer Amy Lee got all the adoration, and he was concerned that the lead guitar player get some adoration too. I guess the DJ might have been needing fairness too. And the male DJ standing next to him took off his shirt in the manner of a striptease to set an example. Maybe I was presuming more of a double standard than there really was.

When in the movie, The Fisher King, Robin Williams entreated a woman to, "let loose your golden orbs!" it was somehow more cute, tasteful, and eminently excusable coming out of the mouth of a character who had already been pronounced clinically insane.

Anyway, I didn't see anybody meeting his request. But they could have. With permission from the State no less. Just like in the state of New York where I grew up, it is legal in Eugene for women to go topless everywhere it's legal for men to go topless. And just like in New York, virtually no women take advantage of their government-granted liberty. In the year and a half I've lived in this town, I've only ever seen three women with their golden orbs unveiled. The only significant number of bare breasts I've seen locally have been at the Oregon Country Fair which takes place in a forest outside the nearby town of Veneta. Only there it's not just chill and casual, nor a practical response to the heat. There, women pay money to get birds and flowers painted on their breasts by professional breast painters. So it's a ritualized commodity exchange thing, and the breasts are technically covered by a thin layer of paint. It lacks the purity of true liberation.

A couple of weeks back at Subversive Pillow Theater in the park, they showed a documentary called Mardi Gras: Made In China about the young Chinese women who make plastic Mardi Gras beads, working 11 hour days for 10 cents an hour. I highly recommend this film-it's more than just a downer, and it provides a lot of food for thought about the workings of global capitalism and sexism, and communism as well. For the purposes of this essay, I only want to talk about the flashing of breasts in exchange for necklaces of plastic beads, which is the central ritual of Mardi Gras, other than inebriation.

It struck me that exchange only becomes necessary when there is a scarcity of a good or service (I would argue that relationships of tit-for-tat (pun intended) exchange are not inevitable even then, but that's an essay for another time.) Since the sight of bare breasts in public is rare, then even a momentary glimpse of them must be worth something, say, a string of gaudy beads made cheaply in China. But this is the most ridiculous false scarcity I have ever encountered. Females are a slight majority of the population, and except for those with malignant tumors, their breasts aren't going anywhere. That means a potentially infinite supply! The pornography industry depends on a scarcity of bare flesh in everyday life to stimulate a demand for images of it. Sexual repression inflates the market for pornography as surely as drug prohibition inflates the market for illegal drugs. And Mardi Gras is at best a grassroots, participatory form of pornography.

Several months ago I was in the mall alone, eating a $1 Famous Star burger from Carl's Jr. I overheard a young couple heatedly debating the bare breast issue. The girl was arguing in favor of freedom-to-bare, while the boy was trying to make a case for the necessity of covered breasts. He had a reified teleological reading of human evolution. He was saying that only in humans are breasts permanent, compared to other mammals, which only sport swollen mammary glands when nursing young. So that proves that the evolutionary purpose of breasts is to attract male mates, end of story, so of course one can't go showing them in public. She countered that large male muscles are just as sexy, yet not illegal to show. He retorted that large male muscles have hunting and protection as their primary evolutionary function, so should be allowed to be seen since they are only secondarily sexy, whereas female breasts are primarily sexy and only secondarily used to nurse young, so must remain covered. He never identified what he thought the threat was. Too much distraction? That too much temptation would turn husbands into adulterers, tearing the delicate fabric of our civilization? Maybe it was an unquestioned assumption that he was unaware of. They went on and on like this. I considered interjecting my superior wisdom, but I decided that this couple was too far beneath me in terms of their theoretical development.

I presume bare-torsoed men are every bit as alluring to those inclined to be attracted to such, but our culture constructs the male as center, and thus neutral. As a corollary, the female is the Other, and thus the source of all sexuality, and sexual attraction is caused by her, radiating from her naughty parts, rays that burn innocent bystanders. So it's double-standard city, even in a city such as mine where the cultural double-standard is not mirrored in statutes enforced by State violence.

The significance of the difference between neutral, boring male chests and too-sexy-to-handle female chests is constructed for us, and we continue to reproduce this significance when we obey these norms and laws unquestioningly. Female fingertips tend to be more pointed compared to men's blunter fingertips. Female palms tend to be fan-shaped compared to men's more square palms. These differences are no less objectively measurable than differences in chests, but no one talks about their potential as erotic turn-ons. Women being forced to wear gloves constantly is laughable today, but wasn't that all the rage a century ago?

I wrote an outline for a story a couple of years ago, a sci-fi story in which a future repressive society decides that the female neck is erogenous zone, and so must remain wrapped at all times. Certainly, a woman's neck is so slender and graceful, and so lacking an Adam's apple, that its appeal is utterly irresistible, no? Would not a self-respecting citizen have the common decency to keep it covered? I hoped this satire could reveal the arbitrary nature of such norms.

I bet the burqa must have its origins in a belief that unbounded sexuality is socially corrosive, and every bit of skin on the female body is sexy, hence private, and must remain hemetically sealed lest the very world fall apart. I admire the holism of eschewing a demarcation of "private parts" in favor of a private whole, but what's good for the goose should be good for the gander too. Imagine a society where everyone's in a burqa all the time. Cool.

I'm also reminded of that tropical tribe where the only private part is the top side of the penis, so a loop of string around the waist is considered a full set of clothes, and without it, they feel naked.

Are you opposed to the commodification of sexuality? You can take the profit out of it by flooding the market with free "goods"! The means to smash capitalism were right under your nose all along. Let loose the twins!

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