The Model and the Mannequins

Abbey Clancy and friends in the new ad  for Veet and Scholl

(Virgo Health/PA, 2014)

Just when I thought I'd finished with the question of female objectification, model and Strictly Come Dancing winner Abbey Clancy appears semi-nude in the company of five mannequins as part of a new promotional campaign for hair-removal specialists Veet and leading foot-care brand Scholl.

Ms Clancy is literally prepared to play the dummy in order to encourage other women to have the confidence to expose their legs and feet with pride. She informs us with all the spontaneity and warmth of a corporate sex doll reading a press release written by condescending and misogynistic morons:

"With such a busy lifestyle and a little girl to run around after I barely have time to visit a salon for beauty treatments, so easy-to-use products such as Scholl Velvet Smooth Express Pedi and Veet EasyWax help me get long-lasting professional results from home. It's not just about how great your feet and legs look, but how you feel when they are prepped and ready to bare as soon as the sun comes out!"

 
Rather coyly, and unlike her plastic associates, Ms Clancy keeps her knickers on. Presumably this is to help us spot which one she is. It is also intended to eroticize the image. But, dear Abbey, don't you know that whether she is in or out of her underwear makes very little difference to the desirability of modern woman having lost her nakedness long ago?

No matter how prepped your legs and feet might be and no matter how much you may flaunt your body, you do so in what Lawrence describes as a non-physical, merely optical aspect and your nudity is about as interesting as a dolls, cut off from any mystery or charm.

In fact, it's even less interesting and little wonder that many men will look at this picture and quickly decide in favour of the mannequins: for why desire an object still tainted with traces of subjectivity when one can love an object free from all residual humanity?

Bukkake

 Illustration: en.wikipedi.org/wiki/Bukkake

When viewing a bukkake scene which, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the act, involves multiple male figures masturbating and ejaculating onto the face of a young woman, one is tempted to ask what the essential role of the latter might be; is she there as a necessary object of desire, or does she serve a symbolic function as sacrificial victim? 

Or is she not, in a still more fundamental sense, simply serving as an alibi? That is to say, is she not there merely to placate the heterosexual make conscience? 

For it seems to me that the real excitement of bukkake is generated by the fact that it's a homosocial and homoerotic event; a rare opportunity for straight men to be naked and in intimate physical proximity. It's not the sight of a woman on her knees that arouses, but of other men openly masturbating in a cock-and-cumfest which fetishises phallic masculinity and elevates semen to first place within a hierarchy of bodily fluids.

The viewer of such scenes which, as with the vast majority of porn, are shot from a male POV, is expected to identify with the anonymous (sometimes masked) male figures and encouraged to enjoy the feeling of vicarious pleasure.

They are not, of course, expected or encouraged to concern themselves with the young women at the centre of the action or think about the problematic sexual politics of bukkake, which, involving as it does, an undeniable element of violence and ritual humiliation, is uncomfortably close to a form of group rape and not merely a disguised form of gay circle jerk.