Nudity vs. Nakedness

[Daft]

Nudity vs. Nakedness

 By Sarah Nicole Prickett

 Last week, Melville House re-released the trashy single mother of all femoirs, and a seminal expression of genius, Mary MacLane's I Await The Devil's Coming (1902). My review is due... now. Also due is an essay on the only movie released this year, Spring Breakers. On my desk, buried underneath Spalding Gray, Marguerite Duras, Semiotext(e) things I'll never read, this Homo Cats zine (a gift; I don't really fuck with zines), press releases (why are we still printing press releases), and an unopened, embarrassing pack of Marc Jacobs pencil crayons, is a copy of Marie Calloway's what purpose did i serve in your life, which for weeks I have been tiredly deciding to either write about in a careful, distended way, or ignore entirely.

Given these tasks, I've managed to: a) desultorily and daily masturbate; b) in a giant pile of clothes; and c) very little else, but what else is there, when all anyone wants to read about is naked girls? Finally, after several days of thinking about/exercising nakedness, and one last Girls night, I realized I'd had it wrong. Nakedness is banal, relatable, in-your-face—and not that interesting, not now. I'm interested, personally, in a return to the nude.

What's the difference? “To be naked,” wrote the best male art critic ever, John Berger, “is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A nude has to be seen as an object in order to be a nude.”

So nakedness has been constituted as a kind of radical subjectivity, the kind Mary MacLane means by “humanness” when she says that it's “the rarest quality in the world” (and that, incidentally, she possesses more of it than anyone). Nudity, meanwhile, is a construct my generation feels compelled by French theory to deconstruct, without pausing to consider that it might be useful.

Think about the first time we saw Lena Dunham's “normal”-sized ass on screen. Revelatory, yes? Nudity can't shock, no body is too nude for a billboard, and no length of celebrity skin is impermissible so long as it's perfected. And yet, a raw, un-beautiful—I mean unconventionally beautiful—body can still stop your breath.

The seventh or eighth time, it felt counter-revolutionary. Hannah's routine undressing is fine, good; I'm not Lily Tomlin. It's just, why must she be so naked? Why can't she be gorgeously lit, pinned to the screen, the way “good” bodies are? Too commonly “bad” bodies are left to wobble in bad lighting, or, in even the Photoshoppiest ladymags, are posed less flatteringly. This sort-of subversion only maintains the order by which “good” types of bodies are made beautiful, while the “bad” types, the Botticelli, Matisse, DiCaprio types, once the most beautiful, are left bare.

There is an all-telling moment in Marie Calloway's book, in a story called “sex work experience three,” when she undresses and lets a customer coolly look her over. She's cute, he says. She says thank-you. To us she writes: I am not “cute.” I am extremely beautiful.

That was almost brave of her. Then she parenthesizes: Around normal men I had severe anxiety about the way that I looked, but with johns there was this resentment, bitter anger at the thought that my immense physical attractiveness could even be a question to them.

 It is a question because she's standing there naked, asking. It's a question because johns are normal men, and she is all too normal a girl, unwilling to defend her beauty or to be hated for her belief in it. Marie Calloway naked is dull. Marie Calloway's excerpted gchats, submitted among a proudly “unprintable” gallery of NC-17 selfies, are nakeder and dull yet. They reveal her talent to be not raw, not flawed, but almost non-existent.

A Marie Calloway self-edited and lit up with effort could be a great writer, a figure, unassailable in the nude. Nobody hurts a nude, because nobody even touches a nude. Think of Molly Crabapple, who wrote of being a “professional naked girl,” but who, especially when I've seen her in lingerie, is impossible to picture naked. She's so poised, coiled, a porcelain boa. She lies inside herself. All nudes do. Their bodies are objects they know how to use, because women, if we don't know how to use our bodies, will find them used against us.

That using-against is what most people mean by “objectification.” And yet, there's a using-for that I love. I don't love the consensus on “objectification” = “not good,” because it lacks answers to a more interesting question: Who gets to be an object? I remember complaining to a friend that I hate when guys say “you're so beautiful” as a pre-sex ploy. Her voice cooled eleven degrees.

“So,” she said slowly, just to be sure. “You're so beautiful that you don't want to be told you're beautiful?”

And no, but I saw her point: There were ways in which she would like to be seen, but the images with which she'd been raised did not permit her to see herself that way first.

Now, I mostly hate to be told “you're beautiful” when it happens at my most vulnerable, stripped-down, naked. When Drake's all about “sweatpants, hair back, chillin' with no makeup on,” I do take that wrong, in the same way I always felt disserviced by Jane Pratt's famous“makeunders,” the way they privileged “natural beauty,” without ever acknowledging that “natural beauty” itself privileges the naturally, and conventionally, beautiful.

I'd rather be told “you're beautiful” when I'm one of my made-up selves, the selves I want you to see. What right do you have to get what you see, or to see me for myself? Or anyone, for any oneself. It's funny: I want to speak more candidly and transparently, often, but I want to be seen dimly through a filter always. After all, I can choose better whom I speak to than I can choose who sees me. For women and girls, especially, to change how we're seen is to create it. Where men once painted, sculpted, photographed, filmed, and otherwise invented our myths, we have more power to do that ourselves.

But there is a feeling that few will believe the myths if we create them ourselves, but everybody will buy the confessionals. We become then denuded. We belong to stories, whether by Marie Calloway or Lena Dunham or xoJane bloggers or even my literary heroines, like Chris Kraus and Kate Zambreno, that read like bleeding naked on the floor, and I'm torn. Girls must be allowed flaws, fuck-ups, and vulnerability. Just lately—I hate that we love them more the rawer, and less powerful, they appear. I hate watching to diagnose, when what I want is to admire.

http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/nudity-vs-nakedness