There’s almost no way on earth that you could not have been aware of the recent Royal Wedding – believe me, I tried hard enough! But how many people are aware of the extraordinary attention that Pippa Middleton -Kate’s sister- has received since the occasion. Due to a variety of factors I ended up watching most of the main ceremony on tele. It was slow but mildly entertaining (Prince Harry swaggering down the aisle), but if anything could be said about the Maid of Honour (Pippa Middleton) it would probably be that she looked good. Yes, she didn’t look unattractive, but nothing crazily out of the ordinary. If you look back at the pictures, she had a modest hair-do, no jewellery to really speak of, and was dressed in a fairly simple, white dress.
Despite the relative plainness of Ms Middleton’s attire there has been a huge world-wide response to her wearing something not even especially tight. It shouldn’t matter what she was wearing but I make mention of it to highlight that no matter what one wears, the objectification still takes place. What you wear isn’t that important, what’s more significant is the fact you’re a woman. The Mail on Sunday, Daily Mail, News of the World and Daily Mirror all published pictures showing the Kate and Pippa Middleton holidaying on a yacht. The News of the World published images of Pippa removing her bikini top with the headlines “Oh buoy it’s Pippa” and “So hot she had to be hosed down.”
On the same day as the wedding there was a group on facebook ‘Pippa Middleton Ass Appreciation Society’ which now has almost a quarter of a million ‘likes’! Linked to the Facebook page is a website selling t-shirts printed with ‘If only Pippa were a Stripper’, and one of a silhouetted women in heels bending over with the text ‘I’d like to be in the Middleton of that!’ This, among other things, led to Pippa Middleton being approached by Steven Hirsch of porn company Vivid Entertainment to appear in a porn film. The Vivid letter to Pippa offering her $5m to appear in a porn film – cited her ‘beauty and attitude’ as reasons why she would be successful as an ‘adult star’.
Christopher Sun, the director of the world’s first 3D porn film, then waded in claiming that ‘Pippa’s body didn’t compare to the figures of the many actresses he’d auditioned for his films’. “I’ve seen better” he told Metro.co.uk, and said he would never even think about casting her in one of his films. The Metro are really dragging it out with a story about a virtual reality firm who have purchased the rights to the kissing scene from the wedding so customers can insert themselves into the picture using blue screen technology. They ran with the headline: ‘How you can pinch ‘Pippa Middleton’s’ bum‘.
What is really incredible about all this attention is that it has been endorsed by major news titles, an indication of how widespread this kind of attitude and objectification is. This, sadly, should not be a huge surprise seeing as pornography teaches you well not only to see sexual situations where there aren’t any, but also it can train one to look at women as if they were some sort of being fundamentally different to men, a being that is all body-parts to be considered against a background and context of porn. When you spend a significant time (either in terms of amount or ‘intensity’) with images of women presented as essentially a composite of various body-parts that each have their use to a masculine figure, it shouldn’t be a shock that many porn users see women and instantly judge them as ‘carriers of body-parts’ imaginatively seeing these body-parts being used by themselves or another male figure. Women’s body-parts are seen as ‘parts-for-male-use’ and women as possessors of these parts become nothing more than ‘objects-for-male-use’. It is this process of objectification, commodification and dehumanisation that is at the heart of what motivates a young woman in a simple dress having her body-parts discussed and priced in international news. How can we expect gender equality to be achieved in an environment like this?
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Longer copy of article I wrote last week with full links included: http://bit.ly/my441R
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Thanks for this. I remember reading the comments Christopher Sun made. It really annoys me how Pippa Middelton is being reduced to her body parts and how suitable they are for sexually gratifying men through pornography or lap dancing.
Good article. Poor girl, wouldn’t want to trade places with her, it must feel so violating.
Good lord, the woman’s a party planner / PR agent. Perhaps she should have considered becoming a bus driver, an engineer or a Gaelic language revivalist if she didn’t want to become the object of people’s contempt!
some FB comments I’ve seen made about her are so horrifying and violent in their tone it’s sickening – and yet there are numerous paper and mag articles attempting to persuade us she’s “lucky” to be getting all this attention – it all just grosses me out a lot – thanks for this eloquent article!
Good reminder of objectification, but her circumstances (substance-less socialite linked to a royal family that is merely there to gawk at) are prime conditions for objectification.
And the Middletons are refreshing in the sense that the pornographic scandal in the family is male and gayish: The numerous nudish pics of James Middleton.
Yet another example of how it is the mainstream context that is the problem, not contextualised graphic sex acts.