This week’s blog is
dedicated to the impression that caused to us a TV program in the Danish public
television DR called “Blachman”, and it is about: a woman that enters a room
with dim lights, takes her clothes off and at the same time, two men seated in
front of her on a sofa, comment and criticize out loud each detail of her naked
body. We can hear phrases like: “How does you
vagina work?”, “You have such happy nipples!”, or “I’ve always liked asses,
could you turn around?”
Meanwhile, she has to
remain silent, she cannot say a word.
This program has
triggered all sorts of comments and criticisms. The host of the show says that
he doesn’t understand why, because he considers himself a revolutionary and “a
genius”.
“The feminine body longs to be talked about. That men talk about it.”
The TV editor, Sofia
Fromberg’s comments impress us even more, even though she is a woman she
assures that the Blachman show is a tribute to feminine beauty and to women in
general; she defends it with affirmations like:
To search for the participants an ad in the newspaper was published and
a variety of women were chosen: models, housewives, actresses, schoolteachers,
with bodies of different sizes and forms. One had a C-section scar, another one
was a woman 85 years old, another one had a voluptuous body with a lot of
cellulite in her bottom…”.
“It is a program that reveals what men think of a woman’s body, and
honestly, what is wrong about that?”
She adds:
“In this society we have on one extreme pornography and on the other the
puritans. But there is no one in the middle speaking decently and openly about
the naked body of a woman”.
“Participants only received a symbolic amount of money, to pay for the
expenses of their participation”.
This program started
on April 2nd and has just finished airing. As we can see, rude and
grotesque comments about the feminine body don’t have enough cultural grounds
to keep a show alive for a long time. They are now thinking of making a new
show to which they need to create even more polemic; this is the only way this
show can grow.
This show has
generated us a feeling of reject, from the sound, the illumination, to the body
language of the judges. An instinctive reject.
Past this first shock
and analyzing a little bit more the situation, it called our attention that
this happens in a Nordic country. Without doubt women there have less shyness
towards their naked body, less than in countries of other latitudes; but on the
other hand, the humiliation that this program supposes makes it difficult to
understand how it can take place in a cultural environment where women are
considered liberated. Though, it seems that machismo there is also evident, to
the point that it becomes a television entertainment.
This program makes us
reflect about how much women still care about the opinion men have about our
bodies, even though it is a bad one. Not even about us!, but of our bodies. In
a beauty pageant misses go to be applauded, in this show they go to get
insulted and to be judged. Does this
show reveal to us the deterioration our species is living, and the trace of
sadomasochism in the relations between men and women?
And now that we are
talking about men, we cannot stop asking ourselves, is that what they really
think “honestly” when they see a naked woman? Because that is what they say to
defend this program. If this is true, then men have truly lost their perspective,
because when they see a woman they stay only with the material part, on what
they see, forgetting everything of what the feminine supposes. If we compare it
with the universe, men are only watching the solid material we know, forgetting
of the dark matter, what we cannot see, that is more than the 90% of it.
The feminine universe
still has the biggest part of her being in the dark, to discover it and comment
about it supposes a true challenge for us all: men and women. Who dares to make
a program about this?
Nudity can be
liberating or enslaving, depending on how it is focused. Nudity can be
liberating when it helps untie the knots of prejudice, but it can be extremely
alienating when it supposes the humiliation of getting stuck in the judgment of
a man.
“Naked: take off the
knots that tie you to prejudice” J.L.P.
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