So let's say you're a guy who's been reading about boudoir pics (perhaps at THIS VERY BLOG), you find the idea intriguing, and you start to think that it might be nice to have some similar pictures of your special lady friend.
Today we're going to talk about how you might suggest that in a supportive and nonpressuring way. (Yes, that's right, it's another Unsolicited Relationship Advice post! Come for the racy pics and DJT rants, stay for the unsolicited relationship advice.)
I'm going to start with two baseline assumptions: (1) you already have a good relationship, and your lines of communication are open and clear; and (2) you have a good guess that she'd be receptive to the idea, or at least wouldn't be adamantly opposed to it.
If neither of those things is true, then this probably isn't the best time to go pushing for a boudoir shoot. As I've talked about before, boudoir pics frequently represent a significant gift of trust (not to mention a significant financial outlay, at least if you're using a good and established photographer), and if your relationship isn't currently as secure as it could be, then it may not be reasonable to ask for something that big. Meanwhile, if you happen to know that the lady would definitely not be open to the idea -- maybe she's extremely modest, or uncomfortable with her body at the moment, or this just plain isn't her style -- then, again, this might not be the time.
Boudoir isn't for everyone. It doesn't have to be for everyone. And with this as in all things: her body, her choice. Respect your partner's wishes, and don't push for something she truly does not want to do.
But assuming that she's curious and potentially into the idea, you shouldn't have to do a hard sell. What you might have to do is offer gentle encouragement, which I'd suggest structuring as follows:
1. Tell her why you want pictures of her.
This might be a hard one, because a lot of guys are unaccustomed to expressing their desires frankly and with sensitivity. The culture of Our Dumb Society hands you a whole lot of vocabulary about objectifying women at an emotional distance, but doesn't provide much help when it comes to earnestly and honestly telling your partner "you turn me on, and this is why."
To some extent, you're going to have to chart your own path here, and it's natural to feel self-conscious and awkward about that. It's totally normal to have flashbacks to the time you bared your heart to Mindy in ninth grade and got it stomped into paste and resolved to never ever do that again. Confessing your desires and being vulnerable -- even a little bit, even with a degree of self-protective irony -- is hard. It is!
But it's also really, really important. If you want her to do this for you, then you have to do this for her. You have to offer a little bit of vulnerability in turn and tell her, openly and with specificity, that the idea of having pictures of her turns you on, and why, and how.
There are a million impersonal beautiful women who are naked on the internet. You can look at them anytime. But there is only one lady you're asking to do this right now. So what you need to do is think hard and honestly about what makes her special, and why her pictures would be uniquely treasured, and why you want to see her, above and beyond all the other women in the world, in this light.
Then you have to tell her that. Many (read: all) women are self-conscious about perceived imperfections in their bodies, so this is where you really need to bolster her confidence that yes, she's attractive; yes, she's desirable; yes, you want to see her in pictures, and no one else in the world will do. Write it in a card if you can't work up the nerve to say it aloud (Valentine's and anniversaries are good for this, especially in combination with gifts as suggested below), or say it aloud if you can't work up the nerve to write it down -- whichever's easier. But tell her. Make it personal. Make her feel special, and make her understand why it's special to you.
2. Do the legwork for her.
Some women prefer to take charge and control their own projects from start to finish, and if your partner happens to be of this mindset, then you can safely skip this step. But if you're looking to make this as easy and stress-free as possible, then one of the ways you can do that is to look up boudoir photographers in your area. Figure out what's in your budget, who's got solid reviews, whose style you like, and whose aesthetic seems most likely to flatter your lady friend. If you know that she's more likely to be comfortable shooting with an all-female team, look for that.
Then, when you're ready to move forward with the proposal, you can point her to one or two of your top choices. Be ready to discuss why you picked out those photographers, and what in their portfolios made you think that they'd be able to put her at ease and portray her in the best light. Go through the samples together, if you like: this gives you an opportunity to talk about what she is and isn't comfortable showing, to get her thoughts on different poses and outfits (if you're thinking of buying lingerie in the future, listen carefully to what she likes), and to tell her (again! you can never do this too often!) how you'd like to see her.
3. Provide some inspiration.
Again, this might not be a step you need to spend much time on (if she prefers to work independently or wants to make it a surprise, step on out of the way), but if you think your partner would find it helpful, you might offer a little bit of inspiration as to her props or outfit.
I don't recommend laying out the entire ensemble and storyboarding her whole shoot for her -- it's supposed to be about what she likes and how she wants to be seen, and it's not for you to dictate her whole shoot -- but if you happened to buy an extra-nice piece of lingerie for Valentine's, or a special necklace for an anniversary, it might be a romantic gesture to ask for its inclusion. If the purpose of these pictures is not only to commemorate how lovely she looks, but her personal and irreplaceable importance to you, then including signifiers of your relationship in the shoot can add to the romance.
Besides, I'm a big advocate of building sentimental value into pieces by using them as touchstones as often as possible, e.g. giving a lovely trinket one year and then including that gift in a personal photograph the next year. It's a way to remember who you were at that moment in time, and how you felt about each other. Including the object as a symbol can help anchor the sentiment.
4. Offer to cover costs.
Good boudoir pics ain't cheap. You're paying for the time and talent of a photographer who's spent a lot of years building up those skills, and you're probably also paying for a makeup artist and hairstylist to help those pictures look as good as they possibly can. The investment is well worth it (really, you do not want to be the one who kicks off the Pinterest Fails of boudoir pics), but it is an investment.
So cover it. If you want the pics, don't ask her to pay for them. More than that, make a gift of the shoot. As I've discussed in prior posts (and there are lots of other accounts on the internet that will back me up on this), doing a boudoir shoot can be a great experience in building up a woman's confidence and helping her explore and embrace herself as an unabashedly sensual, beautiful creature -- but many women don't feel comfortable spending that much money on themselves, and for something that they might perceive as vain or frivolous.
If she doesn't have to pay for it, then she doesn't have to worry about that. Making a gift of the shoot removes both the financial pressure and the emotional pressure of having to worry about whether she's vain for wanting to do such a thing. Instead, her participation -- and the pictures -- becomes her reciprocal gift to you.
The flipside of this, however, is that I don't recommend springing for a shoot before you've discussed it with your partner and cleared it as something she really wants to do. This is not something I'd recommend as a surprise gift. If it's really not her thing, then she's stuck with a choice between doing something that she doesn't really want to do (and, spoiler, the pictures never come out looking great if the woman doesn't really want to be there, because confidence and enthusiasm are pretty key to boudoir), or potentially wasting a lot of money.
I think it's much better to wait until you've talked it over, settled on a photographer, and figured out a reasonable timetable for when she wants to do this (maybe she isn't totally happy with some aspect of her appearance right now and wants to take a couple of months to work on that first; for example, I totally ruined my nails recently by stripping them with acetone polish remover way too often, and it's probably going to be a couple of months before I have anything but stubby finger nubs going). Then you can go ahead and buy the gift shoot. But please, please don't lock her into anything by putting money down before you've talked.
And that concludes today's episode of Unsolicited Relationship Advice from a (Not-Yet-Existent) Romance Writer.
Monday, February 27, 2017
Wednesday, February 15, 2017
Some Thoughts on Valentine's
The other day, a friend of mine -- a relatively recent immigrant from a country where Valentine's Day isn't really a Thing -- asked me what the deal was with this peculiar American holiday.
For a minute I thought about giving him the cynical, flip answer: that it's a fake commercial holiday invented to keep jewelers and chocolate manufacturers afloat. But that isn't what I actually believe (you'll be shocked, shocked! to know that it's a bit wordier and more complicated than that) and also I didn't know that it would really answer his question, so I begged off and said I'd blog about it sometime.
So here is what I really believe: that Valentine's Day is a stress test for relationships, and also that it's an interesting insight into what happens when you ask (mostly) men to perform emotional labor within those relationships.
A stress test, in the medical context, usually means asking the patient to undergo some mild physical exertion in order to put a little extra stress on the heart and thereby reveal problems that might otherwise go unnoticed. If you're healthy, a stress test is nothing. But if you're not, it can be alarming -- and not infrequently, you might have thought you were just fine, only to discover that, if you subject the system to a little extra demand, there's something amiss after all.
That's what V-Day is to relationships. The extra pressure of societal expectations to Do Something Romantic and the near-universal human temptation to compare your situation to your friends' and peers' creates a little extra stress that isn't otherwise there (sure, there are other stereotypical romantic occasions like anniversaries, but they don't all fall on the same day for everyone and thus don't impose the same pressure to compare; you'd never go to a restaurant and know that every other couple at every other table was celebrating their anniversary too).
If your relationship is healthy, your communications are clear, and your expectations are aligned, V-Day is easy, even fun. It's an excuse to do something nice for each other, or to affirm your own relationship by making fun of everybody else doing stuff.
But if your relationship is new and fragile, then it's hard to know how much stress it can withstand. And if you're not in great shape and there are deeper underlying problems, they're likely to buckle and crack under the strain.
It's these uncertainties that make V-Day as profitable as it is. It isn't the people in secure relationships who make V-Day profitable (the ones who like doing stuff spend money on each other anyhow; the ones who don't care about it aren't going to be pressured into dropping dollars on a holiday they perceive as fake). It's the insecure ones. People spend money on V-Day because they're trying to buy strength into their relationship.
This isn't meant to be a criticism, btw. Sometimes it's actually a very good idea, and sometimes it works. Sometimes it's inevitable (if you've only been dating someone for a couple of months, you can't have as strong a relationship as someone who's been happily married for 20 years; you simply don't have that reservoir of shared time). But the fact is, people who only spend money on V-Day are doing that because they're trying to buy what they don't already have, and what is not actually possible to purchase directly.
Which brings me to my second point: V-Day is pretty interesting in what it says about how difficult it is for (some) American men to perform emotional labor in relationships.
The general dynamic in most relationships (and let me underline that it's general, and I know there are plenty of exceptions, but generally I still think this is true) is that the woman does most of the emotional labor, by which I mean that she's the one who is primarily responsible for maintaining social connections, being "fun," and "keeping the romance alive." More often than not, it's women who arrange social plans for the couple, who write the thank-you notes and everyday emails to their friends and family, who stereotypically make the candelit dinners and wear the expensive lingerie and make sure their toenails are painted and don't "let themselves go" and all of that.
(Again: I realize I'm generalizing. I realize that social norms are, however slowly, changing. I realize there are plenty of men, especially young men, who take an active role in these things. That's great! But by and large, for decades, women in This Dumb Society have been conditioned by TV shows and movie rom-coms and well-meaning peers to feel like they have an obligation to be pretty and vivacious and maintain the relationship's romance as part of their feminine role [and if you don't do it, you know you aren't doing it, and you probably made that choice intentionally vs. doing it automatically without a moment's awareness that it was anything other than "normal"], and by and large, men have not been subject to the same pressures in the same way.)
V-Day is the one day a year where that expectation is reversed. The expectation on V-Day is that the man will be the one who does the primary romantic gesture, whether that's taking his girlfriend out on the town or bringing home a box of chocolates or surprising his wife with a diamond necklace or whatever. It's pretty explicit in the way this holiday is marketed that the man is supposed to do something romantic on Valentine's.
And that is really interesting to me, because the main thing you see as a result is that lots and lots of men have no idea how to be romantic. They just don't have the emotional vocabulary for it. They don't have any independent conception of what this is supposed to mean or how you would even articulate it.
So, lacking a real ability to express themselves on a deeper level, they buy the pre-packaged sentiment. They let greeting cards do their talking, and they let chocolates do their courting, and they let more expensive presents stand in for any deeper sentiments that they might want to share. And what should be a thoughtful and individualized expression of a unique and special relationship with a unique and special person instead gets transmuted, literally, into a mass-produced commodity. Whatever you wanted to say is trammeled and limited by the options available on the shelf, and many men never even consider that they might want to express themselves in some other way.
And then -- and this is really interesting to me too -- there's a certain resentment, half joking but half not, about doing even that, because doing emotional labor is hard (it's work! that's why they call it "labor"!) and it's frequently not something guys are accustomed to doing, and when you have to do something hard and unfamiliar on cue because Society Says So, then the natural unexamined reaction is to look for a way out of it.
It's so common to hear guys joking about how they "have to" do something for Valentine's that I think even guys who want to do things often feel obligated to shrug it off, like they're only doing it because they have to. There's a lot of joking about how much money you have to spend, or how you totally almost forgot about it because lol who pays attention to Valentine's, or how you forgot and your girlfriend never let you hear the end of it and women, so emotional and needy, amirite?!
The upshot of all this is that men often go to their significant others with some version of "honey, V-Day is a fake commercial holiday anyway, you don't really need a dumb card and a box of drugstore chocolates, do you?" And women feel a pressure to be agreeable, to not be emotional-and-needy, to signal that they're easy to get along with and not shrewish or demanding, so plenty of them will laugh and shrug it off and say "no, of course not!"
Some of them mean that. Some of them don't. Lots of them say it and think they mean it and then wonder, later, why they feel unappreciated when everybody knows that Valentine's is a fake holiday and they genuinely don't care for flowers or diamonds. And then their boyfriends or husbands might wonder why they're being frozen out when they talked about this and everybody agreed not to do anything for Valentine's.
The answer is that it isn't about the cards or the chocolates. It's about signifying to the woman that she's appreciated, and that the relationship is worth putting time and effort (and, yes, sometimes money -- but money is the paradoxically cheapest option here; time and effort count for more) into. It's about recognizing that this holiday is an externally imposed social ritual of no significance in and of itself (so by all means, skip out on it if that's what you both want to do), but it is also and because of that a stress test for your relationship, and ignoring it may mean ignoring a valuable early warning that something deeper and more serious is at risk.
For a minute I thought about giving him the cynical, flip answer: that it's a fake commercial holiday invented to keep jewelers and chocolate manufacturers afloat. But that isn't what I actually believe (you'll be shocked, shocked! to know that it's a bit wordier and more complicated than that) and also I didn't know that it would really answer his question, so I begged off and said I'd blog about it sometime.
So here is what I really believe: that Valentine's Day is a stress test for relationships, and also that it's an interesting insight into what happens when you ask (mostly) men to perform emotional labor within those relationships.
A stress test, in the medical context, usually means asking the patient to undergo some mild physical exertion in order to put a little extra stress on the heart and thereby reveal problems that might otherwise go unnoticed. If you're healthy, a stress test is nothing. But if you're not, it can be alarming -- and not infrequently, you might have thought you were just fine, only to discover that, if you subject the system to a little extra demand, there's something amiss after all.
That's what V-Day is to relationships. The extra pressure of societal expectations to Do Something Romantic and the near-universal human temptation to compare your situation to your friends' and peers' creates a little extra stress that isn't otherwise there (sure, there are other stereotypical romantic occasions like anniversaries, but they don't all fall on the same day for everyone and thus don't impose the same pressure to compare; you'd never go to a restaurant and know that every other couple at every other table was celebrating their anniversary too).
If your relationship is healthy, your communications are clear, and your expectations are aligned, V-Day is easy, even fun. It's an excuse to do something nice for each other, or to affirm your own relationship by making fun of everybody else doing stuff.
But if your relationship is new and fragile, then it's hard to know how much stress it can withstand. And if you're not in great shape and there are deeper underlying problems, they're likely to buckle and crack under the strain.
It's these uncertainties that make V-Day as profitable as it is. It isn't the people in secure relationships who make V-Day profitable (the ones who like doing stuff spend money on each other anyhow; the ones who don't care about it aren't going to be pressured into dropping dollars on a holiday they perceive as fake). It's the insecure ones. People spend money on V-Day because they're trying to buy strength into their relationship.
This isn't meant to be a criticism, btw. Sometimes it's actually a very good idea, and sometimes it works. Sometimes it's inevitable (if you've only been dating someone for a couple of months, you can't have as strong a relationship as someone who's been happily married for 20 years; you simply don't have that reservoir of shared time). But the fact is, people who only spend money on V-Day are doing that because they're trying to buy what they don't already have, and what is not actually possible to purchase directly.
Which brings me to my second point: V-Day is pretty interesting in what it says about how difficult it is for (some) American men to perform emotional labor in relationships.
The general dynamic in most relationships (and let me underline that it's general, and I know there are plenty of exceptions, but generally I still think this is true) is that the woman does most of the emotional labor, by which I mean that she's the one who is primarily responsible for maintaining social connections, being "fun," and "keeping the romance alive." More often than not, it's women who arrange social plans for the couple, who write the thank-you notes and everyday emails to their friends and family, who stereotypically make the candelit dinners and wear the expensive lingerie and make sure their toenails are painted and don't "let themselves go" and all of that.
(Again: I realize I'm generalizing. I realize that social norms are, however slowly, changing. I realize there are plenty of men, especially young men, who take an active role in these things. That's great! But by and large, for decades, women in This Dumb Society have been conditioned by TV shows and movie rom-coms and well-meaning peers to feel like they have an obligation to be pretty and vivacious and maintain the relationship's romance as part of their feminine role [and if you don't do it, you know you aren't doing it, and you probably made that choice intentionally vs. doing it automatically without a moment's awareness that it was anything other than "normal"], and by and large, men have not been subject to the same pressures in the same way.)
V-Day is the one day a year where that expectation is reversed. The expectation on V-Day is that the man will be the one who does the primary romantic gesture, whether that's taking his girlfriend out on the town or bringing home a box of chocolates or surprising his wife with a diamond necklace or whatever. It's pretty explicit in the way this holiday is marketed that the man is supposed to do something romantic on Valentine's.
And that is really interesting to me, because the main thing you see as a result is that lots and lots of men have no idea how to be romantic. They just don't have the emotional vocabulary for it. They don't have any independent conception of what this is supposed to mean or how you would even articulate it.
So, lacking a real ability to express themselves on a deeper level, they buy the pre-packaged sentiment. They let greeting cards do their talking, and they let chocolates do their courting, and they let more expensive presents stand in for any deeper sentiments that they might want to share. And what should be a thoughtful and individualized expression of a unique and special relationship with a unique and special person instead gets transmuted, literally, into a mass-produced commodity. Whatever you wanted to say is trammeled and limited by the options available on the shelf, and many men never even consider that they might want to express themselves in some other way.
And then -- and this is really interesting to me too -- there's a certain resentment, half joking but half not, about doing even that, because doing emotional labor is hard (it's work! that's why they call it "labor"!) and it's frequently not something guys are accustomed to doing, and when you have to do something hard and unfamiliar on cue because Society Says So, then the natural unexamined reaction is to look for a way out of it.
It's so common to hear guys joking about how they "have to" do something for Valentine's that I think even guys who want to do things often feel obligated to shrug it off, like they're only doing it because they have to. There's a lot of joking about how much money you have to spend, or how you totally almost forgot about it because lol who pays attention to Valentine's, or how you forgot and your girlfriend never let you hear the end of it and women, so emotional and needy, amirite?!
The upshot of all this is that men often go to their significant others with some version of "honey, V-Day is a fake commercial holiday anyway, you don't really need a dumb card and a box of drugstore chocolates, do you?" And women feel a pressure to be agreeable, to not be emotional-and-needy, to signal that they're easy to get along with and not shrewish or demanding, so plenty of them will laugh and shrug it off and say "no, of course not!"
Some of them mean that. Some of them don't. Lots of them say it and think they mean it and then wonder, later, why they feel unappreciated when everybody knows that Valentine's is a fake holiday and they genuinely don't care for flowers or diamonds. And then their boyfriends or husbands might wonder why they're being frozen out when they talked about this and everybody agreed not to do anything for Valentine's.
The answer is that it isn't about the cards or the chocolates. It's about signifying to the woman that she's appreciated, and that the relationship is worth putting time and effort (and, yes, sometimes money -- but money is the paradoxically cheapest option here; time and effort count for more) into. It's about recognizing that this holiday is an externally imposed social ritual of no significance in and of itself (so by all means, skip out on it if that's what you both want to do), but it is also and because of that a stress test for your relationship, and ignoring it may mean ignoring a valuable early warning that something deeper and more serious is at risk.
On the "Luxury" of Self-Esteem
I've had a number of friends who have, at one point or another, hit hard times financially. Some of this just goes along with being a millennial and having a lot of friends who entered the working world during and shortly after the financial meltdown of 2008; some of it's because no matter what the broader economic cycle looks like, there are always going to be some people who, through bad luck and happenstance, find themselves on the outs. It happens. Nature of a dynamic economy and us being trapped with occasionally malfunctioning meat sacks for bodies.
All my friends are decent people. They'd work hard if they could, and it cuts them deep when they can't.
It *also* cuts at them when they're on disability, unemployment, or just come into a few bucks from friends or family -- any kind of money that they feel they didn't "earn" -- and want to spend a little on something that isn't a basic life-or-death necessity. I have seen so much *agonizing* over whether they're "allowed" to spend $5 on a bottle of nail polish or tickets to a show or a couple of carefully-nursed dive drinks so they can spend an evening hanging out with friends.
It kills me. Because we're not talking about welfare-myth caricatures who blow their entire allowance on lobster and steak and snazzy Obamaphones. We're talking about good and frugal people who wrack their souls over allowing themselves the teeniest tiniest little bits of joy that they're worried might be "nonessential."
Which is, by the way, a lie. Joy IS essential. Maintaining your optimism and self-esteem in the face of the constant bludgeoning barrage that is being unemployed in This Dumb Society is absolutely essential. You need hope. You need to feel like you're still a full-fledged person and yes, you're allowed to enjoy music and the company of friends and feeling a little bit pretty once in a while. IT'S ALLOWED. IT'S FINE. YOU'LL GO CRAZY WITHOUT IT, TRUST ME.
What this whole thing is really about is whether the poor are allowed to feel like genuine full-on people. So much of the punitive "they can only have cold water and beans! anything else is a LUXURY!" stuff isn't really about what's in the best interests of the poor (nobody cares about the actual best interests of the poor, that's why we won't give them health care or child care or a half-decent education), it's just about undercutting their self-esteem that last little bit by telling them that they're not good enough to have the things reserved for Real People With Jobs.
The effect of that, whether intended or not, is to make people feel like absolute garbage. It makes people feel morally culpable for plain bad luck. Which accomplishes nothing productive, although it does allow fragile people without any real self-esteem of their own to feel momentarily superior, and it also allows unscrupulous employers to exploit their desperation more easily.
Now there are, certainly, people who do their best to scam the system. They exist! There are people who just don't care to have legitimate jobs and get by with welfare grifts and fraud. I know a few. They're not my *friends,* but I know them, and I know the Janice Soprano lowlife isn't a complete myth.
But the question is this: Is it better to punish good people who are trying their best to do the right things, and make their lives more difficult so it's harder for them to climb out of that hole, or is it better to accept that Janice Soprano will get some checks she doesn't deserve? Because you have to pick one. Either good people suffer unnecessarily, or crummy people get a few bucks they did nothing to earn (and, keep in mind, you can't actually tell which ones are which; that's why you have to paint with a broad brush one way or the other). Either self-esteem is affordable for the poor, or it's a luxury we don't care to allow them.
And I think which version you choose depends heavily on whether you've ever been or had friends who were poor. Because the question looks a little different when you see it applied to people you know to be decent and struggling, rather than the caricatures imagined of strangers.
Saturday, February 4, 2017
Follow-up on USDA Silencing
Couple of follow-ups to the puppy mill/USDA silencing post (here's a NYT piece with an overview as reminder).
-- I've seen a few people wondering what the motivation might be for cutting off public access to the USDA's animal-welfare records. The answer is pretty simple: it's about money.
At the most straightforward level: it costs more money to treat animals humanely. Bigger cages mean less density per square foot, so you're not extracting as much money from your space as you could. Breeding animals less frequently (versus breeding mill dogs to death within a few years) means you're not extracting as many puppies per bitch. Mandating that dogs get exercise in open spaces means that you have to dedicate an exercise yard, keep it clean, and pay more employees to take the dogs out and watch over them.
All of this cuts into the puppy mill's profits. So if all you care about is maximizing profits, regardless of the toll in suffering, then you're probably not a big fan of the AWA. But lobbying against that (or, worse, being caught violating it) looks bad, and puppy buyers tend to be a pretty sentimental market, and you need your product to look cute and innocent and lovable (and not like what it actually is). So the *best* course, for you, is not to fight about it, but to pretend to go along and meanwhile make sure the public can't see what you're doing.
That's what this is. There are a couple of other profit motives that also tie in here (check out the egg lobby trying to kill egg-free mayonnaise in the excerpt later) but they all come down to $$$.
-- "But according to the APHIS website this has been in the works for over a year, so it's not DJT at all! LOOK, OBAMA!!"
yeah, no
First off, we already know this administration lies. It lies about everything from the size of inauguration crowds to Iran supposedly attacking U.S. ships to the "Bowling Green massacre." DJT and his people just straight-up lie about everything constantly, and furthermore they silence agency employees from communicating honestly with the public. As far as I'm concerned they have zero credibility anymore. So my immediate response when a DJT-controlled entity says anything is "uh huh, where's your proof?"
There is no proof. The statement itself is written for maximum weasel-ability (the actual wording is "DURING the past year," i.e., it could have been 10 minutes ago, that's still "DURING the past year"). No specific officers or employees are identified by name. No reports are provided; there's no paper trail (and we know DJT's administration deliberately avoids creating a paper trail so they can avoid accountability; we *also* know the Obama people did not do this, therefore if this were in the works during the preceding administration then there should be a paper trail and DJT's team should be eager to show it to us so they could punt the blame over to the other guys). None of the court opinions they're ostensibly basing this on are named or cited. There's just no substantiation at all.
Furthermore, if Obama's administration *did* have this in the works and DJT's people genuinely thought "whoa hey no, this ain't right, the public has a right to know what's going on," they could easily just... not delete the records!
But they didn't do that, because that isn't what happened here. What did happen here is that Klippenstein (who, again, has a long long history of trying to protect factory farmers and puppy millers from accountability) saw an opportunity to use the DJT administration's love of deleting information to benefit his longtime benefactors.
And this *does* have a long history to back it up. Factory farmers and puppy millers have been trying to avoid the public eye for years.
In fact, the APHIS statement's note that "you can get the records through FOIA!" is particularly eyebrow-raising when you remember that ag groups have been trying to dodge out of FOIA scrutiny for a while now, see, e.g.: http://bigstory.ap.org/…/inside-washington-ag-groups-seek-e… and http://www.sej.org/…/commodity-groups-slip-foia-exemption-h…
-- I've seen a few people wondering what the motivation might be for cutting off public access to the USDA's animal-welfare records. The answer is pretty simple: it's about money.
At the most straightforward level: it costs more money to treat animals humanely. Bigger cages mean less density per square foot, so you're not extracting as much money from your space as you could. Breeding animals less frequently (versus breeding mill dogs to death within a few years) means you're not extracting as many puppies per bitch. Mandating that dogs get exercise in open spaces means that you have to dedicate an exercise yard, keep it clean, and pay more employees to take the dogs out and watch over them.
All of this cuts into the puppy mill's profits. So if all you care about is maximizing profits, regardless of the toll in suffering, then you're probably not a big fan of the AWA. But lobbying against that (or, worse, being caught violating it) looks bad, and puppy buyers tend to be a pretty sentimental market, and you need your product to look cute and innocent and lovable (and not like what it actually is). So the *best* course, for you, is not to fight about it, but to pretend to go along and meanwhile make sure the public can't see what you're doing.
That's what this is. There are a couple of other profit motives that also tie in here (check out the egg lobby trying to kill egg-free mayonnaise in the excerpt later) but they all come down to $$$.
-- "But according to the APHIS website this has been in the works for over a year, so it's not DJT at all! LOOK, OBAMA!!"
yeah, no
First off, we already know this administration lies. It lies about everything from the size of inauguration crowds to Iran supposedly attacking U.S. ships to the "Bowling Green massacre." DJT and his people just straight-up lie about everything constantly, and furthermore they silence agency employees from communicating honestly with the public. As far as I'm concerned they have zero credibility anymore. So my immediate response when a DJT-controlled entity says anything is "uh huh, where's your proof?"
There is no proof. The statement itself is written for maximum weasel-ability (the actual wording is "DURING the past year," i.e., it could have been 10 minutes ago, that's still "DURING the past year"). No specific officers or employees are identified by name. No reports are provided; there's no paper trail (and we know DJT's administration deliberately avoids creating a paper trail so they can avoid accountability; we *also* know the Obama people did not do this, therefore if this were in the works during the preceding administration then there should be a paper trail and DJT's team should be eager to show it to us so they could punt the blame over to the other guys). None of the court opinions they're ostensibly basing this on are named or cited. There's just no substantiation at all.
Furthermore, if Obama's administration *did* have this in the works and DJT's people genuinely thought "whoa hey no, this ain't right, the public has a right to know what's going on," they could easily just... not delete the records!
But they didn't do that, because that isn't what happened here. What did happen here is that Klippenstein (who, again, has a long long history of trying to protect factory farmers and puppy millers from accountability) saw an opportunity to use the DJT administration's love of deleting information to benefit his longtime benefactors.
And this *does* have a long history to back it up. Factory farmers and puppy millers have been trying to avoid the public eye for years.
In fact, the APHIS statement's note that "you can get the records through FOIA!" is particularly eyebrow-raising when you remember that ag groups have been trying to dodge out of FOIA scrutiny for a while now, see, e.g.: http://bigstory.ap.org/…/inside-washington-ag-groups-seek-e… and http://www.sej.org/…/commodity-groups-slip-foia-exemption-h…
"Lobbying by agricultural commodity groups can sometimes be embarrassing — which is why House Republicans slipped language carving them a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) exemption into the Agriculture Appropriations bill now awaiting passage.
It was FOIA'd emails that revealed the American Egg Board trying to strangle an egg-free mayonnaise startup in its crib in 2015. The Egg Board is one of the commodity-specific "checkoff" boards funded by industry to promote agricultural products. Congress has made industry contributions to the boards mandatory.
After a collection of ag commodity lobby groups wrote a letter earlier this year to the House Appropriations Committee requesting a FOIA exemption, that panel wrote one into the funding bill."so yeah: big ag has been trying to limit USDA scrutiny on animal welfare violations for a long time; Klippenstein was a lobbyist for exactly that purpose; DJT comes into power, lets Klippenstein run the USDA transition; mysteriously USDA scrutiny on animal welfare violations vanishes; ostensibly there's a FOIA exemption (for now), but hm yes big ag has been lobbying the GOP to make that go away too, wonder how long that'll last.
Brian Klippenstein and Silencing the Watchdogs of the USDA
Since
I took a minute to spell it out elsewhere, let me do a quick game of
connect-the-dots on Brian Klippenstein, the USDA records purge, and how
DJT's administration is now actively aiding and abetting massive dog
abuse.
On Friday, the USDA's animal welfare records suddenly got purged: http://www.sciencemag.org/…/trump-administration-blacks-out…
Let's take a second to appreciate the deep irony of "our commitment to being transparent" being used as a reason to block public access to animal welfare reports. Let's also reflect on just how bad the risks to those animals need to be when you have to have a specific act preventing the deliberate injury of horses' legs FOR SHOW. And, finally, let's take a second to recall how miserably minimal the USDA's protections fo mill dogs really are (they are bad!). But in many states, the Animal Welfare Act and the USDA are the only protection puppy mill dogs have at all: https://www.aspca.org/…/state_puppy_mills_guide_w_chart_jun…
As the Washington Post notes, the USDA further "said the removed documents, which also included records of enforcement actions against violators of the Animal Welfare Act and the Horse Protection Act, would now be accessible only via Freedom of Information Act Requests. Those can take years to be approved."
The WaPo continued:
So why did the USDA suddenly decide to stop caring whether factory farms and puppy mills were abusing their animals? Because Brian Klippenstein, pro-puppy-mill lobbyist, is head (or, possibly, is the entirety) of DJT's USDA team.
Prior to joining DJT's team, Brian Klippenstein worked for "Protect the Harvest," a hilariously/horribly named lobbying group that campaigns for factory farms and puppy mills against animal welfare efforts: http://www.motherjones.com/…/trump-usda-klippenstein-heitka…
"Back in 2010, the year before Protect the Harvest was founded, Lucas [PtH's founder] vigorously opposed a Missouri ballot measure to "require large-scale dog breeding operations to provide each dog under their care with sufficient food, clean water, housing and space; necessary veterinary care; regular exercise and adequate rest between breeding cycles," and to "prohibit any breeder from having more than 50 breeding dogs for the purpose of selling their puppies as pets." In 2014, Protect the Harvest opposed an Illinois bill banning the retail sale of puppy-mill dogs."
In other words, this lobbying group was founded in response to a Missouri ballot measure that would have required more humane treatment of puppy mill dogs, with the express aim of blocking that (extremely minimal!) humane treatment and allowing existing abuses to continue. This is what Klippenstein did for his job before joining up with DJT.
He's also pretty much a one-man army for the USDA transition, or was as of December: http://www.politico.com/…/trumps-usda-landing-team-looks-li…
This sudden silencing of the USDA in regards to animal welfare has Klippenstein's grubby little fingerprints all over it. That's who he is, that's what he does, and that's the department DJT put him in charge of transitioning.
And that, apparently, is what DJT's administration wants to transition the USDA into: absolute silence on animal abuses, and refusing to enforce even the extremely minimal safeguards of the AWA.
On Friday, the USDA's animal welfare records suddenly got purged: http://www.sciencemag.org/…/trump-administration-blacks-out…
"The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) today removed public access to tens of thousands of reports that document the numbers of animals kept by research labs, companies, zoos, circuses, and animal transporters—and whether those animals are being treated humanely under the Animal Welfare Act. Henceforth, those wanting access to the information will need to file a Freedom of Information Act request. The same goes for inspection reports under the Horse Protection Act, which prohibits injuring horses’ hooves or legs for show.
The agency said in a statement that it revoked public access to the reports “based on our commitment to being transparent … and maintaining the privacy rights of individuals.”"
Let's take a second to appreciate the deep irony of "our commitment to being transparent" being used as a reason to block public access to animal welfare reports. Let's also reflect on just how bad the risks to those animals need to be when you have to have a specific act preventing the deliberate injury of horses' legs FOR SHOW. And, finally, let's take a second to recall how miserably minimal the USDA's protections fo mill dogs really are (they are bad!). But in many states, the Animal Welfare Act and the USDA are the only protection puppy mill dogs have at all: https://www.aspca.org/…/state_puppy_mills_guide_w_chart_jun…
As the Washington Post notes, the USDA further "said the removed documents, which also included records of enforcement actions against violators of the Animal Welfare Act and the Horse Protection Act, would now be accessible only via Freedom of Information Act Requests. Those can take years to be approved."
The WaPo continued:
The records that had been available were frequently used by animal welfare advocates to monitor government regulation of animal treatment at circuses, scientific labs and zoos. Journalists have used the documents to expose violations at universities.
Members of the public could also use the department’s online database to search for information about dog breeders, as could pet stores. Seven states currently require pet stores to source puppies from breeders with clean USDA inspection reports, according to the Humane Society of the United States — a requirement that could now be impossible to meet.
So why did the USDA suddenly decide to stop caring whether factory farms and puppy mills were abusing their animals? Because Brian Klippenstein, pro-puppy-mill lobbyist, is head (or, possibly, is the entirety) of DJT's USDA team.
Prior to joining DJT's team, Brian Klippenstein worked for "Protect the Harvest," a hilariously/horribly named lobbying group that campaigns for factory farms and puppy mills against animal welfare efforts: http://www.motherjones.com/…/trump-usda-klippenstein-heitka…
"Back in 2010, the year before Protect the Harvest was founded, Lucas [PtH's founder] vigorously opposed a Missouri ballot measure to "require large-scale dog breeding operations to provide each dog under their care with sufficient food, clean water, housing and space; necessary veterinary care; regular exercise and adequate rest between breeding cycles," and to "prohibit any breeder from having more than 50 breeding dogs for the purpose of selling their puppies as pets." In 2014, Protect the Harvest opposed an Illinois bill banning the retail sale of puppy-mill dogs."
In other words, this lobbying group was founded in response to a Missouri ballot measure that would have required more humane treatment of puppy mill dogs, with the express aim of blocking that (extremely minimal!) humane treatment and allowing existing abuses to continue. This is what Klippenstein did for his job before joining up with DJT.
He's also pretty much a one-man army for the USDA transition, or was as of December: http://www.politico.com/…/trumps-usda-landing-team-looks-li…
This sudden silencing of the USDA in regards to animal welfare has Klippenstein's grubby little fingerprints all over it. That's who he is, that's what he does, and that's the department DJT put him in charge of transitioning.
And that, apparently, is what DJT's administration wants to transition the USDA into: absolute silence on animal abuses, and refusing to enforce even the extremely minimal safeguards of the AWA.
Friday, February 3, 2017
At Long Last, a Walkthrough (With Pictures!)
I really was going to do a detailed walkthrough of my boudoir shoot with Lori Mann, but I keep getting distracted looking at all the pretty pictures.
Look! Lori and Aleks made me look glamorous!! That is some bonafide miracle working right there, my friends.
On the afternoon of the shoot, I showed up to the Center City studio with a ridiculously huge bag of clothes and props in tow, plus one big dramatic fur coat and a smaller fox stole. I had a vague notion of the sequence I wanted to do ("you meet a lady in a hotel bar and she turns out to be not too nice" / "in this shoot I will be playing a giant bitch who is perpetually unimpressed with everybody, which is to say, I'll be myself"), but it was mostly just to keep myself on track and semi-focused while Lori and Aleks did all the real work.
Both of them were so warm and easygoing that I immediately felt like we'd been friends forever, which is a really crucial and underappreciated talent for boudoir teams. Think about it: these ladies make their living getting women -- most of whom they've never met before, and many of whom are probably at least a little bit nervous about stripping down and showing their stuff for posterity -- to relax and have fun in front of the camera. That's hard! That takes some special interpersonal skills!
Which Lori and Aleks have, in addition to being really awesome at photography and makeup, respectively.
I have had some not-so-great experiences with other makeup artists in the past. I once flew out to Colorado for a photoshoot that ended up being completely unusable because the stylist (who was, to be fair, a newbie just starting out) stuck me with orange foundation, blue eyeshadow, and curls stiffer than mattress springs. I still don't have any pictures from my formal wedding album because I never liked the makeup from that day, either.
Because of these prior experiences, I was a little gunshy with Aleks. I shouldn't have been. That lady is a genius and master of her art, and although I was probably the worst kind of "augh oh no!" flinch-ful client while she was working on me, once she was through it was clear that I should have shut up and let her do her magic in peace. Because she did a great, great job. It was everything I'd hoped for and then some.
And then we took a bunch of pictures! and it was really fun! and I was never self-conscious even a little bit (how could I be, when they handled everything with such matter-of-fact ease?), and both Lori and Aleks were super attentive to detail throughout, catching every little glitch (smudged eyeliner, a bit of dirt on my foot) that might have threatened to make the pictures anything less than perfect.
The studio, by the way, is a fun little lesson in how selective framing and picture cropping can make a small and relatively empty space stand in for a number of sets. There's a lot of sleight-of-hand that goes on behind the scenes in how the furniture and backdrops are arranged. It's pretty neat to see in person.
Lori helped me through some poses and made it very easy to fake being an Actual Model, and at the end of the day I got to look over the raw shots on her computer and pick out which ones I wanted.
The hardest part was narrowing it down to just a few (well, relatively a few). But that's okay. I can always go back and take some more, right?
From start to finish, including picture review and selection, the whole thing took about five hours. We shot two sets, each with its own outfit and mini-storyline. All of these are from the first set; I'll post a picture from the other one next time I get to talking about boudoir.
All told, it was a fabulous experience and I can't wait until I get to shoot with them again.
Look! Lori and Aleks made me look glamorous!! That is some bonafide miracle working right there, my friends.
On the afternoon of the shoot, I showed up to the Center City studio with a ridiculously huge bag of clothes and props in tow, plus one big dramatic fur coat and a smaller fox stole. I had a vague notion of the sequence I wanted to do ("you meet a lady in a hotel bar and she turns out to be not too nice" / "in this shoot I will be playing a giant bitch who is perpetually unimpressed with everybody, which is to say, I'll be myself"), but it was mostly just to keep myself on track and semi-focused while Lori and Aleks did all the real work.
Both of them were so warm and easygoing that I immediately felt like we'd been friends forever, which is a really crucial and underappreciated talent for boudoir teams. Think about it: these ladies make their living getting women -- most of whom they've never met before, and many of whom are probably at least a little bit nervous about stripping down and showing their stuff for posterity -- to relax and have fun in front of the camera. That's hard! That takes some special interpersonal skills!
Which Lori and Aleks have, in addition to being really awesome at photography and makeup, respectively.
I have had some not-so-great experiences with other makeup artists in the past. I once flew out to Colorado for a photoshoot that ended up being completely unusable because the stylist (who was, to be fair, a newbie just starting out) stuck me with orange foundation, blue eyeshadow, and curls stiffer than mattress springs. I still don't have any pictures from my formal wedding album because I never liked the makeup from that day, either.
Because of these prior experiences, I was a little gunshy with Aleks. I shouldn't have been. That lady is a genius and master of her art, and although I was probably the worst kind of "augh oh no!" flinch-ful client while she was working on me, once she was through it was clear that I should have shut up and let her do her magic in peace. Because she did a great, great job. It was everything I'd hoped for and then some.
And then we took a bunch of pictures! and it was really fun! and I was never self-conscious even a little bit (how could I be, when they handled everything with such matter-of-fact ease?), and both Lori and Aleks were super attentive to detail throughout, catching every little glitch (smudged eyeliner, a bit of dirt on my foot) that might have threatened to make the pictures anything less than perfect.
The studio, by the way, is a fun little lesson in how selective framing and picture cropping can make a small and relatively empty space stand in for a number of sets. There's a lot of sleight-of-hand that goes on behind the scenes in how the furniture and backdrops are arranged. It's pretty neat to see in person.
Lori helped me through some poses and made it very easy to fake being an Actual Model, and at the end of the day I got to look over the raw shots on her computer and pick out which ones I wanted.
The hardest part was narrowing it down to just a few (well, relatively a few). But that's okay. I can always go back and take some more, right?
From start to finish, including picture review and selection, the whole thing took about five hours. We shot two sets, each with its own outfit and mini-storyline. All of these are from the first set; I'll post a picture from the other one next time I get to talking about boudoir.
All told, it was a fabulous experience and I can't wait until I get to shoot with them again.
Wednesday, February 1, 2017
Boudoir vs. Porn
So I know I said this time I was going to do a walkthrough of a boudoir shoot, but actually I want to knock this post out first because I feel like doing some Abstract Philosophical Discussion right now.
Every now and then somebody asks me whether boudoir photography is the same as "porn." I don't think there's anything inherently bad about porn (its accompanying features, sure, but not the porn itself), but I do think boudoir is a very different thing, and in today's post I want to talk about why.
The reason, fundamentally, comes down to this: boudoir is about empowering women. Porn, by and large, is not. (I wrestled with the question of "is doing porn empowering to women?" for several years before concluding that generally the answer is no, at least not right now, not in This Dumb Society. There are a few narrow exceptions, but by and large I think the answer is mostly "no.")
That is the issue -- who holds the power, and what the ramifications of that are -- that distinguishes boudoir from porn.
It's not about artistic merit. There are boudoir photographers who produce beautiful works of art and others who just take pictures. There is pornography that has artistic merit (yes, there is; we can fight about this if you want) and there's a whole lot more that doesn't.
It's not about how revealing or explicit the pictures are, either. Boudoir tends to be softer (there's rarely full nudity and almost never anything beyond that), but that's not the decisive factor. There are plenty of "art nudes" and softcore sites that really aren't a whole lot more explicit.
The key distinction is about power. In boudoir, the woman has it. In porn, she generally doesn't. So, literally, one is empowering and the other is not.
Here's my argument for why:
1. Boudoir removes the element of money-as-coercion.
This is the big one. In boudoir, the woman is not being paid for the pictures. In porn, the actress/model is working for money, whether that's from a producer/studio or directly from fans.
In theory you might think this is a good thing (money should flow to the model! the women in porn are higher paid than the men!). In practice, that money often operates as coercion.
Porn models and actresses tend to be young; they tend to be less educated (in part because they're young); they frequently have limited options for supporting themselves financially outside porn. If you're dependent on that money for a living, then the promise of more money, or the threat of losing it, can be used as a cudgel to make you do things you wouldn't otherwise choose to do. It's like every long-suffering and short-skirted cocktail waitress who's forced to put on a smile and play along with a skeevy customer, but ramped up 100x.
In boudoir, because the woman isn't being paid for what she does, that element of coercion is gone. The absence of a financial incentive means that the woman has full artistic freedom. She can do exactly as she pleases, revealing as much or as little as she likes. She can walk away whenever she wants. All the power is hers.
2. In boudoir, the woman controls her own image.
Another aspect of power and coercion in porn is that the actress/model does not control her own image. Her pictures and/or videos go up on a website where they can be displayed, advertised, and manipulated without her input. She has little or no ability to take them down, and little or no ability to bury her past if and when she ever decides to try shedding it.
That doesn't happen in boudoir. The woman owns and controls her image. She might choose to grant permission for the photographer or makeup artist to use her pictures, but the pictures are hers, so she gets to choose. If she wants to limit those permissions, she can. If she wants them to never be on the internet at all, she can -- many boudoir photographers, like Lori Mann, transfer images via flash drive and good old-fashioned prints on paper, which means they're never stored or transmitted online (unless you choose to do that yourself) and can never be hacked.
Thus, in boudoir, your privacy is yours and, if you choose, inviolable. Of course if you want to make your images public, you can choose to do that, but nobody is going to force you.
3. Boudoir celebrates the woman as a person, and intimacy rather than anonymity.
This one is, I guess, more about the psychology and romance of it than hard dollars-and-cents economic coercion, but I think it's important and also goes to empowerment: boudoir is a deeply personal experience, a creation and celebration of the individual woman.
Her pictures might just be for herself, or they might be shared with someone very close to her, but they aren't meant for the faceless public and they aren't about turning her into a product. It's about her. No one else on earth could stand in her place or carry the same value as that individual woman.
In (most, not all, but most) porn, a woman is a widget: she is depersonalized, pushed into a more-or-less uniform mold, and put out for consumption. She is seldom her own person, and never known in great depth; most often she's a canvas for the viewer to project their own fantasies onto, and if there's any semblance of personal warmth or friendliness, it's as professional and superficial as an airline stewardess's smile.
Some of that's inevitable: that asymmetry exists between any performer and her audience. And it need not always be a bad thing; there are some women for whom that exhibitionism has its own thrill. But by and large, my perception is that porn churns through new faces and new bodies with little regard for them as anything other than novelties, and that it tends to evaluate women strictly for how profitably their bodies can be monetized, and that this is damaging rather than bolstering to women's self-esteem.
(I should note that this is mostly a criticism of the economics behind porn rather than the porn itself, but the effect's still there and it still exploits young women's uncertain self-esteem to pay them less, regardless of the damage that might do to their self-worth and sexuality. Coupled with the rampant misogyny that runs through the industry, the upshot is that they generally leave with little money and less pride.)
In porn, by and large, you're replaceable. You're processed and presented to a largely indifferent audience as one of many. There's no real relationship, and you're not particularly special.
In boudoir, it's the opposite. You are irreplaceable. You are the only one of you, and you are presented to a very tiny audience (maybe just yourself and your photographer). The privacy, exclusivity, and relationship between woman and viewer (if any) change the dynamic considerably.
It isn't about strangers gawking at a body. It's about the close and unique connection between people.
And that's why I think boudoir photography can be extremely empowering for women, and why I don't think it's much like porn at all.
Every now and then somebody asks me whether boudoir photography is the same as "porn." I don't think there's anything inherently bad about porn (its accompanying features, sure, but not the porn itself), but I do think boudoir is a very different thing, and in today's post I want to talk about why.
The reason, fundamentally, comes down to this: boudoir is about empowering women. Porn, by and large, is not. (I wrestled with the question of "is doing porn empowering to women?" for several years before concluding that generally the answer is no, at least not right now, not in This Dumb Society. There are a few narrow exceptions, but by and large I think the answer is mostly "no.")
That is the issue -- who holds the power, and what the ramifications of that are -- that distinguishes boudoir from porn.
It's not about artistic merit. There are boudoir photographers who produce beautiful works of art and others who just take pictures. There is pornography that has artistic merit (yes, there is; we can fight about this if you want) and there's a whole lot more that doesn't.
It's not about how revealing or explicit the pictures are, either. Boudoir tends to be softer (there's rarely full nudity and almost never anything beyond that), but that's not the decisive factor. There are plenty of "art nudes" and softcore sites that really aren't a whole lot more explicit.
The key distinction is about power. In boudoir, the woman has it. In porn, she generally doesn't. So, literally, one is empowering and the other is not.
Here's my argument for why:
1. Boudoir removes the element of money-as-coercion.
This is the big one. In boudoir, the woman is not being paid for the pictures. In porn, the actress/model is working for money, whether that's from a producer/studio or directly from fans.
In theory you might think this is a good thing (money should flow to the model! the women in porn are higher paid than the men!). In practice, that money often operates as coercion.
Porn models and actresses tend to be young; they tend to be less educated (in part because they're young); they frequently have limited options for supporting themselves financially outside porn. If you're dependent on that money for a living, then the promise of more money, or the threat of losing it, can be used as a cudgel to make you do things you wouldn't otherwise choose to do. It's like every long-suffering and short-skirted cocktail waitress who's forced to put on a smile and play along with a skeevy customer, but ramped up 100x.
In boudoir, because the woman isn't being paid for what she does, that element of coercion is gone. The absence of a financial incentive means that the woman has full artistic freedom. She can do exactly as she pleases, revealing as much or as little as she likes. She can walk away whenever she wants. All the power is hers.
2. In boudoir, the woman controls her own image.
Another aspect of power and coercion in porn is that the actress/model does not control her own image. Her pictures and/or videos go up on a website where they can be displayed, advertised, and manipulated without her input. She has little or no ability to take them down, and little or no ability to bury her past if and when she ever decides to try shedding it.
That doesn't happen in boudoir. The woman owns and controls her image. She might choose to grant permission for the photographer or makeup artist to use her pictures, but the pictures are hers, so she gets to choose. If she wants to limit those permissions, she can. If she wants them to never be on the internet at all, she can -- many boudoir photographers, like Lori Mann, transfer images via flash drive and good old-fashioned prints on paper, which means they're never stored or transmitted online (unless you choose to do that yourself) and can never be hacked.
Thus, in boudoir, your privacy is yours and, if you choose, inviolable. Of course if you want to make your images public, you can choose to do that, but nobody is going to force you.
3. Boudoir celebrates the woman as a person, and intimacy rather than anonymity.
This one is, I guess, more about the psychology and romance of it than hard dollars-and-cents economic coercion, but I think it's important and also goes to empowerment: boudoir is a deeply personal experience, a creation and celebration of the individual woman.
Her pictures might just be for herself, or they might be shared with someone very close to her, but they aren't meant for the faceless public and they aren't about turning her into a product. It's about her. No one else on earth could stand in her place or carry the same value as that individual woman.
In (most, not all, but most) porn, a woman is a widget: she is depersonalized, pushed into a more-or-less uniform mold, and put out for consumption. She is seldom her own person, and never known in great depth; most often she's a canvas for the viewer to project their own fantasies onto, and if there's any semblance of personal warmth or friendliness, it's as professional and superficial as an airline stewardess's smile.
Some of that's inevitable: that asymmetry exists between any performer and her audience. And it need not always be a bad thing; there are some women for whom that exhibitionism has its own thrill. But by and large, my perception is that porn churns through new faces and new bodies with little regard for them as anything other than novelties, and that it tends to evaluate women strictly for how profitably their bodies can be monetized, and that this is damaging rather than bolstering to women's self-esteem.
(I should note that this is mostly a criticism of the economics behind porn rather than the porn itself, but the effect's still there and it still exploits young women's uncertain self-esteem to pay them less, regardless of the damage that might do to their self-worth and sexuality. Coupled with the rampant misogyny that runs through the industry, the upshot is that they generally leave with little money and less pride.)
In porn, by and large, you're replaceable. You're processed and presented to a largely indifferent audience as one of many. There's no real relationship, and you're not particularly special.
In boudoir, it's the opposite. You are irreplaceable. You are the only one of you, and you are presented to a very tiny audience (maybe just yourself and your photographer). The privacy, exclusivity, and relationship between woman and viewer (if any) change the dynamic considerably.
It isn't about strangers gawking at a body. It's about the close and unique connection between people.
And that's why I think boudoir photography can be extremely empowering for women, and why I don't think it's much like porn at all.
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