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Salon.com recently published a fabulous personal essay by Rachel Shukert about a night of transgressive photography.
Shukert had “scoffed” at “Girls Gone Wild.” She’d felt disdain for the “tan, tacky, scantily clad girls” who drunkenly allowed themselves to be exploited. (To be fair, she’s no fan of the GGW filmmakers, either.)
But … One night, “some years ago,” when magazine launches still happened because print media still existed, Shukert found herself at just such a swanky event in New York. Alone. Hoping her “crippling shyness” was passsing for “entitled reticence.”
It was then that a ”fairly well-known nightlife photographer” introduced himself to her. He was a “specialist in the school of ‘Look at This Awesome Party You Didn’t Go to Full of Amazing People You Don’t Know.’”
He told her she was pretty, complimented her fashion, and asked whether he might photograph her at an exclusive club down the street from the party. She agreed, and as they passed by the velvet rope she felt she had made it. She had this very cool person’s stamp of approval. She had arrived.
However, what happened to Shukert next shocked her:
I didn’t expect that he would yank up my skirt without asking, rip down my panties and start snapping away, all the while instructing me to “spread” and “look sexy.”
A club employee saw what was going on and kicked Shukert – yeah, Shukert — out. The photographer left with her and offered to send her the pictures. “Humiliation,” Shukert writes, “had restored my assertiveness.” She ordered him to erase the photos.
As you might guess, the experience caused Shukert to reevaluate her attitude about the women featured in GGW:
Like me, they were probably just surprised and flattered by the attention, trying to navigate the dangerously permeable line between being admired and being objectified — a line it’s often hard to tell you’ve crossed until it’s too late.
I absolutely suggest reading the entire essay over at Salon!
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I don’t understand how that isn’t completely illegal. He pulled OFF her panties and started taking picture without her consent. I am so absolutely disgusted by what I just read. Did she know it would be this sort of event (even so, S&M and wife swap things have RULES they go over first and that’s much more hardcore)? Or was she just invited to a party and then manhandled?
I just read the full article. That sort of invalidates my questions.
While I agree that the sexual revolution is a great thing- there’s a lot of weirdness that still comes along with how far you should go in order to APPEAR like a free spirit, or even just accepted, when the real answer is as soon as you start to feel uncomfortable, you stop- whether that means being a virgin in turtleneck sweaters your whole like or an exhibitionist.
Something like Sex in the City shows how women are now able to act because of the freedoms that were fought for, but it also makes some more reserved people feel like they’re not cool because they’re not talking about some guy’s shlong. It’s a pretty difficult area, because people will always want to be cool by pretending that they’re something they’re not, but in the case of sex it’s getting into a dangerous area when someone’s not prepared.
With all of the crap I’ve heard about photographers lately, it makes me wonder if the ones that want to shoot models are all just assholes.
Wow. If it had been me, that guy would have gotten a stiletto heel in the eye.
Stories like this totally reinforce why I think that all women should know a few basic self defense moves.
Self-defense wasn’t needed here. When she decided to stop, he stopped. He was an asshole (as presented), sure, and the initial move was not right, but he didn’t continue to force anything.
Please, if somebody tried to forcibly pull of my panties, they’d end up with a broken nose for their troubles. Maybe that’s just me, though.
Precisely – it is you. She may well have been fully able to defend herself if need be. But she was going along here. And that’s the issue at hand.
Sounds to me like she was having fun until the bouncer slut-shamed her, and now all these years later her mind has twisted the scenario until she was the innocent farm girl and he was the mustache twisting villain.
Because somebody jumping though hoops to get attention from someone they find desirable is evil when its woman jumping for a man, but only right and just when it’s a man jumping for a woman.
Where did you get the idea that she was having fun? Just because she was young and naive and moved to NYC doesn’t mean she wanted random asshats photographing her cooch.
And I gathered from the article that the bouncer “slut-shamed her,” as you put it, pretty much immediately, so it’s not like she was just hanging out with her parts out for a good thirty minutes.
The whole story has a ring of someone “re imagining” the facts in order to lessen their own culpability and make someone else out to be the big bad. If photog was so handsy why did the bouncer toss them both out? And if the bar was so “dark and secluded” how come the bouncer was there in a hot minute? Also she is recounting the story through the lens of her beliefs and the distortion of time. I am sure every time she remembers this story the photog gets more villainous and she gets more naive and innocent. Everyone is the hero of their own story.
the article was interesting. It does make me wonder how things would have gone without the bouncer – she says he jumped right in without her consent. would she have got her senses back in a moment anyways, and told him to fuck off? Or would she have enjoyed the validation and gone with it? Hard to say.
This to me is too much extrapolation on ‘it happened to me, therefore it could happen to you’. I’m happy you learned something about yourself. A good thing to re-evaluate. It doesn’t necessarily say anything about anyone else though.
[...] Dirty Pictures I Didn’t Want Taken – Zelda Lily [...]
Just playing hard to get.
[...] kind of an interesting direction, though. There tends to be backlash when women are perceived as being objectified in advertising, yet there’s an argument that men are objectified in similar [...]