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Jul. 12th, 2014 08:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficI have been procrastinating like a mad woman all week. Senioritis has set in for realsies. I don't know why they put Business Law in the last semester, cause that's a class that actually requires work and...no one is doing any work at this point. One of my classmates showed up to class for the first time in the middle of the second week.
ANYWAY.
All this means I spent much of the last week watching season 4 of Ink Masters, which continues to be a fascinating train wreck of poor life choices.
One of the final challenges they had (meaning, thankfully, that it was only given to four really top-quality tattoo artists) was to tattoo the reconstructed breasts of women who had had mastectomies. A weird thing happened when they started filming the women getting tattoos, though. They weren't censored.
Now, however you feel about it (and I'm of two minds), female nipples are usually censored on television. Nipples specifically. Some women who have had mastectomies, even if they've had reconstruction to restore the shape of a breast, do not have nipples. Which means that, to whoever it is that makes censorship decisions, these breasts don't count. And that's...supremely fucked up?
It's as if by making a choice to focus censorship on nipples, a statement is being made that femininity is located in the nipple; that the essence of the breast is the nipple; and that, therefore, it is the nipple alone that drives men crazy with lust and must be hidden. So, for women who don't have nipples, the sudden absence of censorship is saying that they aren't really women, their breasts aren't really breasts, and that they're not sexually desirable.
Just the absence of a few pixels, and there's all this baggage about what it means. This is especially poignant given that one of the women said that, since the mastectomy, when she looks at her chest, she doesn't feel like a woman anymore. That's why she was getting the tattoo. So while the text of the show is a story of reconstruction and reclamation of femininity through tattooing, subtextually, the lack of censorship is essentially saying that that reclamation is impossible because the essential womanly feature is gone. It makes you wonder if they would show a castrated man uncensored.
Yes, so I was thinking about all of this while watching a shitty reality TV show. I have to say, though, I'm not actually sad for the lack of pixelation, cause those tattoos were gorgeous.
ANYWAY.
All this means I spent much of the last week watching season 4 of Ink Masters, which continues to be a fascinating train wreck of poor life choices.
One of the final challenges they had (meaning, thankfully, that it was only given to four really top-quality tattoo artists) was to tattoo the reconstructed breasts of women who had had mastectomies. A weird thing happened when they started filming the women getting tattoos, though. They weren't censored.
Now, however you feel about it (and I'm of two minds), female nipples are usually censored on television. Nipples specifically. Some women who have had mastectomies, even if they've had reconstruction to restore the shape of a breast, do not have nipples. Which means that, to whoever it is that makes censorship decisions, these breasts don't count. And that's...supremely fucked up?
It's as if by making a choice to focus censorship on nipples, a statement is being made that femininity is located in the nipple; that the essence of the breast is the nipple; and that, therefore, it is the nipple alone that drives men crazy with lust and must be hidden. So, for women who don't have nipples, the sudden absence of censorship is saying that they aren't really women, their breasts aren't really breasts, and that they're not sexually desirable.
Just the absence of a few pixels, and there's all this baggage about what it means. This is especially poignant given that one of the women said that, since the mastectomy, when she looks at her chest, she doesn't feel like a woman anymore. That's why she was getting the tattoo. So while the text of the show is a story of reconstruction and reclamation of femininity through tattooing, subtextually, the lack of censorship is essentially saying that that reclamation is impossible because the essential womanly feature is gone. It makes you wonder if they would show a castrated man uncensored.
Yes, so I was thinking about all of this while watching a shitty reality TV show. I have to say, though, I'm not actually sad for the lack of pixelation, cause those tattoos were gorgeous.