Go Play With Your Own Image — Not Hers or Mine

By Maria Padhila

Pretty much if you’ve ever had a pulse at some point in the past hundred years, you’re going to end up with a picture of your boobs on the Internets at some point in your life. Which is why I was not so shocked to see “vintage nude photos” of artist Frida Kahlo online.

Not shocked, no, but certainly WTF. Despite the “vintage” bikini area, which could not have been the artist’s body. There were other sorts of things that were all wrong about it, as well.

(For those who don’t know much about Kahlo: check out her art on Google, first, but also know that she did not have traditional monogamous relationships by a long shot — she was bisexual and she and her husband had lovers during their on-and-off marriage.]

The wrong part was also noted in a fine blog post on Black Girl Dangerous by Mia McKenzie that gives the background and the story as well. So I posted that blog post to my social network, and got a couple likes and a doofy-ass comment from a white guy about how everyone else was a racist except him.

I just spent about 15 minutes looking for that comment, but it was to the effect that the blogger herself is guilty of racism because she assumes “all white men are racists” and “all men have abused women.”

Oh, the weariness. I just felt this 30-year-old déjà vu — do people really still say things like that? I wonder it every time. I’m naïve.

I just wrote under that comment that if he didn’t understand what was wrong with that statement, it would take too long to explain it to him. It’s such a weird attempt at a self-protective internal dialogue people have to go through to get to that place: Omg what if they’re talking about me THEY’RE NOT TALKING ABOUT ME I DON’T DO THAT why do they think I do that I feel scared and I don’t know why I’M NOT THE ONE WHO’S WRONG what if I am WHY ARE YOU ACCUSING ME they always say that YOU’RE THE ONE WHO’S WRONG YOU’RE THE RACIST.

A lot of time that last accusation is less hurled than made in a gentle and delicate way: “I hate to bring your attention to this, but if you’re the one saying that all white men do something, then you must be the prejudiced one.”

It was pretty easy to do a search on the word “all” in the blog post. There’s “all kinds” and “all of a sudden,” but there’s no “all men” or “all white men.”

There is this following, but even that doesn’t restrict the noun:

“When did the idea of respecting the image, body, or identity of women of color ever trump the need for white men (or any men, really) to do whatever they please?”

It doesn’t say “all men” exploit that privilege — it just says the privilege exists, and it trumps respect.

It was really easy to find the unfriend button though. Easiest thing about all this. In fact, I feel bad that I didn’t stay in there and keep fighting and do the conversation thing, because as a white woman I might have a shot at getting someone to see this. But to tell you the truth the guy makes me a little nervous, and I didn’t think he would take being contradicted well. I was right — there followed some further correspondences all designed to make me feel ashamed of being female and having sex, until I hit the “un” button and stopped all communication.

It isn’t the first time that being realistic about privilege has earned me or anyone else some badmouthing. It’s actually kind of funny, the reaction that comes when privilege is exposed by one who says, yeah, you know, there it is, you’re soaking in it. The privileged one often reacts in a way that brings a certain gassy, Victorian vocabulary to mind: umbrage, high dudgeon, huffy, harrumph, affront, disgruntle, well I never, and similar terms.

Under the transits of recent months, I’ve been wrestling with the denial demons quite a bit myself. I’m bewildered by how often people deny the obvious, and how invested they are in doing so, and how they think they can possibly get away with it for very long. If I have to hear how “negative” I’m being from one more New Ager, I will go into high dudgeon! For instance, I’ve been working on poems about the Civil War for about two years now. Just about everything I read on the topic has a stain of a belief in gallantry and noble cause, and most people assume that’s going to be in my writing as well.

Are you, like, fucking kidding me? What do they take me for? Just because I use images from the King James translation and lots of folderol-era words doesn’t mean I’m falling for that shit. That war (no less than any others, or the wholesale soiling of our planet, or the drones that kill innocent 8-year-old boys) was whack, a psychosis, just another mutation of the racism virus that keeps evolving and re-infecting us.

Looking into that blankness and absurdity, even at a remove of 150 years, is a tough one; getting anyone to hold my hand while I do it is no easy sell, either. Once you stop denying, there is very little to hold on to besides each others’ hands; and mine is old and bony and spiked with bitten hangnails. I understand quite well why anyone would prefer a lovely view of denial out the kitchen window (framed by an artisanal-tile backsplash).

But the Photoshopping of Frida is not only a symptom of racism, but also of able-ism, McKenzie points out:

We’d have to be in some serious denial to think that these things did not affect the way Frida’s body looked. There were surely scars, surely much evidence of decades of pain and surgery and brokenness. To replace that broken, scarred body with smooth, un-flawed flesh, as in these photoshopped pics, is plainly able-ist. Further, it dishonors the life Frida Kahlo lived and the experiences she survived. Here was a woman, an artist, whose artistic expression had everything to do with her physical pain, everything to do with existing inside a body that was twisted and gnarled, a body that hurt every day. To erase that is to attempt to erase Frida herself.

That’s the thing that pissed me off the most about this. First of all, behind it I suspect there’s a sort of refusal to believe that a woman with many lovers, with what was from all accounts a strong and active love and sex life, could also have a physical being that was so troubled. We know from her self-portraits and writing and evidence of her multiple surgeries that she was scarred, in chronic pain, often in casts and braces. Her legs had been affected from polio. She was in a horrific bus accident as a teenager — broken pelvis, collarbone, spine, and an iron rail through her stomach and uterus. Surgeries over the course of her life topped 30.

She was not a heroic little silent sufferer, either. She painted herself, her casts, herself in her casts; she saw beauty, fierceness, strangeness in her own predicament, her own reality. She faced that reality in the mirror and then transformed it into (something more real) her art. She faced her life and then self-invented like crazy. Her art was her self, and vice versa.

For anyone who respects an artist, putting her head on another woman’s body is grotesque. It doesn’t work as art; as novelty it’s creepy; even as commentary it misses the mark.

So this is what disturbs me most about women’s naked photos being released on the Internet without their permission. I don’t want anyone’s photos being used without their permission; men too, and in whatever stage of dress, or not.

Recently an advice columnist responded to a woman who was disturbed about her husband and his friends sending emails about women they’d slept with, with photos. One of the readers said something like: “Ask the guy how he’d like it if that were his sister up there on the Internets!”

Which is a terrible case of missing the point. You or your sister or anyone else don’t have any reason to run and cover up in shame. The one who is trying to provoke the shame — the one who manipulates and controls the image — that’s the one who owns the shame and derision. (It goes without saying that if the problem involves someone underage, there are laws and courts — sic ’em.)

I’ve posed nude for artists and photographers, and I was once a stripper. I don’t make a big deal out of it. Everything I’ve done has had its good and bad points; some moments transcendent. I’m still trying to be a good artist and writer. My having been naked in front of people has been a part of my life, as much as my cooking food for people, or my brushing my teeth. If images of me showed up on the Internet, what would I do? It wouldn’t be that big a deal, either, unless I felt there was an intent to threaten me or those I care about in some way. Then I’d deal with it.

By the way, I don’t consider it a threat if someone wanted to show someone I care about naked pictures of me. The people I care about would just make sure I’m safe, then laugh, or think you’re a creep. I’d feel ashamed if someone had images of me being cruel, but I’d also be ashamed while it was happening, if I did it in real life. Right now I’m feeling really ashamed remembering that I once cut in a line at a buffet because I didn’t realize where the end of the line was. I just want to melt into the floor thinking about it! I never felt ashamed about modeling or dancing, though.

What if we decided that there was nothing shameful about sexual photos or talk, that these were simply interesting or not? The shamers and manipulators lose their power. This is the next step; it’s what’s coming. This is the place we’re headed as the world creaks open under the pressure of the Uranus-Pluto square. Victim-blaming and slut-shaming are losing. The most vicious efforts to keep this alive — from legislated ultrasounds to athlete-rapist apologists — are death throes. These people are going down. Unfriend. Unelect. Unpower.

How many scars and flaws do you and your loved ones have? How much do you love them for them? Would I wish that either of the men I love not have what are considered disabilities? Of course I want them to be happy; but I want more than that for them to be themselves, whatever that might be. It’s a very strange paradox of identity, one I’ve tried to write about several times in ways that for me are clearer than rhetoric. I hope you’ll forgive me if you’ve heard this before.

Ten of Swords
Wounded Healer

It’s been a while since I’ve kissed the scars
Of someone I love. The indentation in your leg,
The star shape to the left of your navel,
The weal sewn over your heart. No more
Delicate fingertips and wide-eyed awe here.
When you first know a body, you count the scars,
You wonder over them, you hear every story
These marks tell. You are hungry for the news.
You would push the point of your tongue
Into a tiny, still-red canyon, mining
For information, for emotion, for the undeniable
Truths of the past. Now it’s an act of faith
To overlook what hurt you so long ago.
It’s tempting for us damaged
To worship the wounds, you know.
So I resist, slide my lips quickly over and past
Those places, over and past for you.
These next few moments are what I live for.