Post-Due Date Tid Bit

While I was commenting on one of the other posts from this section, I remembered an episode of MTV's "True Life" that is extremely relevant to the idea of online identity, RPGs, and cyberpunks. YouTube disabled embedding, so here is a link: view the video here.

This episode follows three women who have various problems interacting with others in the "real" world: social anxiety, stage fright, shyness, etc. They use the Internet and RPGs (role-playing games) to overcome these problems and lead fulfilling lives--all while being online. The full episode shows each of them trying to take their online confidence and personalities into the real world, but as the end of the clip shows, it doesn't go well for any of them.

What is so different about interacting with someone online? Why is it so much more comfortable for these people? While I understand being able to put up a front and simply sign offline if something becomes too intense, suffocating, or intolerable, but the same is true of "real" life--we have the personal freedom to walk away from any situation that we feel uncomfortable in, extenuating circumstances aside. We can walk away from relationships that we don't feel are thriving. We can walk offstage if the audience is staring too hard. We can put our clothes back on if we feel too much pressure.

If people are turning to RPGs and the Internet to act out their actual personalities, what does the computer hide? Any ideas, guys?

Catfish: The Creepiest Movie EVER

WARNING: SPOILERS!

The above two videos are trailers for the recent documentary film Catfish, during which the main character (Nev) and his two best friends record an internet love story with a twist. One day, out of the blue, Nev receives a Facebook friend request from a young (elementary school level) girl, Abby, who likes to paint. Her mother (Angela) also friends Nev, and they all become both Facebook and IRL (in real life) friends--Abby's mother sends Nev paintings, letters, even money. Over e-mail, G-chat, and Facebook, Nev finds himself becoming a significant part of their lives, and visa versa. Nev also becomes Facebook friends with Abby's older sister, Megan, who is close to his age. The two exchange photos, videos, sound clips, etc. and about halfway through the film, become involved in a sort of "would-be" relationship: as Nev says, if they were to meet and have the same chemistry in person as they do online, they would instantaneously be in a relationship. Nev believes that everything Abby, Megan, and Angela is telling him is real and true because he sees these characters interacting with numerous other people--family and friends--via wall posts,  tagged photos, etc. They have a real life, so they're real people.

Except, the spin is (surprise!) they're not. Nev and his friends decide to go visit Abby, Megan, and Angela--unannounced. They find their "home" abandoned, and in the second address Nev was given by Angela, they find Abby and Angela--neither of whom are who Nev expected them to be. The mother, who lives at home with her husband and his two severely handicapped sons (in addition to Abby), has been spending hours upon hours on multiple computers and cell phones creating an entire world that doesn't exist. She likes to paint, not Abby. She has fallen in love with Nev via her role-playing as Megan. She even goes as far as to lie to Nev and tell him she has cancer so he'll be sympathetic instead of angry when he finds out the truth.

How could Nev had guessed? He didn't meet one single girl through Craigslist or on Myspace, where it would be easier to spot  a fake. He met an entire family, including cousins, aunts, uncles, sons, daughters, and friends. All of these fake characters interacted with each other and with other people, creating an online world that didn't exist. This film addresses many of the topics in this section's texts: Nev fell in love over the internet, leading us to question what "mating" has become and what role touch plays in the creation of a relationship; Angela created around 20 "living" characters, showing us that a life online isn't  close to life in the "real" world; and questioning whether or not we even need physical bodies for digital and technological bodies to exist?

(This is an image that Nev photoshoped--he sent it to Megan to "make her smile.")

Was Angela crossing a line, or simply taking role-playing out of Second Life and into her "first" life? Ollivier Dyens defines what "artificial life" is, and it's scary to say that Angela's world of fake characters and manipulation doesn't seem too far from our own world of untagging and profile pictures: "A-life is also the cultural body, the human-saturated environment, the protection of endangered species, and the spread of automobiles. A-life is life that breaks away from biology, replication of culture rather than genetics. Artificial life is our extreme dependence upon electricity, our pharmaceutically maintained lifestyle, and our technologically controlled and protected existence" (94). By creating so many different people, Angela was spreading her "cultural DNA" in the same way that we do by opening up a twitter account or telling our friends to follow our Google Reader. Having so many different three-dimensional characters in a two-dimensional world made Angela extremely culturally relevant--they covered a huge range of ages, both the sexes, and many different types of personalities

It would appear to me that Angela was crossing a personal boundary...but not a cultural one. She had created artificial life and allowed it to grow and breathe without her (at one point in the film she tells Nev that the situation took control of her). Her world became, in the words of Dyens, a "living idea" (22). A "virtual being [...] is an expression of new life, a life made of signs, culture, and knowledge" (33). Angela's living idea became it's own cultural bubble--each of the characters did what a "real" person would be expected to do: listen to music, have favorite bands, like to make art, share pictures with his/her friends, respond to wall posts, comment on other people's content, etc. Her world was entirely made of signs, culture, and knowledge. And she manipulated all the signs to point to reality.

Is Angela a cyberpunk? Was Megan or Abby a cyberpunk? Dyens quotes Bruce Sterling as he says that cyberpunks are "hybrids," "brain-computer interfaces" (73). They are "a common narrative on the ride of a new type of cultural body (created and formed within computers)" (73). Each of Angela's characters was a blend of her own self (she was the one acting the parts, so there had to be at least a shred of herself in each person), what she would expect that character to do (a male persona would type differently than a female person, for instance), and a computer (each of these characters truly only existed within a computer). It seems as if this sort of interaction between a person and a computer is becoming the norm--it is not just a part of a bleak, A.I.-esque future. People around us in the normal world are creating "cultural bodies" that exist without physical bodies.

(From the film A.I.)

If someone were to take your internet presence, lift it up, and carry it over into a region of the country or world where it hadn't already reached, would it live on? Would you be able to create a following on Facebook and Twitter and Foursquare without using your physical body? The internet certainly has enough information about us to carry on without our bodies--hell, it can steal our bank account or spam our friend's e-mails. Who (or what) is more powerful here? Clearly the Internet has the power to mislead someone entirely in a way that a physical body couldn't. Our "soul abides in machines" (Dyens 95).

Can We Ever Do It For Ourselves?

This song, TLC's "Unpretty," was released in 1999 and became the band's second single to hit #1 on the Billboard charts in the United States. According to the Wikipedia article on the song (I know--not necessarily the most reliable source, but the only one), it originated from a poem written about "a woman's struggle with her self-image" (Wiki). Both the poem and the song also address the comparisons that women make "between themselves and the sometimes unrealistic concepts of beauty, as it is commonly portrayed in the media" (Wiki). We see one young girl contemplating getting breast implants because her boyfriend likes the look of a large-chested woman and another girl attempting bulimia because all the images she finds in magazines are of skinny women. However, both of these women find their inner strength and decide that no one should have the power to make them feel so "damn unpretty." Their body is theirs alone, and shouldn't be controlled by the wants and pressures of others.

As we read in this section, it's not necessarily that simply to decide to stay true to your natural body. First of all, putting on makeup or using cellulite creams changes the way that we think about a "natural" body." Secondly, women are facing lots of pressure to age "gracefully"--and that doesn't mean naturally. Thirdly, what if it were possible that having cosmetic surgery was completely about the person going under the knife, and not simply about outside pressure? 

The first two of these questions have been widely discussed in our readings, documentaries, and class discussions, but this third question seems to linger. As we saw in Youth Knows No Pain, even when women (Sherry) put up a front that their surgeries or enhancements are done for themselves and themselves only, we find it hard to believe. As Shawn Levy said in the article "A Little Too Ready For Her Close Up?," "[the] era of 'I look great because I did this to myself' has passed" (Holson). Casting directors are looking for natural (but also perfect) bodies--and senses of self too: Carrie Audino, casting director of Mad Men, said that "I do think there are times when you sit in a casting session and listen to what someone things is beautiful or handsome, and there is this very skewed outlook based on their own insecurities. Because they have issues, they have an issue with someone else" (Holson). Macy Halford recognizes that some physical qualities can be see as "psychologically and physically damaging traits" (Halford). So we are now expected to either have work done that is perfect, unnoticeable, and seamless or be completely happy with the way we look. Period. The other side of either option clearly reflects poorly on the individual, and those around him or her (read: her) feel uneasy about it as well.

Is there really anything wrong with a woman getting her "nose done" if it will honestly, truly make her feel better about herself? While I was sitting at Peet's Coffee the other morning, I heard a girl on the phone with her mother talking about how she was going to the doctor because she had a sinus infection. And believe me, she was one of those "I don't care if you can hear me or if I'm about four decibels too loud for your pre-caffeine ears, I'm on the phone" types. Except the moment that she mentioned her nose job, her voice fell hushed. She stammered over the words "nose job," stuttering to correct herself, saying "got my nose fixed," and finally landing on the words "had that surgery done to correct that thing." She became so overcome with embarrassment that she left. The girl who had just been screaming about the copious amount of snot coming out of her face left because she said nose job.

This girl, along with many others, understood that there is still a stigma surrounding cosmetic surgery. People feel "unpretty" and they want to fix it. I think the real issue isn't that people are getting botox or nose jobs or breast implants, but rather that most of them aren't doing it because it will genuinely make them feel better. We live in a world where media is both the cause and the effect of the way we feel and the way we act. Without television and magazines, we might not know that our eyelids were differently shaped than Reese Witherspoon's or that our noses were bigger than Julia Stiles'. We wouldn't feel so close to celebrities that we found ourselves on par with them, and therefore comparing ourselves and feeling that we could “come closer to becoming a celebrity by having ourselves surgically altered" (Blum 154). Botox and nose jobs and breast implants are ways of getting closer to a "perfect" image of a celebrity, a person outside of oneself, instead of the "perfect" image of one's own body.

 

Is it possible to step outside of influences that exist outside of ourselves? Can we separate them from our own thoughts, or has the media's idea of perfect (whether that be altered or unaltered) become too intertwined? Even if we could untangle these ideas, would that make surgery okay? These are all questions that cannot be answered, because we are so far into this image-based society that we cannot pull ourselves out.

How To Look Good Naked

Lifetime's show How to Look Good Naked (HTLGN) is a show that "teaches women of all shapes and sizes to go from self-loathing to self-loving without resorting to interventions like extreme dieting or cosmetic surgery" (Lifetime). Instead of working to change bodies, HTLGN focuses on changing minds. The participant is given new undergarments, new clothes, a new hairstyle, and new makeup techniques--all to help properly dress her body type. At the end of the show, the women have a full-on 'Hollywood' photo shoot--wearing nothing but a sheet. In the American version (I'm not sure how the British version ends), the final photo is blown up and displayed on a building, and the women feel great about it! They have a new-found confidence and are completely comfortable with their previously hated and distorted body.

Does it ever work that way? Can women really be convinced they're beautiful and have great bodies simply by putting on a new bra? As Naomi Wolf points out in The Beauty Myth, all women, regardless of their beauty, believe that "the ideal [is] someone tall, thin, white, and blonde, a face without pores, asymmetry, or flaws, someone wholly 'perfect,' and someone whom they felt, in one way or another, they were not" (Wolf 1). Regardless of how beautiful a woman is, she never feels it. It seems out of this world that in the amount of time that it takes to film an hour television show, a woman can completely turn her views of herself around. But it certainly seems like a good idea, considering how many women can't begin this process of finding self-love on their own.

In the clip below, a participant is shown how distorted her body image is. However, to do this, the host has her judge other women based on how large or small they are in comparison.

While the participant ends up feeling better about herself, what about the other women? They were selected simply because they tummies bigger than the show's target. The 'good' intention of making one woman have a more positive body image is overshadowed by the undermining of the other women's self-confidence. Wolf titled her book The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women, and HTLGN is a clear demonstration of this. As the host points out, the larger women are curvaceous and soft, and as the street surveys point out, many men appreciate this body type. (And, as a side note, the street survey definitely highlights the idea that the "beauty myth is not about women at all. It is about men's institutions and institutional power" [Wolf 13].) Perhaps they are among the women who "have a sense of a measure of freedom to dress up or down, put on lipstick or take it off, flaunt themselves or wear sweats--even--even, sometimes to gain or lose weight--without fearing that their value as a woman or their seriousness as a person is at stake" (Wolf 8). But here is a male host telling them that they are all inches larger than this woman who can't stand the way she looks, and they were chosen for this segment because they are attractive, but also because they are 'heavy.' How are they supposed to take that? It's a completely backhanded compliment. And they're receiving it in their underwear!

This idea of celebrating bodies at the same time as rejecting them is much more common than it appears. The term "plus-size model" feels as if the fashion industry (and magazines, television, etc.) is saying: "You're beautiful despite your size" instead of "You're beautiful." Period. End of story. The focus is constantly on the body shape of these women, which makes it seem that they are the exception instead of the norm. And are they even "normal sized"? A plus-sized model is used so a magazine/newspaper/etc. can boast that they are using "real women," but the average woman in America, aged twenty or older, "is 5'3" tall, weighs 164.7 pounds, and has a 37.6 inch waist" and wears a size 14 (Watson).  By comparison, "the average model is 5'11" tall and weighs 117 pounds," and a plus-size model might be, for example, 5'9" and a size 12 (Watson). Things such as Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty (which we've seen a few times in class, CFRB) are making steps in the right direction, but we're still not there.

These women, from CFRB, are definitely a part of a diverse group of body shapes and skin tones. Some have tattoos, others freckles, and others wrinkles. By putting together a large group instead of one woman, CFRB is doing a better job of making women with real bodies appear as the norm. Glamour Magazine stepped on board with this idea of "real" or "normal" beauty in October 2009 by placing an image of a "normal," non-model in their magazine. They drew no extra attention to the shape or size of this woman--she was simply there, looking beautiful.

So why aren't we "there yet," as I stated above the CFRB image? On a supplemental article on Glamour's website, user "abby95" brought up that it is not enough to feature different body shapes. It is not enough to show women who are "average" sized. It is not enough to call these women beautiful because they are curvy. She writes: "I find it funny that although we have all this hype about how we shouldn't think we're fat and about eating disorders and so on. What about the women with bad skin? Braces? Bad hair? Scars? Major cellulite? Stretch marks? Where are they? Sure, these women are plus-size models (read: most of them average), but its not exactly helping the self-esteem of those who have other body image issues. We're practically ignoring everything except the fight of the "fatness" body image" ("Supermodels"). There is much more at stake than diet and exercise. Women put on makeup because they feel they have to--to look "normal." Foundation and concealer aren't accessories (I consider lipstick and eyeshadow to be more accessory-like), they are things we use to attempt to fix a beauty standard of smooth, blemish-free skin. Maybe mousse or hair gel are "hair accessories," but what happens when a woman with curly hair goes product-free? The standard of female beauty goes so much beyond fat and thin, and the media has yet to embrace all of these aspects.

Outside Sources:
"How to Look Good Naked." MyLifetime.com. AETN, Web. <http://www.mylifetime.com/shows/how-to-look-good-naked>. 

Watson, Bruce. "Glamour's risky gamble on full-sized female models." Daily Finance 11 Oct. 2009: Web. <http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/glamours-risky-gamble-on-full-sized-female-models/19190929/>

"Supermodels Who Aren’t Superthin: Meet the Women Who Proudly Bared it All ." Glamour.com. Conde Nast, Oct. 2009. Web. <http://www.glamour.com/health-fitness/2009/10/supermodels-who-arent-superthin#slide=1>.

Come on Barbie, Let's Go Party

This imagine is simply a little side note to the more major blog posts going on in these two sections. Every Sunday (and sometimes late on Saturday nights), Frank Warren posts anonymous secrets that have been mailed to his home. While the topics range from secret candy habits to suicide prevention, this particular one caught my eye--and I don't think it's only because we've been reading about this revolution in which "gender blending in sexual politics" is occuring (Wykes 132). As Naomi Wolf states, "women must want to embody [beauty] and men must want to possess women who embody it. This embodiment is an imperative for women and not for men" (Wolf 12). However, men are now "beginning to aspire to previously feminine concerns for 'looks'", which may be stemming from the "leisure and pleasure industries, which have increasingly targeted male beauty and body consumers through advertising" (Wykes 132). When I was in middle school, I used to rant about how some of the "popular" boys were chubby, had bad skin, had braces, etc. and all the "popular" girls were stick thin, straightened their hair, and were already wearing makeup. It bugged me, even then, that the standards that men and women were held to were so different. But, as stated by both Wilkes and this post card, the tides are turning--well, at least they may be evening.

"The Illustrated Lady"

Julia Gnuse, the most tattooed woman in the world, is inked on over 95% of her body. According to an interview conducted with the Today Show, the tattoos "are not a vanity project; they’re actually a type of camouflage" (Inbar). Gnuse suffers from a skin disorder, cutaneous porphyria, which causes her to blister when exposed to any amount of sunlight. After her first few tattoos, Gnuse succumbed to what those in the body modification community refer to as 'the itch.' And now, aside from "part of her upper lip area and the skin near her ears," her entire body is covered in tattoos instead of scars (Inbar).

Does Gnuse's use of tattoos as "camouflage" effect her beauty or how she could be considered beautiful? While her sores, if left alone in their 'natural' state, would most likely be considered to deem Gnuse ugly, grotesque, or disfigured, the tattoos change the perception of her skin in a different way.  Umberto Eco writes that "just as the decoration of a facade adds Beauty to buildings and rhetorical decoration adds Beauty to discourses, so does the human body appear beautiful thanks to natural ornaments (the navel, the gums, the breasts), as well as artificial ones (clothing and jewelry)" (113). If we were to consider tattoos artificial ornaments, it would be simple to don Gnuse's tattooss beautiful--breathtaking, even. She is more ornamented and decorated than anyone else in the world, so does that make her most beautiful?

Eco quotes Thomas Aquinas in saying that "a thing was beautiful provided that it was suited to its function, in the sense that a mutilated body--or an excessively small one--or an object incapable of correctly performing the function for which it was conceived [...] was to be considered ugly even if produced with valuable materials" (111). On one hand, Gnuse's body and skin are still capable of performing their 'normal' functions (as we discussed in class--skin functions as a protective shelter, a part representing a whole, a boundary between our body and the outside world, a place of encounter, etc.) Tattoos don't make her skin less able to protect her body or desensitize it from make it less able to protect her body. On the other hand, many would consider even a single, large tattoo to be too much and would argue against altering one's skin so heavily. A person with these views might say that Gnuse went too far and her skin no longer serves its 'normal' function, or that it no longer represents any form of 'natural' beauty. Some might say that the tattoos are a form of mutilation--even though they are "valuable materials" (enough sessions to cover an entire body must cost thousands of dollars). And while Gnuse's skin was mutilated prior to the tattoos (her scars), some might argue that her choice to battle nature lends it to be ugly.


As was discussed in class, some things that different cultures consider beautiful (lip plates, neck rings, etc.) disrupt the normal function of a  body. However, both lip plates and neck rings would be considered beautiful by Eco's standards of ornamentation--they are artificial ornaments that 'enhance' natural ornaments. It's hard for us to look at someone with a stretched neck or lip and see its beauty--to us, it looks painful, uncomfortable, unnecessary, or simply strange. These ideas of beauty, as we've seen throughout the past few sections, are clearly cultural. Are the ideas of function cultural as well? Perhaps African tribes consider stretched lips to be entirely functional, because they serve the 'purpose' they were intended: finding a partner. The function might not be necessarily about biological function, just as beauty is not necessarily about worldly perspectives.

The real questions here are: how much is too much? When can we draw the line between 'normal' and 'strange'? Are we even capable of drawing this line, as long as the parts are still functional? Is function a valid argument of beauty?




Outside sources:
Inbar, Michael. "Ink up! Meet the world’s most tattooed woman." Todayshow.com. MSNBC, 27 May 2010. Web. <http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/37374413>.

Experience Has Made Me Rich

"Later, Plotinus, who more radically defined matter as evil and an error, was to identify ugliness clearly with the material world." (from On Ugliness, Eco, p. 25)

This quote, which fell at the beginning of this week's reading, immediately struck me. It might not be wise to admit that throughout the other chapters from On Ugliness, The History of Beauty, and Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality, all I could think about was this quote. But it's true. As Umberto Eco took us on a journey through the Classical World, the Renaissance, Antiquity, the Baroque period, and the modern world, we saw the definition of ugliness change from Plato's idea of ugliness as "an aspect of the imperfection of the physical universe compared to the ideal world" to the modern ideas of excess, kitsch, and camp (24). He states this idea, point-blank: "Ugliness is a social phenomenon [...This] is a highly volatile subject" (394). Many of the ideas explored in earlier chapters of On Ugliness have been reevaluated in the modern world, and concepts of beauty have become more and more subjective. And this disbelief in earlier definitions of ugliness is certainly true of Plotinus' alignment of materialism and ugliness.

The video below, Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance," won Video of the Year at MTV's 2010 Music Video Awards. Clearly, Gaga's music is extremely popular, and despite some of her extreme fashion choices and bizarre choreography, she is someone that many people strive to be like. This could be in any capacity, ranging from the desire to have her body, get tattoos similar to hers, or wear outrageous clothing to something as general as wanting to step outside of the box and pursue a passion.

However, if you watch the video closely, it's nothing but a long, stylized commercial for sunglasses, computers, speakers, Vitamin Water, headphones, and vodka. It can even be taken as a commercial for Gaga herself: she portrays her character as a high-class prostitute taking revenge on her client by setting their bed on fire, therefore turning herself into a commodity that cannot be had. However, the materialism in this video doesn't take away from the aesthetic and conceptual beauty, leading us to the conclusion that materialism doesn't even come close to equating with ugliness.