BY
ACTOR
Since the extraordinary and beautiful mass uptake of the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements, I feel like scales are falling from my eyes. Things that I’ve worried about alone at 4 a.m. suddenly seem like things I can talk about in public, and certain ‘insecurities’ that I had previously been ashamed of, I now feel proud of having because I am realizing they’re a very coherent response to some incoherent aspects of our culture.
When I left drama school one of my first jobs required nudity – I didn’t bat an eyelid as the nudity was part of playing that particular character and was offered to a particular audience in a particular context, all of which I felt absolutely artistically at peace with. However, I quickly learned after the show was broadcast that whenever an actor appears nude on screen, within minutes those nude images and clips of film are ripped out of context and uploaded to porn sites.
For years afterwards I felt ashamed and hurt by this practice but never really got beyond feeling like it was my fault and that I was powerless to stem the flow of our mighty culture that had ordained that these images of actors (male and female, I should point out, but who are we kidding? This affects women in a particular way that is too obvious and deep-rooted to outline here) in character, naked, doing their job, could belong to the people who run porn sites and the people who view them.
As the #MeToo movement was gathering momentum last year, however, some kind of kung-fu flip happened: my insecurity about this flipped to anger, and that anger felt like it became focused and articulate for the first time and I felt that this was in fact something l could quite easily shoot down. Talking about this shouldn’t embarrass me; it should embarrass the perpetrators.
Should anyone’s work be used in another context to support a completely other industry, then their consent needs to be sought and, in the unlikely instance that this be granted, financial recompense should be made to the individual. But it can’t be up to already miraculous and multitasking agents to fight this impossible, unregulated mess. They shouldn’t have to work as porn agents for their acting clients. And in fact the legislation isn’t there for them to curb this anyway. As it stands, the only way to defend against this is to be hardline against nudity at work, no matter how appropriate it may be for the project.
As Brit Marling brilliantly pointed out in her article about the economic exile of women in Hollywood (analogous, of course, and arguably much more catastrophically so, to women worldwide), where there’s injustice there’s usually an economic dynamic. This internet practice is making money for someone. The curating of these images isn’t stamp-collecting; it is a diligent, deliberate and thorough search. Why do we legislate hard against practices like fraud and not against the exploitation of women’s bodies? How have we got to a point as a community where we value money over people’s dignity? My guess would be because where fraud is taking place, institutions are losing money, whereas where exploitation of images of women’s bodies is taking place, institutions are directly or indirectly, making money or, at the very least, not losing any…So where’s the economic incentive to defend against the human cost? It is women who pay and culture that suffers.
The arguments defending this practice don’t stand up. Can we sever the imaginative connection between actor and sex worker please? Not because one is acceptable and one is shameful – neither are – but because it’s an inaccurate comparison; a doctor is not doing the same job as an architect. And, even if you bizarrely insisted that actors and sex workers did share a profession, nor would it be appropriate to take photographs of a sex worker doing their job and post them online to entertain an audience to whom they granted no consent, to make money for people to whom they were never contracted.
Holding up this house of strange are odd assumptions such as: ‘actresses are “fair game” ’, ‘the internet is full of “weirdos”, so ignore it’…These aren’t ‘weirdos’; the people curating these sites are working hard and doing a thorough job…In fact they’re supplying a demand. And this practice impoverishes everybody: those who seek these sites as well as those who are exploited on them. No one gains when a culture exploits itself. If we woke up to what we are doing, we could gain each other.
Something my astonishingly astute mom has pointed out to me for years is that underneath tons of the misogynistic practices in our culture are some cultural ‘norms’ – values that legitimize oppressive behaviour. Two HUGE ones that keep occurring to me are: the suppression of the female voice (read Mary Beard’s lectures in Women and Power) and the assumption that women’s bodies belong to those observing them rather than to the woman themselves. And what’s going on in the instance of female actors being used on porn sites is most certainly a manifestation of the latter: the unconscious categorizing of women’s bodies as public property. Isn’t it this attitude that underpins the kind of comments I heard every day walking to school such as ‘Move your bag, I can’t see your arse’ and ‘Smile, darling’? As if women were simply ghosts in their own machines, machines designed for the gratification of others. And as if our duty as good women were to act as sort of front-of-house hosts of our own bodies, supplying the demands of those who want to look at them.
I hope to have used this example about online exploitation of imagery merely as a small example of how certain cultural norms are manifesting in our popular culture.
I HOPE THAT MY EXPERIENCES
HAVE CREATED AN EMPATHIC BRIDGE
WHICH HELPS ME FEEL
FOR MY SISTERS
ALL OVER THE WORLD AND, GIRL,
AM I KEEN TO HEAR, SEEK AND FIGHT
FOR THEIR VOICES.
Thanks to Tarana Burke for coining #MeToo in 2006 and Alyssa Milano for promoting it, and thanks to all the women who have raised their voices for decades and centuries to make this choir.
At the most recent Women’s March in London I found myself crying as my mom and I chanted ‘Time’s Up’, and I felt unusually centred in an era where emotion has become ironized, in an era where things can feel more and more ‘contactless’ – it was shocking to feel so viscerally moved by the chanting of these two words alongside so many feminists. And I’m going to be real with you, I think the tears had been welling in my being for years; in fact they felt like ancient tears, and not just my own…May they form an ocean that floats us to freer times…