Here's Looking at You, Brit

Note from the Editor: Previously we brought you Rebecca Niose's (graduate of WS now in law school) article responding to the recent judicial ruling that a woman cannot say NO after she has agreed to have sex. Now we bring you Adriana Ramirez de Arellano's (teaches our Women and the Law courses) response to the recent Britney Spears "no panties" incident.

These are not necessarily the views of WS per se, but these 2 posts and the posts to come on our new blog represent highly articulate engagements with the daily events that indicate that we still need Women Studies and feminism. We hope you will find the new blog to be another avenue for give-and-take on the issues that so concern us. If you have a post you'd like to send, please reply to me privately. Enjoy! -- Gail Houston


Pussy and the Paparazzi

There are as many ways to read Britney Spears' latest scandal as there were camera angles capturing her no-longer-private parts. Ms. Spears' career reads like a female "Forest Gump" allowing us to travel through the poles of American idiocy, this time from a woman's vantage point. From Mickey Mouse Club kid to Madonna's little kissing pet, Britney Spears has invented and reinvented herself numerous times along the various codes of contemporary American female sexuality. First as teenage virgin-seductress, later as bride-for-a-weekend in a Las Vegas drunken stupor, Ms. Spears began to trace the "axis of sexy" for our times to which now she adds these latest images of her as a (rich) "Girl Gone Wild" whose nudity--instead of being sold for the low price of $9.99 (plus shipping & handling)--can be downloaded for free in the all-so-democratic internet.

The scandalous publicity stunt during the MTV Awards a couple of years ago when Madonna--at the center of a lesbian-chic triptych--kissed both Britney Spears and (fellow Mickey Mouse Club veteran) Cristina Aguilera on their pouty lips, now reeks of contagious magic. With these latest photos, Ms. Spears now seems to have been infused with Madonna's ability to cater to the needs of the American voyeur. As most of us may remember, Madonna's exhibitionism reached its apex in the early nineties with the publication of her book "Sex", in which racist, child-molesting, and gang-rape vignettes were all packaged in sexy couture and choreographed into slick fashion photo-shoots: imperialist status quo sold as high-brow rebellion. Once again, the Hollywood media machine feeds the masses with the parading sexual excesses of the oligarchy.

Yet these latest "Spear shots" must also be read as somewhat counter-hegemonic; there is something subversive in Ms. Spears' gratuitous beaver shot. In a country where, as recently as 1992, a California judge still asks the question, "why, in heaven's name, do you buy the cow when you get the milk for free," there is something revolutionary about giving free milk to the needy... in this case, the American people who are seemingly starving for a glimpse of Ms. Spears' genitals or a peek at Janet Jackson's breast. It is rumored that the reason why Ms. Spears recently divorced her latest husband is that he sold footage of the two of them having sex. If this is true, then Ms. Spears' decision to go out partying scantily clad in paparazzi-loaded nightclubs had the (unintended) effect of reversing the judge's question: "how (in heaven's name)could you make money by milking images of my sexuality now that these have been smeared all over the internet?"

This gratuitous montage featuring Ms. Spears' genitalia, then, must also be read under the sign of former porn-star turned feminist performance artist, Annie Sprinkle. In one of Ms. Sprinkle's most famous performances, aptly entitled "A Public Cervix Announcement," she inserts a speculum and invites members of the audience to look inside her vagina. In the photos she has posted on her web-site, Ms. Sprinkle has extended this invitation to anyone with internet access: "Please, be my guest. I invite you to take a long look at my cervix." She proudly points out that if one looks closely one is able to discern a drop of menstrual blood "making its debut" at the opening of her cervix. Ms. Spears in tabloid formula; Ms. Sprinkle in a series of daring solo acts of improvisation; both of these women's careers would seem to be running in opposing parallel lines... until now, when they have reached this juncture in which their pussies meet, eye to eye, with the gaze of the American public.

Whether one reads the pictures as subordinating or subversive, there remains an uneasiness in looking at Ms. Spears' sex--a feeling of being seen as one is watching. Something is revealed about America as it obsessively peeks into its starlets--or inside the lover of the President vis a vis a cigar. Women's sexes have for so long been the "black hole" around which patriarchal men, in particular fascist men, have spun their existentialist neurosis. But reality does not operate as a one-way mirror. As we look, we also become exposed. Thus, not just as a "vagina dentata" capable of pulling a multitude of cameras into its orbit, Ms. Spears' sex should be read also as a sort of pubis cameral for the digital age, in which America can be seen as it looks into Ms. Spears; a vagina obscura reversing the camera angle, allowing for something else to be exposed: America, The Lecherous. These photos can be read, not only as Ms. Spears saying "Here's my pussy, America," but rather as her pussy announcing, "America, here's looking at you, kid."