Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

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‘great’ art in order to capitalise on ‘aesthetic emotion’. The
industries responsible for sexualised imagery benefit from the
association with art, and therefore form the most obvious site for the
‘production’ or re-production of qualities that are perceived to be
‘artistic’. The symbiotic co-existence of ‘obscenity’ and ‘acceptability’
within gentlemen’s pornography is possibly its strategic
incentive, since it is this paradox that differentiates it from
conventional pornography. Towards this end, namely creating a brand
that encapsulates ‘class’ and sexualised display, gentlemen’s
pornography commodifies female sexuality in order to re-present it as
available only to a select few. GQ, for instance, fluently juxtaposes
sexualised display with up-market advertisements (Mercedes, Tag
Heur, Armani), and in so doing, sexualises materialism. Subtle
references to the genteel customs of old (hunting and hand-tailored
suits) are employed to remind the reader that ‘gentlemen’ are their
demographic, thus encouraging aspirational branding and shrouding
sexualised objectification in the exalted aestheticism associated with
elitist class and artistic ideals. Within the confines of the ‘artistic’,
the so-called ‘obscene’ and ‘acceptable’ thus become likely
bedfellows.
With the development of photography, pornography came to be
associated with the tawdry and the tasteless, even where it
attempted to imitate art. 19 Art, by contrast, was aligned with
‘significant form’, originality and modernity, the buzzwords of the
avant-garde. Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray and Edward Weston combined the
Modernist ideals of form, originality and modernity in their
celebration of the ‘photographic’ (as opposed to the painterly). Their
abstracted style soon became encoded with the semantic ideals of
progress, minimalism and avant-gardism. Nowhere is this more
obvious than in their representations of the female body. In order to
strip the body of its obscene history, these Purist photographers
refused the sexual charge of the mythic gaze and fetishised
accessories and, instead, abstracted the body. Details such as nipples
and pubic hair were avoided, and the intimacy of seeing a naked
woman’s face was circumvented by cropping or blurring her head.
Perhaps these photographs are sexual rather than being sexualised or
fetishised; they were thus perceived to be so tasteful, so effective in
19
These associations are not only value judgments, but also material ones, since
early pornographic photographs were printed on low-cost (low grade) paper with
inexpensive inks that smudged easily. The models and props also had an air of
low-cost convenience to them, and indeed police records show that quite often
wives and daughters were roped in to pose for pornographic pictures. So
ingrained is the association of pornography with the cheap and the dirty, that in
Chambers Thesaurus the word pornographic appears as a synonym for the
adjective ‘dirty’ (Chambers Thesaurus (1992)) 97.