“Their nakedness acts as a confirmation and provokes a very strong sense of relief. She is a woman like any other: or he is a man like any other: we are overwhelmed by the marvellous simplicity of the familiar sexual mechanism. […] The other is reduced or elevated — whichever you prefer — to their primary sexual category: male or female. Our relief is the relief of finding an unquestionable reality to whose direct demands our earlier highly complex awareness must now yield.” (p59 Berger: “Ways of Seeing”)
In “Ways of Seeing”, Berger writes about the western visual culture and in particular how males and females are culturally represented and consequently act accordingly. These mutually accepted representations of male and female are very different from each other. Berger concludes that a woman, for instance, is always self-conscious and measures her self-worth by her representation through her own eyes, in others’ eyes and in men’s eyes.
I find Berger’s article quite interesting in light of a RuPaul’s Drag Race episode I saw recently where the contestants had to do a ‘wet t-shirt contest’ mini challenge. For those of you unfamiliar with this show, RuPaul’s Drag Race is an American reality competition show where drag queens contend for the crown of “America’s next drag superstar”. In this particular mini challenge, the contestants had to wear breastplates (fake plastic boobs) and, slathered in soap and water, dance seductively in front of a cheering crowd of men. Most of the drag queens were shaking it about quite a bit resulting in several “nip slips” which were blurred out by the show. When these comically large breastplates were presented on a cart to the contestants beforehand nothing was blurred out. Even when the contestants were trying on the breastplates out of drag (ie: in their “male representations”) nothing was blurred out. What exactly are the regulations and practices concerning nipples on this show? We all know that the boobs these males are wearing are absolutely fake, but still the nipples were blurred out. Especially in a show like RuPaul’s Drag Race video obscuration is quite tricky, because when the males are in drag and simulating the representation of the female anatomy, the breastplate nipples have to be blurred out. Once the nipple that is exposed is attached to the body of a woman or has the representation of a woman, it is considered nudity and has to be blurred out. This goes to show that the regulations regarding obscuration are fixed to abide by the rules of the marvellous simplicity of the familiar sexual mechanism Berger was talking about. The regulations are forced to abide by the primary sexual categories of male/female which is difficult to uphold when trying to decide what to blur out in a show like RuPaul’s Drag Race in which we know that the lady parts are fake because the contestants are all male, which only highlights the absurdity of the situation.
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