Every so often, I return to books that shaped my thinking as a young person. Recently, I’ve done that with John Berger’s classic 1972 text on art history and mass media, Ways of Seeing. I was first assigned it in a film-studies class in high school, and since then, I’ve always kept a copy. The book holds up, nearly 50 years later, for the ways it describes how much visuality is connected to how we are gendered. “Woman,” as a social category, is produced through visual culture as someone who is “seen,” conducting surveillance on herself and her image as available for consumption. Berger’s text reads well with Frantz Fanon’s classic work of anti-colonial psychoanalysis, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), in which he describes how Black people are made aware of being “seen” as “other” in the West. He calls this “third person consciousness.” Even as our understandings of gender and race have expanded in recent decades, so much in these works still holds true.
I have underlined many parts of both texts over the years. And last week I posted a quote from Ways of Seeing on Instagram:
Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest—if you do you become less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion of their power. The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness …
It reads as though Berger could see the future, because THIS is the truth about social media. As more research is done on its impact, and on how social media produces anxiety, what is becoming clearer and clearer is that glamorous images on social media fuel the insecurity and stress felt by so many of their consumers. On the other side of that, in order to build “platforms” on social media, there is a market advantage to performing glamour and desirability. I feel the pressure myself as I prepare for the rollout of my next book. I am being strategic with attempting to draw people to my work, and I would be lying if I said the image performance didn’t matter. Now, the reason it matters to me is because I want people to read what I have to say. And I want them to even when what I’m saying is a criticism of the very vehicles I’m using to reach out to the public. It’s meta (pun intended).
For instance, in my book on gender theory, Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation, I wrote about the challenges of using social media as a place for political deliberation and debate. These aren’t public squares, really. They’re corporate platforms. And when we post, we are representing ourselves. And because we represent ourselves with each post, we are relatively unwilling to allow our opinions to be swayed, to admit being wrong or being changed. That is, unless the thing we’ve said is a PR debacle. Then we want to “fix” the error. But that’s still different from the organic ways that a good conversation can allow one to grow.
My worry is about both the political/intellectual world of social media and the visual one. But I’ve been heartened by a recent trend in which people have been showing their face through an Instagram filter that promises perfection, and then showing their “real” face. Now, I’m not sure I believe in the concept of a real face (our faces are constantly changing through the day and seasons, with emotions and sleep and sun and age), but what is refreshing about this is that people (and it’s mostly women I’ve seen) are rejecting the idea of putting a perfect face forward. Collectively, it is teaching us (and I include myself in this) to release some of the pressures of being seen.
However, beyond the pressure of putting forward a “good” face, the thing that I find even harder about social media is how it threatens to take away the very thing it is meant to deliver. It promises connection across the boundaries of space. You can find your people on it—people with shared interests, identities, and commitments. If you are isolated or alienated, it offers an olive branch of possibility. That’s a gift that can be snatched away when it feels like an unsafe place on which to be vulnerable, or naked. I want the community, but I don’t want to leave myself open to being devastated by it.
And that brings me to another one of Berger’s arguments. He describes the difference between nakedness and nudity in the West. He says nudity is a form of representation, a performance of being “unclothed” that is put together for the viewer. That is different from the raw “undressed” status of nakedness. Nakedness is something unselfconscious and matter-of-fact.
Nakedness is hard. But there is nothing quite so beautiful as being “naked” in front of people, revealed in all of our messy vulnerability and cherished nevertheless. What I have come to realize is that in order to pursue nakedness, we have to be deliberate about what we take in, and maybe less concerned with thinking about what we put out. Because if we take in fallible human beauty more than glamour, perhaps we can better appreciate it in ourselves. I believe we must curate what we read or view or pay attention to. And that curation should be consistent with the values we hold dear and how we are seeking to heal and grow. For me, as a 49-year-old woman, this has included following interviews on StyleLikeU with women who are post-menopausal and on my_bloodyhell with women who are in perimenopause, as well as bookstagrammers, musicians, visual artists, and landscape photographers who remind me that life is about living inside your body and mind and seeking connection—not about convincing others that yours is a life worth living.
And it’s a practice. In my first book, published in 2004, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop, I wrote about the importance of curation in terms of supporting music with the values we hold dear. And in Vexy Thing, I wrote about curation of all media as a way to live anti-patriarchal values. The fact that I’m still working through this, just like I’m still working my way through reading Berger, is a lesson. Beliefs are rarely a destination. What they are is a meditation on how to live in a difficult and yet nevertheless often-beautiful world.