Women, Modesty, and Media

Guest Post by Seraphine of Zelophehad's Daughters

[My arm twisting campaign was successful, and Seraphine has graciously shared some of her Sunstone presentation here with us. I think she makes a number of brilliant insights that are very important to consider when we discuss the experience our YW have with the media and the effect that has on their emotional and spiritual health. I kind of wanted to go over this whole essay with a highlighter. -Reese]

Talks on pornography are almost solely directed at men. But how and where do women fit into this picture? When they are mentioned or addressed, it’s primarily in two ways:

* Way #1: The most common is that women are usually cast in the role of victim when discussing pornography. Typically, this comes with a mention of the wife of the pornography user who is the innocent victim and suffers greatly when her husband uses pornography. Most talks (though not all) are very vague about how and why the wife suffers.
* Way #2: Women being condemned for their participation in pornography. Very, very occasionally women are included in the admonition to avoid pornography, but more often women are reminded that they participate in pornography when they choose to dress immodestly. The most well-known of these (at least, in the circles that I inhabit) is Elder Oaks’ April 2005 conference talk titled “Pornography,” in which he tells women that by dressing immodestly, “you are magnifying the problem by becoming pornography to some of the men who see you.”

The patterns in our discourse on modesty are a bit more varied, though there are a few major themes. There definitely is a large amount of discussion of clothing and its appropriateness: women are admonished not to wear short skirts, short shorts, prom dresses without sleeves, etc. Another common pattern is that women are reminded that their outside reflects their inside, and that when they dress immodestly, they are not representing their divine status as a daughter of God. Women are also generally encouraged to respect their bodies, usually with a discussion of how bodies are important, a temple, etc.

Our discussions of pornography/modesty/female embodiment rarely address an important critique of certain kinds of pornography: how the pornographic industry often problematically represents women (and increasingly men) as objects. However, this is one of the most prevalent trends of the media, and one of the most damaging. Women’s bodies are treated as objects, as things, waiting to be viewed and consumed (typically by men). Contemporary advertising often breaks down women’s bodies into parts: hands, faces, breasts, etc. By doing this, women more closely resemble the products being sold, rather than living, breathing human beings (and if you want to see this demonstrated, I would recommend Jean Kilbourne’s videos, especially “Killing Us Softly”).

This objectification has a variety of destructive consequences. In her book, Can’t Buy My Love, Jean Kilbourne talks about the link between representations of women in popular culture and violence against women. She writes,

Ads don’t directly cause violence of course. But…objectification and disconnection create a climate in which there is widespread and increasing violence. Turning a human being into a thing, an object, is almost always the first step toward justifying violence against that person. It is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to be violent to someone we think of as an equal, someone we have empathy with, but it is very easy to abuse a thing.[1]

Kilbourne and others point out that one of the primary problems with pornography and the media in general is that they participates in a culture where men are encouraged to see women as objects rather than full human beings.

These images also impact women’s experience with their bodies and sexual desires. The emphasis on beauty and thinness puts an extraordinary amount of pressure on young women who are already struggling to figure out who they are and who they want to be. Jean Kilbourne observes that

Even girls who are raised in loving homes by supportive parents grow up in a toxic cultural environment, at risk for self-mutilation, eating disorders, and addictions. The culture, both reflected and reinforced by advertising, urges girls to adopt a false self, to bury alive their real selves, to become “feminine,” which means to be nice and kind and sweet, to compete with other girls for the attention of boys, and to value romantic relationships with boys above all else.[2]

In addition to these problematic effects on girls, through their experiences with popular culture, women come to see their own bodies as things and objects, as things to be viewed rather than to be directly experienced. Because they are constantly being looked at, they often look at themselves not through their own eyes, but through the eyes and perspectives of others. Popular culture trains women to objectify their own bodies.

So, how might these ideas impact our understanding and views of the media as Mormons? I’ve already pointed out that I don’t think we (Mormons) spend enough time thinking and talking about objectification and the problems connected with it. Also, I do think we can be more careful about the ways in which we discuss women—their bodies, dress, selfhood, femininity, etc. Our discourse often doesn’t fight the problem of objectification (see, for example, the remark above by Elder Oaks above about women “becoming pornography”). Given that the media makes women incredibly anxious about how they dress, how they don’t live up to the beauty ideal, how men view them, etc., we need to be more explicit in discussing the destructive ways in which media represents and objectifies women, and we need to be much more careful when discussing these issues so that we are doing our best not to replicate or reinforce the messages and patterns in popular culture.

Also, as we think about the issue of pornography, in the church, we so often discuss it as sleaze, filth, sexually graphic, etc. But we do not spend enough time talking about how it represents people and relationships. Pornography can be damaging because much of it encourages us to see human beings as less than human. People become objects, and fantasies and images replace real intimacy. This impairs our ability to love, show compassion, and honor the personhood of one another, all of which are essential to our overall mission of becoming more Christlike.

Finally, media critics like Jean Kilbourne help us to see the importance of developing a richer discourse on female subjectivity, and I believe that Mormon theology offers a unique and compelling way to think about female subjectivity, embodiment, and desire. Not only are we human (rather than objects), we are also divine. We talk about bodies as being essential to our personhood/divinity: we will have our bodies through the eternities, and they are essential to who we are and who we will become (we’ve inherited them from a God who shares the same form). As Susan W. Tanner states in her conference address “The Sanctity of the Body,” “We are not less but more like Heavenly Father because we are embodied.” Because of this, we should feel an increased need to more fully explore the implications of embodiment. And our discussions of popular culture should be informed by the understanding that our bodies are central to our human and divine potential.


[1] Jean Kilbourne. Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel. (New York: Touchstone, 1999), 278

[2] Kilbourne, 130