“Sometimes I play with nudity because it makes people pay attention, sometimes I play with nudity because it makes me loudly vulnerable to those in the room and it turns their brains inside-out as I challenge them to see me for what I am…without clothes.”
– Amanda Palmer, “An Open Letter to Sinead O’Connor, Re: Miley Cyrus”

It’s a moment burned into the American pop culture memory – Super Bowl XXXVIII, halftime. Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake strut on the stage. At the end of the show while striking a pose, a part of her costume was torn and her right breast was revealed to the country. Her breast was on camera for a split second, but the uproar lasted for months, even years. The following Super Bowl performances included older, all male acts, including Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, and the Rolling Stones. Obviously, had a male performer shown up shirtless no one would have batted an eye. Shirtless men are normal, common place, and in some arenas in some groups even expected. But when a woman shows a certain amount of skin, it is automatically sexualized. Even when she is fully clothed, female pop stars are generally regarded as sex objects first and musicians second – for example, Amanda Palmer suffering the fatal “nip slip” while performing at Glastonbury Festival.  For many artists, this could have signaled the beginning of the end of their career as “serious” musicians.  For Palmer, it was just another step in a long and, more often than not, unclothed career.

First, it must be acknowledged that the oversexualization of female nudity is hardly just a problem in pop music, but also in society as a whole. Everywhere a person looks in today’s world, it is impossible to miss the way that women’s bodies are viewed as inherently sexy and tempting, turning the female into an object to be bought and sold. Anyone who has looked in a magazine has seen these sorts of advertisements, with women’s bodies being equated to a car, or a brand of beer, lowering a woman’s role in society to nothing more than a sex object.

http://www.indiatimes.com/news/rest-of-the-world/top-5-most-sexist-ads-68807-2.html

http://www.thedignifieddevil.com

Men, meanwhile, are put through no such conditioning. In fact, a recent Abercrombie & Fitch in-store video advertising campaign was labeled as “too obscene” and “absurd.” The main difference between this and Abercrombie’s usual advertisements is that this campaign contained mostly men acting in the role of a sexualized object instead of women (“Sexualized Ads”). While I couldn’t find the specific video that this is referencing, there are other instances of Abercrombie objectifying me in the way typically saved for women.

http://www.sisterhoodadventures.com/2012/10/20/basic-bitch-of-the-week/

Both of these use fragmenting, showing only sexual parts of the body in a sexual situation and thus dehumanizing the subject, in a way that women are frequently subjected to. Yet a woman’s body being fragmented is common place, where as a man’s body causes an uproar of naysayers crying impropriety. Men in advertising – much like in pop music performances and music videos – are held to a very different standard than the women. Again, like in many music videos, women in the advertisements are also subjected to fragmenting, showing them as pieces of a body to be used rather than a full person.
Furthermore, there is an element of good humor associated with male nudity or partial nudity. For example, K-Mart released this advertisement this year for the holiday season, depicting men dropping their pants and playing jingle bells by shaking their balls.

A hilarious commercial, without a doubt. We watched it at Thanksgiving this past year, my whole family and I, my youngest cousin being ten. I couldn’t help but think that if it were women standing in their underwear on a stage, there was no way my aunt would have allowed my cousin to watch the video. The stigma that a naked or semi-naked woman is inherently more sexual is reinforced by the casual good humor that surrounds a man’s naked form. Part of this goes back to the idea that society is groomed to view women as sex objects and men as subjects – objects do not hold the capacity or need to generate humor and laughter, subjects do.

The conditioning of viewing women as objects begins early, too. In one book of many, designed to teach older children and teens to draw anime characters, male models are featured at work, behind desks, being productive. The sections on drawing women, meanwhile, depict the woman leaving the shower or getting dressed, scenes with little grounding or any productivity (Lawson). The problem is not that the women are shown as wearing little clothing, just as the problem is not, necessarily, that the men are fully clothed. Objectifying men as sex objects (though it rarely happens) would not fix the problem of female objectification. The problem is that the women in the book are not shown to be productive members of society as the men are, therefore conditioning society from an early point to view women as something that stays home and does not add anything to society beyond her body.

Which brings us back to Amanda Palmer.

This year, Amanda Palmer gave a performance at Glastonbury Festival during which one of her breasts slipped free of her bra. Moments later, she readjusted herself, proceeded to rip off her shirt completely so she was only in her bra, and continued on with the show which was, to all accounts of those present, an excellent performance from Palmer. However, when the tabloid The Daily Mail reported on that performance, they failed to mention any of the musical aspects of her music concert, and chose instead to talk about how she “made a boob of herself” and went on to analyze her body and breasts (Daily Mail Reporter). For many artists, this would have been a marketing disaster, maybe even would have signaled the start of their slide from fame to infamy. However, Amanda Palmer is not many artists. Her response was to pen a waltz reply to the tabloid, entitled “Dear Daily Mail”.

In order to summarize Palmer’s ideas on the oversexualization of the female body, one really doesn’t have to go much further than the lyrics of this song. She flat out states in the song that tabloids’ habit of “debasing women’s appearances ruins our species of humans.” It is a direct calling out against the way that society objectifies women so that their only worth is found in their appearance and ability to act as a sexual object. Later, after whipping off her kimono to stand naked in front of the crowd, as her song is nearly drowned out by their cheers, she laughs and says, “Shh, it’s just a naked woman” (Palmer, “My Open Letter”).

True, stripping completely naked would be a stretch even for a male performer, but again – the idea that a naked woman is innately more sexualized that her male counterpart is apparent throughout the rest of the performance. “Where are the news worthy cocks?” she belts out, finishing with a note pounded into her piano. When a male performer has his show reviewed, chances are that even a tabloid rag like The Daily Mail would report on at least some aspect of the performance – being musicality or theatrics or presentation – before reporting on their physical appearances. Male performers do not have to worry about the objectification that is inherent in being a female performer. By stripping naked and unabashedly continuing her performance as if she were still fully clothed, Palmer removes some of the implied sexuality that is attached to a naked women by removing the mystery. There are no implications, no blink-and-you-miss-it qualities to this performance – Palmer wears her nakedness like armor as she calls out the tabloid for objectifying her. She takes back her subjectivity almost by force, naked as the day she was born and standing tall. Palmer makes her statement about the oversexualization of the female form and is blunt and completely unsubtle about doing so.

As previously stated, Amanda Palmer is not like most artists, and as she states in the song, had The Daily Mail spent even a few moments to look into her history, they would have found that Palmer is not a stranger to taking off her clothes in front of an audience. Before she was a musician, she worked as a nude model for painters and artists (Palmer “Art, Nakedness…”) In fact, had The Daily Mail simply done a Google Images search for her, barely a page down appears a photo of Palmer, smiling broadly and stark naked, arms thrown out, as her fans draw and color on her body. She has posted nudes of herself to her twitter account. At the Firefly Music Festival, Palmer stripped down to her bra and underwear to sing “Ukulele Anthem” to a crowd, once again wielding markers to sign her body with (Greene).

http://octobass.tumblr.com/post/52318648710/nsfw-this-is-an-awesome-picture-strong-sexy

It must be said that Amanda Palmer has a very open, trusting, and frankly irregular relationship with her fans. Her most recent album, “Theatre is Evil,” was funded completely via a Kickstarter project that ultimately raised over one million dollars from her fans (Watkins). Again, she has on several occasions invited her fans to draw and color on her naked body. When going on tour, Palmer often goes as far as to stay in the houses of those who like her music and attend her shows, finding them through her various social media platforms (Palmer, “The Art of Asking”). However, she uses this relationship of give and take, of apparently open trust, to combat the societal ideas that generally surround female nudity in pop music and other medias. When watching the video of Palmer’s rendition of “Dear Daily Mail”, you can hear the crowd cheer in clear anticipation of what is about to happen. Palmer has built such a reputation of taking off her clothes for non-sexual purposes that her fans have come to expect her to at least partially strip at her clothes. By doing so, Palmer has built a reputation of having nothing to hide, literally baring all for her audience in many cases, including her performance of “Dear Daily Mail”.

http://www.spacereptilesareyourfriend.com/page56.shtml

Would Palmer’s use of nudity work for other artists? No. And she is perfectly aware of that, writing on her blog what she wants is for “women to feel less trapped inside their bodies, less afraid to be nailed to the cross of the cultural beauty standard.” Later, in the same blog post, she writes that there must be room for “Adele to wear a conservative suit, room for Lady Gaga to do naked performance art in the woods…room for Miley to rip a page out of stripper culture and run around like a maniac for however long she wants to.” It fits with Palmer’s established identity to strip her kimono and sing a waltz about the objectification of women in tabloids, and clearly not every female performer would be comfortable or expected to respond in such a way. All the same, there’s no denying the effectiveness of Palmer’s strategy, or her intentions behind it. “Let’s give our young women the right weapons to fight with as they charge naked into battle,” she writes, “Instead of ordering them back in the house to put some goddamn clothes on” (Palmer, “An Open Letter”).

Works Cited

Daily Mail Reporter. “Making a boob of herself! Amanda Palmer’s breast escapes her bra as she performs on stage at Glastonbury.” Mail Online. The Daily Mail, 28 Jun 2013. Web. 16 Dec 2013. <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2351373/Making-boob-Amanda-Palmers-breast-escapes-bra-performs-stage-Glastonbury.html>.

Greene, Brian. “Watch Amanda Palmer’s Nearly Nude Performance of “Ukulele Anthem” at Firefly.” Fuse. Fuse, 27 Jun 2013. 16 Dec 2013. <http://www.fuse.tv/videos/2013/06/amanda-palmer-stripped-exclusive>.

Lawson, Corrina. “The Tipping Point: Girls, Geeks, Sexualization, and How It Starts So Young.” Wired. Wired, 11 Jan 2012. Web. 13 Dec 2013. <http://www.wired.com/geekmom/2012/01/the-tipping-point-girls-geeks-sexualization-and-how-it-starts-so-young/>.

Palmer, Amanda. “An Open Letter to Sinead O’Connor, Re: Miley Cyrus.” Amanda Palmer and the Grand Theft Orchestra. Disqus, 03 Oct 2013. 13 Dec 2013 <http://amandapalmer.net/blog/20131003/>.

Palmer, Amanda. “Art, Nakedness, & Museums, Oh My! (Warning: Contains Art, Nakedness & Museums, Oh My!).” Amanda Palmer and the Grand Theft Orchestra. Disqus. 16 Dec 2013 <http://amandapalmer.net/blog/art-nakedness-museums-oh-my-warning-contains/>.

Palmer, Amanda. “The Art of Asking.” TED2013: The Young. The Wise. The Undiscovered.” TEDTalks. California, Long Beach. Feb 2013. Speech.

Palmer, Amanda. “My Open Letter to the Daily Mail.” Amanda Palmer and the Grand Theft Orchestra. Disqus. 13 July 2013.

“Sexualized Ads Become “Obscene” When Guys are the Objects.” don’t ya wish your girlfriend was smart like me? WordPress, 25 Apr 2008. 16 Dec 2013 <http://smartlikeme.wordpress.com/2008/04/25/sexualized-ads-become-obscene-when-guys-are-the-objects-2/>.

Watkins, Gwynne. “Amanda Palmer on Her Kickstarter-Funded Album, Boring Fortysomethings, and Nudity.” Vulture. New York Magazine, 11 Sep 2012. Web. 16 Dec 2013. <http://www.vulture.com/2012/09/amanda-palmer-interview.html>.