--Carly Cindrich
If you are a female with a Facebook account, there is a good chance that you received this message in your inbox at some point this week:
About a year ago, we played the game about what color bra you were wearing at the moment. The purpose was to increase awareness of October Breast Cancer Awareness month. It was a tremendous success and we had men wondering for days what was with the colors and it made it to the news. This year's game has to do with your handbag/purse, where we put our handbag the moment we get home. For example "I like it on the couch", "kitchen counter", "the dresser" well u get the idea. Just put your answer as your status with nothing more than that and cut n paste this message and forward to all your FB female friends to their inbox. It doesn't have to be suggestive. The bra game made it to the news. Let's see how powerful we women really are!!!
If you haven’t seen this message yourself, there is still very likely that several “I like it on…” statuses appeared on your news feed. The explanation behind this successfully viral Facebook message is that October is breast cancer awareness month. Last year to raise awareness, a group of activists sent a similar Facebook message to all of their females friends asking them to simply post the color of their bra they were wearing. The end of the message read, “Pass it on and be sure to do your breast self-exams!” While the game is amusing and made for a pretty successful internet meme , it seems that this year the actual purpose of the game got lost in the goal to a) exclude men from knowing something and b) to be as suggestive as possible. This year’s message did not even remind women to do their self-exams, nor did the secret behind the game have anything to do with breast cancer. However, in a world where women feel so disempowered by men, it is really no wonder why a little “don’t let the boys in on the joke” game could be appealing to women all over the world. Both years’ games shared this exclusivity aspect, but this year’s “I like it on…” statuses introduced a strong sexual note into the game. At first, it might just seem like a random silly thing to do or a way for some girls to flirt with the idea of themselves as sexually adventurous and experienced. However, if you look again at the big picture you can see that the sexual connotation of the statuses still links back to the issue of empowerment. In “The Sex Which Is Not One," Luce Irigaray writes about how women find pleasure in viewing themselves as the proxy for male pleasure. For women, viewing ourselves as having some hold over men gives us enough power that we regard the small shred of it we get from having something men want to make it synonymous with our own pleasure. Men are thought of as sexual beings and therefore their sexual fervor is socially acceptable, and traditionally women are not supposed to have their own sexual needs or desires. Possibly for some women, the allure of these Facebook statuses is that it allows them to express a preference about something sexual simply for shock value.
The fact that each woman is asked to identify the place she likes to put her purse brings into play the idea that space is never neutral and is most often gendered. By participating in the game, each woman consents to having the place of her purse be construed by the public as the place she likes to have sex. Therefore, the most obscure places to have sex, even if it made perfect sense for a woman to place her purse there, resulted in the most comments and amused feedback. One popular status this week came from my best friend who “likes it hanging on the wall.” By turning the spatial home of a gendered object into the site of sexual activity, the sex itself becomes gendered in the same way. Therefore the place aspect of these statuses was another way for women to assert their sexual dominance and desire.
Although this year’s Facebook game was successful strictly in terms of participation, the official purpose to raise breast cancer awareness was rather lost in all the excitement. To make sense of the popularity of these Facebook statuses is to understand that for today’s disempowered and misunderstood (or simply unheard) woman, the iota of power that marginalizing men for a day on a social networking site along with the allure of being sexually suggestive while remaining innocent is enough to make a simple Facebook message turn into a viral trend seen around the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment