Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

physical fact. The Bunny brand is a Lacanian play of signs bouncing blithely away from any signifiable sexuality.
     
    It can hardly be argued that the ubiquity of the Playboy Bunny logo or its popularity with young girls are positive developments, but it must be understood that what is being objected to here, as elsewhere, is not sex, but symbol: the black-and-white, lipless, featureless symbol of a perky, prosthetic sexuality whose alienation from the flesh and intimacy of real sex can be mass-produced. At root, Bunny orthodoxy is repulsed by human personality, as Hefner himself explained: “Consider the kind of girl that we made popular: the Playmate of the Month. She is joyful, joking, never sophisticated… we are not interested in the mysterious, difficult woman.”
     
    The Bunny symbolises erotic capital as distinct from the lived experience of flesh. As a sign, it overwhelms the sexual encounters it has come to signify. A 2010 survey of unmarried Americans between 18 and 29 revealed that many have little knowledge of even common contraceptive methods such as condoms and the pill, but when we first saw the Bunny on our lunchboxes, we had a naughtily amorphous understanding of what it was supposed to mean. And one thing is certain: when a fifty-year-old rubber-stamp rabbit in a bow-tie becomes an internationally recognised sign for the mummy-and-daddy dance, it’s safe to say that something has gone horribly wrong with our understanding of sexuality.
     
Starving hearts
    What is at play here is a horror of flesh: a rubberised capitalist repugnance for the meat and intimacy of human sexuality. Modern censors are necessarily misled about the nature of consumer frigidity, because their complicity is a necessary part of the trick: the strategic alienation of sexual consumers from their erotic selves relies precisely on censorship to blur the distinction between sexual intimacy and erotic capital, only one of which can be mass-produced. Such a joyless vision of eroticism only looks edgy and exciting because the young and randy have nothing else to work with.
     
    Antiquated paradigms of sexual morality policed the sexuality of young people with a variety of instruments of rusty erotic torture, from tight-laced steel corsets to spiked genital casings designed to prevent young men from masturbating. Our liberated, libertine age of funtime mercantile eroticism requires us to internalise the corset and the spikes; to starve, suffer, spend, primp and perform, to take our place in a monetised pageant of sexual scarcity when, in fact, we have always lived in an age of erotic abundance.
     
    The ooze and tickle of realtime sex, which can neither be controlled nor mass-produced and sold back to us, threatens both capital and censorship. Shaming the choices of young people whilst bombarding us with pounding, plasticised, pornified visions of alienated sexuality creates an impression of sexual scarcity that serves both agendas. But if human beings own anything by right and birth, we own an abundance of flesh, an abundance of dirt and sex and sublimity. Only by embracing this abundance can we liberate ourselves.
     
    The eroto-capitalist horror of human flesh, and of female flesh in particular, is a pathology that can and must be resisted. If we are to free ourselves from this pernicious fear of flesh, we have to learn to live in our own meat. We have to reject the narrow coffin of performance and perfection laid out for young women and increasing numbers of young men, and learn to evoke and respond to our own desires. If we are ever to achieve real sexual freedom, we must be brave enough to resist the ruthless logic of performative erotic irony.
     
    A new model of corporate puritanism is on the march, and what is being censored on all sides is precisely Baudrillard’s “evocation of the body”. The Western female body, which seems to be everywhere on display, is in fact marginalised and appropriated by a culture of monetised sexuality that alienates us from our authentic personal and political selves.
     
A note on whores and whorishness
    If we are to properly understand women’s oppression in the West today, objectification and sexual performance must be understood as work. The sexual sell is real labour, propping up a socially mandated measure of erotic capital. From the working hours devoted to the purchase and strategic application of clothes and hair and beauty products, to the actual labour of dieting and