Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

sterile. For the time being, the myth is winning its campaign against our sexual individuality.” 5
     
Entropy and irony
    Much of the process by which the motifs of modern pornography have entered mainstream culture is excused by blithe claims on the part of producers and advertisers that this brutal objectification of young bodies is somehow ‘ironic'. The excuse is feeble; the irony, however, is real. The pastiche of sexuality adopted by ambitious young people is nothing if not ironic: how could we be at all self-aware and not comprehend the blackly comic alienation of erotic work?
     
    Irony is, in fact, one of the few authentic motifs of Western erotic culture in the early 21st century. A sort of kitsch, tongue-in-cheek naughtiness is relentlessly marketed at children and adults alike, from the peddling of ‘Lolita'-themed bedspreads and schoolbags to the revival of ‘burlesque’ which has been translated from its roots in working-class protest theatre to a tastefully bourgeois package of sexual objectification, wrapped in feather-fans and expensive corsetry.
     
    As popstars and presenters clamour for their turn with the nipple tassels, businesswoman and burlesque superstar Dita Von Teese extemporises on what she calls ‘The Art of the Tease": “I sell, in a word, magic. Burlesque is a world of illusion and dreams and of course, the striptease…. As a burlesque performer, I entice my audience, bringing their minds closer and closer to sex and then -- as a good temptress must -- snatching it away.”
     
    The ‘tease’ is a cry from the heart of the capitalist sexual manifesto. What is sold is precisely illusion: a campy, peek-a-boo frigidity that leaves the consumer dazzled and insatiate.
     
    Apologists for burlesque as an art form tend to enthuse about the ‘empowering’ nature of the ‘tease’, which lost all of its underground credentials the moment bourgeois gyms started offering keep-fit burlesque classes. Polestars, one of the largest companies to run such classes in the UK, claims to offer “a chance for the modern-day woman to learn the old art of seduction and improve your body… release your inner minx in saucy burlesque style!”.
     
    Sometimes one’s inner minx just doesn’t want to come out and play nicely. I lasted six months as a teenage burlesque dancer before all the saucy smiling started to make my face hurt.
     
Bunny and the brand
    The sudden ubiquity of the Playboy Bunny logo perfectly exemplifies this cutesy alienation of marketable erotic signs from the sweaty reality of sex. In the early 21st century, the Bunny began an inexorable hop into the mainstream, appearing on pencil cases, hairslides and other products marketed at children. Feminist campaigners were the first to respond, with worthy projects such as “Bin the Bunny” attempting to educate young girls about the harmful nature of the porn industry; next, the family values brigade hijacked the Bunny as a symbol of moral decline. British Conservative leader David Cameron spoke out against the rabbit in his election campaign of 2010, explaining that “when you see a little girl wearing a T-shirt with a Playboy bunny, that’s wrong, isn’t it?”
     
    But the Playboy empire itself has long been in decline. In the half-century since Gloria Steinem went undercover as a House Bunny to expose the mawkishly misogynist vision of white, submissive heteronormativity peddled by the playboy empire, Hefner has been far less successful as a pimp and pornographer than as a branding expert; even the revolving population of Playmates themselves are largely ignored by the popular press, the cotton-tail and flouncy ears looking droopy and dated in the harsh light of 21st-century celebrity. When, in 2009, the Playboy empire went up for sale, buyers were more interested in the logo than in the rest of the crumbling, impotent company: “there is more to this brand than just sex,” Kelly O’Keefe, a branding specialist at Virginia Commonwealth University, told Reuters. “There is sophistication, there is lifestyle, and there is freedom.”
     
    Sophistication, lifestyle and freedom are worlds away from the fumbling, awkward, sticky revelations that necessarily accompany one’s first decade of sexual experience. Fantasy is, of course, deeply implicated in the physicality of sex, which takes place at the panting border between dream and secretion, but the Playboy Bunny emblematises the absolute dislocation of fantasy from