Our flawed body politics

‘New year, new you’, or so they say. And as sure as eggs is eggs (particularly for the high protein advocates), new year’s resolutions for many will have revolved around the quest for a new body. I use the word ‘body’ specifically because our prevailing culture keeps finding new and alarming ways to reduce us all, but women in the most dehumanising terms, into mere bodies; bodies that can be chopped, changed, rearranged increasingly even to accommodate the outward trappings of the opposite sex.

This manifests itself most completely of course in porn, as it always has, where the cold-eyed camera sees everything of the body and nothing of the person inhabiting it. But if porn is the outlier (albeit one in the hands of every phoned-up teenager), it’s the advertisements, the pop videos, the language (‘money shot’, anyone?) – even, ironically, the ubiquitous sex education in schools – that has elevated sex and sexuality to the dominant social currency, while stripping it of anything remotely sexy.