CONFESSIONS OF A FEMINIST WITH A SWIMSUIT ISSUE, VOL. 3
paradise regained and
reminded.
Of man's last objectification, and the
fruit of that forbidden beach, whose sensual gaze brought lust into the world,
and all our woe, with loss of feminism, till one lesser man restore us, and
regain the blissful equality, sing Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret sands of
Chile, or of the Bahamas, didst inspire that blogger, who first learned from the
cover girl, in the end how the model and the truth rose out of
chaos.
So here I am on a beach in the Bahamas in hell, looking into Carolyn Murphy's kaleidoscopic eyes and realizing I'm not nearly as damned as I think.
Maybe Mulvey was on to something after all; she just got it backward. This lapsed feminist male-gazer, 184 pages of suffering into the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, is thinking that everything he needs to know about visual pleasure and narrative cinema and newsstand sensuality is actually located in the female gaze, in -- to twist a phrase from David Cronenberg -- the retina of the model's eye, in two sweet and supple focal points located about a foot above the two sweet and supple focal points at which these photographs expect us to look.
If you want to rise up and out of the darkness of your own personal hell, it's probably best to keep your head up and look for the light. And the brightest, purest light I saw on those pages came not from the sun or the surf or the diffusers or the reflectors, but from the deep blue seas of Carolyn Murphy's eyes.
The eyes, we're told, are the windows to the soul. And so I have always believed. But I have also always believed that they're the windows to the mind. In their depths or in their shallows, their fullness or their emptiness, their riches or their hollows, we see the inner life. My mom, who taught elementary school for thirty years, always swore she could tell in the first week, even on the first day, who her best and brightest students were going to be; all she had to do was look into their eyes, and she would know. The spark, the sizzle, the luster never lied.
You hear guys describe themselves as breast men, leg men, ass men -- the indelicate phrasings of intemperate males. Me, I've always been a brain man -- the intellectual craving of an inviolable male. There's nothing more seductive than a sharp mind, a quick wit, or a deep thought, no woman more alluring than one with a hot body of knowledge and an eagerness to use it. Smart is sexy. Brainy is beautiful. Physical attraction is wonderful, but intellectual attraction is essential. Swimsuits are optional.
And that's where Sports Illustrated (or at least the Swimsuit Issue) and Playboy and Penthouse and every other soft-core, hard-sell magazine shot in testosterone and inked in objectification gets it fundamentally wrong. Not for their target demographic, of course, among which there are precious few feminist males. But for me, for my eye, for my post-lapsarian self. That's also, it should be noted, where Vogue and Glamour and Cosmopolitan and every other sex-crazed, emaciation-obsessed magazine for women gets it wrong -- especially for their target demographic. They pay lip service to the inner life, but they sell their pages and devote almost all their column inches to the outer look. They show the shells -- lovely, sultry, airbrushed, aerobicized, impossibly perfect shells -- but not the souls. They want us to look, but they do not ask us to see.
On the cover of the swimsuit issue, without even realizing it, I saw. Thinking I was looking at one thing, I actually saw another. Subconsciously, I knew, even if my consciousness had yet to catch up. Like the eyes of my mom's sixth-graders, Carolyn Murphy's eyes did not lie. It felt like her eyes were looking right through me, but it turns out I was looking right through them. It wasn't what she saw in me, but what I saw in her. And what I saw in her had precious little to do with her body or her bikini.
I lingered on that cover and that photo and every other photo I found of her inside not because of her physical beauty -- though, truth be told, that sure didn't hurt -- but because of her eyes and what they said about her, because of everything she knew and held behind them. She stood worlds and heads and shoulders and every other body part apart from every other model in that magazine, rising always above the rampant, salacious absurdity of her surroundings and tempting me to a fall from feminist grace that, knowing what I know and seeing what I've seen and remembering what I now remember, was not nearly as far nor as foul as it felt. I was looking at her body, but I was seeing her face. I was looking at her face, but I was seeing her brain.
Because, more than forty-eight hours before her cover shot ever showed up at my door, over two full days before I first saw her face, I was truly, madly, deeply attracted to Carolyn Murphy. See was alluring, intriguing, enchanting. She was fun, sexy, sultry. She charmed and delighted and surely, sweetly seduced me.
When I heard her on the radio.
Last Thursday afternoon, on my way to work and restlessly flipping through the radio dial, I happened upon two immature, inarticulate, painfully unfunny schlubs interviewing a mature, articulate, naturally funny woman. They were asking her a series of mindless, pointless questions with which she was almost preternaturally patient, giving answers far better and more thoughtful than they deserved. I could tell that it was a publicity bit, but I couldn't tell for what. And I didn't really care at first. I considered changing the station or flipping over to a CD, but the command with which the woman handled herself and the situation, the way she managed not only to suffer but to transcend her time in broadcast purgatory with those two alpha (minor) males -- who, it turned out, were subbing for Dan Patrick on ESPN Radio ; it must have been Let Two Dorks Take Over the Mic Day in Bristol -- was as fascinating as it was captivating, as expressive as it was impressive. She was smart and graceful, easy-going and engaging, with a a sweet voice and an even sweeter laugh. After a few seconds, I was smitten. By the end of the interview, I was hooked.
This was a woman I respected. This was a woman I liked. And it didn't matter what she looked like. That she turned out to be a swimsuit issue super model is interesting -- you take gifts and bonuses whenever and wherever you get them -- but irrelevant. She had me before hello. She had me on the radio.
Even so, I probably would not have thought of her or of the show again, even after the two dorks spent three or four minutes following the interview talking about what a babe she was, about how they'd never have a chance with a woman like her -- about that, they were undoubtedly correct -- and about how hot she looked on the cover of the new SI Swimsuit Issue. If they said her name -- and they certainly should have, of course, but broadcast professionalism did not seem to be their strong suit -- I must have missed it. Or maybe forgotten it. Because, when I plucked that Swimsuit Issue out of Saturday afternoon's mail, I didn't think a thought about it. At least not consciously.
But Sunday night, as I sat and stared and swooned over page 184, I remembered. I realized. And I rejoiced. Because somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind, through the swimsuit glaze and the testosterone haze, beneath the cover photo and beyond the cool remove of all the photos inside, that radio show and that lovely, thoughtful, intelligent, independent, articulate, wickedly cool woman I heard upon it, were working on me and my mind in ways I hadn't realized but suddenly, finally appreciated. Carolyn Murphy called and tempted and beckoned me not with drooping straps or skimpy suits or sloping curves, not with her long legs or wavy hair or ample cleavage, but with her bright blue eyes and the promise of everything I saw and heard and knew to be behind them. She was not -- and never was, and never will be -- just some swimsuit siren luring me to the rocks of my own shipwrecked sense of gendered self; she was instead like a lighthouse, showing me a way through the dark shoals of my own damnable doubts, illuminating and subconsciously reaffirming me, reminding me that the beauty I seek and find in women -- like the power I find and feel in feminism -- is strong and true and anything but skin deep.
So here I am on a beach in the Bahamas in hell, looking into Carolyn Murphy's kaleidoscopic eyes and realizing I'm not nearly as damned as I think.
Maybe Mulvey was on to something after all; she just got it backward. This lapsed feminist male-gazer, 184 pages of suffering into the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, is thinking that everything he needs to know about visual pleasure and narrative cinema and newsstand sensuality is actually located in the female gaze, in -- to twist a phrase from David Cronenberg -- the retina of the model's eye, in two sweet and supple focal points located about a foot above the two sweet and supple focal points at which these photographs expect us to look.
If you want to rise up and out of the darkness of your own personal hell, it's probably best to keep your head up and look for the light. And the brightest, purest light I saw on those pages came not from the sun or the surf or the diffusers or the reflectors, but from the deep blue seas of Carolyn Murphy's eyes.
The eyes, we're told, are the windows to the soul. And so I have always believed. But I have also always believed that they're the windows to the mind. In their depths or in their shallows, their fullness or their emptiness, their riches or their hollows, we see the inner life. My mom, who taught elementary school for thirty years, always swore she could tell in the first week, even on the first day, who her best and brightest students were going to be; all she had to do was look into their eyes, and she would know. The spark, the sizzle, the luster never lied.
You hear guys describe themselves as breast men, leg men, ass men -- the indelicate phrasings of intemperate males. Me, I've always been a brain man -- the intellectual craving of an inviolable male. There's nothing more seductive than a sharp mind, a quick wit, or a deep thought, no woman more alluring than one with a hot body of knowledge and an eagerness to use it. Smart is sexy. Brainy is beautiful. Physical attraction is wonderful, but intellectual attraction is essential. Swimsuits are optional.
And that's where Sports Illustrated (or at least the Swimsuit Issue) and Playboy and Penthouse and every other soft-core, hard-sell magazine shot in testosterone and inked in objectification gets it fundamentally wrong. Not for their target demographic, of course, among which there are precious few feminist males. But for me, for my eye, for my post-lapsarian self. That's also, it should be noted, where Vogue and Glamour and Cosmopolitan and every other sex-crazed, emaciation-obsessed magazine for women gets it wrong -- especially for their target demographic. They pay lip service to the inner life, but they sell their pages and devote almost all their column inches to the outer look. They show the shells -- lovely, sultry, airbrushed, aerobicized, impossibly perfect shells -- but not the souls. They want us to look, but they do not ask us to see.
On the cover of the swimsuit issue, without even realizing it, I saw. Thinking I was looking at one thing, I actually saw another. Subconsciously, I knew, even if my consciousness had yet to catch up. Like the eyes of my mom's sixth-graders, Carolyn Murphy's eyes did not lie. It felt like her eyes were looking right through me, but it turns out I was looking right through them. It wasn't what she saw in me, but what I saw in her. And what I saw in her had precious little to do with her body or her bikini.
I lingered on that cover and that photo and every other photo I found of her inside not because of her physical beauty -- though, truth be told, that sure didn't hurt -- but because of her eyes and what they said about her, because of everything she knew and held behind them. She stood worlds and heads and shoulders and every other body part apart from every other model in that magazine, rising always above the rampant, salacious absurdity of her surroundings and tempting me to a fall from feminist grace that, knowing what I know and seeing what I've seen and remembering what I now remember, was not nearly as far nor as foul as it felt. I was looking at her body, but I was seeing her face. I was looking at her face, but I was seeing her brain.
Because, more than forty-eight hours before her cover shot ever showed up at my door, over two full days before I first saw her face, I was truly, madly, deeply attracted to Carolyn Murphy. See was alluring, intriguing, enchanting. She was fun, sexy, sultry. She charmed and delighted and surely, sweetly seduced me.
When I heard her on the radio.
Last Thursday afternoon, on my way to work and restlessly flipping through the radio dial, I happened upon two immature, inarticulate, painfully unfunny schlubs interviewing a mature, articulate, naturally funny woman. They were asking her a series of mindless, pointless questions with which she was almost preternaturally patient, giving answers far better and more thoughtful than they deserved. I could tell that it was a publicity bit, but I couldn't tell for what. And I didn't really care at first. I considered changing the station or flipping over to a CD, but the command with which the woman handled herself and the situation, the way she managed not only to suffer but to transcend her time in broadcast purgatory with those two alpha (minor) males -- who, it turned out, were subbing for Dan Patrick on ESPN Radio ; it must have been Let Two Dorks Take Over the Mic Day in Bristol -- was as fascinating as it was captivating, as expressive as it was impressive. She was smart and graceful, easy-going and engaging, with a a sweet voice and an even sweeter laugh. After a few seconds, I was smitten. By the end of the interview, I was hooked.
This was a woman I respected. This was a woman I liked. And it didn't matter what she looked like. That she turned out to be a swimsuit issue super model is interesting -- you take gifts and bonuses whenever and wherever you get them -- but irrelevant. She had me before hello. She had me on the radio.
Even so, I probably would not have thought of her or of the show again, even after the two dorks spent three or four minutes following the interview talking about what a babe she was, about how they'd never have a chance with a woman like her -- about that, they were undoubtedly correct -- and about how hot she looked on the cover of the new SI Swimsuit Issue. If they said her name -- and they certainly should have, of course, but broadcast professionalism did not seem to be their strong suit -- I must have missed it. Or maybe forgotten it. Because, when I plucked that Swimsuit Issue out of Saturday afternoon's mail, I didn't think a thought about it. At least not consciously.
But Sunday night, as I sat and stared and swooned over page 184, I remembered. I realized. And I rejoiced. Because somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind, through the swimsuit glaze and the testosterone haze, beneath the cover photo and beyond the cool remove of all the photos inside, that radio show and that lovely, thoughtful, intelligent, independent, articulate, wickedly cool woman I heard upon it, were working on me and my mind in ways I hadn't realized but suddenly, finally appreciated. Carolyn Murphy called and tempted and beckoned me not with drooping straps or skimpy suits or sloping curves, not with her long legs or wavy hair or ample cleavage, but with her bright blue eyes and the promise of everything I saw and heard and knew to be behind them. She was not -- and never was, and never will be -- just some swimsuit siren luring me to the rocks of my own shipwrecked sense of gendered self; she was instead like a lighthouse, showing me a way through the dark shoals of my own damnable doubts, illuminating and subconsciously reaffirming me, reminding me that the beauty I seek and find in women -- like the power I find and feel in feminism -- is strong and true and anything but skin deep.
Posted: Thu - February 24, 2005 at 10:17 PM
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Published On: Nov 30, 2007 03:57 PM
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Published On: Nov 30, 2007 03:57 PM