In Praise of the Supermodel

It is often said by critics of the fashion industry that a young woman on the catwalk provides a bad role model in allowing herself to be commodified as a hollowed-out object, trading on her looks.

But perhaps woman-as-beautiful-object has found a way to turn her own emptiness and reification not only into something that works to her material advantage, but ultimately provides a symbolic form of resistance to the phallocratic order, by subtly exposing how all notions of essence, truth, and identity are based upon deceit and delusion.  

        

For the supermodel is neither an ideal being, nor a natural phenomenon. She is, rather, an artificial creature born of mirrors and make-up, whose mask-like face expresses neither sensitivity, nor true feeling. On the contrary, "her presence serves to submerge all sensibility and expression ... beneath the ecstasy of her gaze and the nullity of her smile" [Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, p. 95].

Rather like the leading ladies from Hollywood's golden age, Linda, Cindy, Naomi, Claudia, and Christy are no ordinary women of flesh and banal sexual status, but mythological beings "around whom crystallized stern rituals and a wasteful profusion which turned them into a generation of sacred monsters" [ibid]. They don't enchant us because of their talent or intelligence, but because of their remoteness and frigidity. Their lack of human warmth and ever-changing appearance, ensures they remain unknown and unlovable; like mysterious and elusive lesbians.

Thus it is that the supermodel is never really with us: she just suddenly appears, struts her stuff, pouts and strikes a pose, turns, and then vanishes - immediately eclipsed by the girl who follows.      

Living Dolls

Thanks to the work of American Pygmalion Matt McMullen, sex-dolls have come a long way during the last two decades. In his obsessive desire to recreate as closely as possible the appearance and feel of  living female bodies, he has developed a range of silicone love companions complete with articulated skeletons, synthetic skin, real hair, and three fully penetrable 'pleasure portals'. 

But, ironically, just as McMullen's RealDolls become ever-more life-like, so real women are becoming ever-more doll-like, due to advances in cosmetic surgery and pressure exerted by our culture for conformity to a deep-throated and large-breasted, but small-waisted and pubicly-hairless ideal formulated within the pornographic imagination.  

And so we come to the case of Valeria Lukyanova; the 21 year old Ukrainian model and internet sensation. Miss Lukyanova - or the Russian Barbie doll as the press like to describe her - is, for us in 2013, what La Cicciolina was for Baudrillard in 1993: a marvellous incarnation of sex in pornographic innocence. 

With her customized body and "realer-than-real curves worthy of an inflatable doll", Miss Lukyanova is both transsexual and transhuman and, as Lawrence would say, she exists beyond desire, cut off from any mystery or allure: even her nudity is no more enticing than that of a dolls. 

All of this casts an interesting light upon the sexual revolution espoused with such passion and conviction by an earlier generation. We were promised that "the bursting forth of the body's full erotic force" would be particularly favourable to women and yet they've ended up having silicone implanted into their breasts and submitting to Hollywood waxing, labiaplasty, and anal bleaching.     

  

Eat the Rich!

Westminster Council are considering cutting benefits paid to obese claimants who refuse to lose weight and enrol on authorised fitness programmes. Evidence, one might suggest, that if Tory politicians and their rich paymasters hate the poor and the unemployed, they positively despise the poor and the unemployed who also have the audacity to overeat. 

For as Baudrillard pointed out thirty years ago, when obesity was almost an exclusively American phenomenon, the super-sized display the truth of the very system that produced them; its greed, its empty inflation, and its lack of shame. 

The obese accept the challenge thrown down by contemporary capitalism: 'You want us to consume? Ok, we'll consume everything until we are no longer fit to work and we swallow you and all your money.' 

When there's no hope of revolution or active resistance, then there can only be a passive-aggressive (and potentially suicidal) response to the violence and obscenity of the culture we are all a part of. Obesity, in other words, is a fatal strategy: an ironic transpolitical counter-challenge to the morbidity of the fat cats. 

Hand Partialism

There's something deeply affecting about the poster campaign for the new perfume from YSL. It's not the gaze of the actress modelling which transfixes; rather, it's the fact that attention is drawn to her hands which have been dipped in purple paint. 

I suddenly see why Baudrillard insists that the slender and lively hands of women are of greater symbolic and seductive beauty than their eyes or hidden sexual organs. 

I suppose that's why nothing gives greater pleasure than to stroll hand-in-hand, or be gently masturbated by a girl with delicate fingers.     

Revenge of the Object

And so to Baudrillard's devastatingly cruel story of the woman who asks her lover what part of her he finds the most attractive, thereby seducing him into platitude and towards his own annihilation as a desiring subject. Having replied that it's her eyes that he loves best, the next day he receives in the post a little package tied with a ribbon and containing an eye-ball gauged from its socket by her own fair hand. 

The violence of the act leaves him shocked and speechless. Never again will he cast his objectifying male gaze over the body of a woman with imperious self-assurance. This act of sacrifice has cost her dearly, but it has cost him far more: she loses an eye - but he loses face. 

It is in this manner that the object takes its revenge: via fatal provocation and a senseless act that belongs to the same order of events as a natural catastrophe or terrorist atrocity. 

How then to respond to the gift of the above ring? Doubtless sent with love, but also a certain knowing irony on behalf of Miss McKeown.