Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show
As if they didn’t have enough opportunities to do so already, heterosexual men will get yet another chance to ogle half-naked white women on their television screens when the Victoria’s Secret fashion shows airs in December. The show, and brand itself, is frequently criticized for its sexist objectification of women’s half-naked bodies but the real problem runs much deeper. Images of women’s bodies aren’t inherently sexist, but the inequitable power dynamic such images bolster, and the way this dynamic affects both women and men, certainly is.
The Victoria’s Secret fashion show is not just normalized, but even celebrated as an anticipated event: over 9 million people watched the show last year. That this brand and its sexist marketing (including this show) clearly has such a strong hold on our cultural imagination demonstrates the extent to which women are still primarily valued for their bodies, especially bodies that fit a thin, young, predominately white ideal. While much has been made of the fact that the first African American model with natural hair will be featured in this year’s show, the brand at large still largely promotes an ideal that upholds white women as valuable for their bodies and women of color as most valuable when they’re invisible.
But the glorification of this idealized body isn’t the problem in and of itself. The problem is that the show and brand ultimately seem to cater to heterosexual men and perpetuate an unequal power dynamic. Fashion shows like this not only impart the message that women are only valued for their appearance but that this appearance is in turn only valuable because it is equated with catering to men’s (sexual) needs. Only women whose bodies are interpreted as serving men’s achieve visibility, and this visibility is often misinterpreted as actual power.
The Victoria’s Secret fashion show is ultimately just one example of a much bigger problem: Women are objectified and viewed as “less than” because we are incapable of being seen as fully human subjects who feel pleasure and pain and have desires and goals that exist beyond catering to men’s sexual pleasure. Shows like this one groom girls to perform but never to receive.
It’s unhealthy to teach men that their mere existence warrants the service of others. Men must be taught that real, healthy relationships with women, with anybody else, requires mutual respect and hard work. Men’s entitlement to women’s bodies is a public health problem, and we can’t keep acting like it doesn’t exist because it gets in the way of brands’ profits.
We need to wake up and realize that just because commercials, films, music videos, and television shows that appropriate women’s bodies for men’s sexual fantasies are ubiquitous doesn’t mean they’re acceptable. Victoria’s Secret is a fantasy world in which neither women nor men are allowed to participate in a mutually human relationship. It’s an unrealistic, unenjoyable and certainly unsustainable model for a healthy world. We all deserve better than this.
