Sex, Violence, and Humor

My mind started wandering this morning, in my super-boring administrative law class, about how easily female sexuality conjures up an association with violence. This is true even when there is no overt violence - eg, horror movies where the virgins are the ones who survive and the victims are running around half-naked - or, to cite something in the news more recently, this genre of holocaust erotica where Nazi officers are imagined as sexy dominatrix women (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/06/world/middleeast/06stalags.html). I was thinking about the much simpler proposition embedded in the image of a man surrounded by scantily clad dancing girls: that man is "bad," a transgressor of decency, someone who undermines the social fabric of respect and power by objectifying (and thereby controlling) people who are other men's daughters, wives, and sisters.

Perhaps there is something inherently violent in the proposition that any one person can objectify and dehumanize any other person - regardless of whatever puritan, desexualized norm that other person was supposed to conform to. This would probably be true if, instead of controlling a person's sexuality, the image were one of controlling a person's labor, say - that is, images of chain gangs and concentration camps are inherently violent too. But the thing that's troubling about sexualized violence is that it's violent only when applied to women. It just doesn't have the same meaning to sexualize a man transgressively. In a lot of ways men are subjected to the same kinds of puritan norms that make it shocking and out of place to see him in a sexualized light ("It wouldn't look right; like Santa Claus taking a shower" - to cite an extreme example of out-of-place sexuality from last week's 30 Rock). And yet when we see images of sexualized men, we don't think it's transgressive and violent. We think it's transgressive and funny. Santa Claus taking a shower is one example. Patrick Swayze and Chris Farley's Chippendale SNL skit is another example. And Jackass - a show that I love that is often expressly violent - is another example.

I'm not sure where this leaves me in suggesting feminist action points, and I'm not even sure if it's better or worse for sex to be violent or funny. I just wanted to point it out.