6 reasons female nudity can be powerful

[redqueen]

2. I LOVE SORAYA CHEMALY

If you are thinking women make choices and are complicit, show contempt for other women because they are women —well, of course some of them do. That is a defining feature of misogyny. Until we have equal access to resources, and are not subject to constant predation,this is a no-brainer. In the meantime, when women refuse to sexualize themselves and use their bodies to challenge powerful interests that profit from that sexualization, the words we should use aren’t “lewd” and “obscene”; they’re “threatening” and “destabilizing.”

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In the U.S., there is nothing unique about reporter Tim Molloy’s question about Lena Dunham’s nudity. Social media company policies,like many city statutes and public ordinances, mirror mainstream norms that clearly privilege heterosexuality, conflate women’s bodies with indecency and sex (a bad thing), and insist that those bodies (and sex) be held in reserve, distributed and consumed according to patriarchal rules. These rules, and the puritanical obsessions that drive them, are why we have billion-dollar “good girls gone wild” industries and an Internet fueled by gonzo porn, both carefully packaged pseudo-transgressions have little to do with women’s autonomy and do nothing to undermine a well-entrenched, misogynistic status quo.