Boobs on the blog: some thoughts on Diana Blaine and topless professors

From Bitch Ph.d, I've learned about the interesting case of Diana Blaine, who teaches gender studies at nearby USC. 

I ought to have heard of her before; we're about the same age, we both have doctorates from UCLA, and we both teach gender studies.  But the feminist community is both busy and parochial, and I am always learning about new and fascinating folks in our world.  What's got Blaine noticed these days is that a few of her students discovered that from her blog, she links to her Flickr photo site where she has a couple of topless pictures of herself.  The story got picked up by Channel 4, the Los Angeles NBCTV affiliate, and it's landed Professor Blaine in a bit of hot water. 

Even though Blaine is untenured,the university, I am happy to say, seems to be backing her to the hilt; the blog is her personal web page and not maintained on USC's servers.  Both her academic and personal freedom mean that her job is not in jeopardy.  (And may I say that I am, reluctantly, greatly admiring of the growing progressive majority at the University of Southern California.  A school once thought of as a mecca for the suntanned, the privileged, the vapid, and the reactionary has become renowned for its commitment to diversity and its particularly strong program in gender studies.  Almost makes me want to say "Fight On for old 'SC!"  Of course, being married to an alumna who bleeds cardinal and gold helps.)

Here's a lengthy excerpt from one of Blaine's posts about her decision to post semi-nude pictures of herself:

The couple of conservative USC students who have dedicated themselves to attacking me clearly grew frustrated at my refusal to react to them, so they upped the ante and contacted the media about my nudie pics. One station bit, and voila, we have a scandal. It was fun watching the broadcasts about me throughout the day as I do what I am trained to do as a gender scholar, interpret media representations; it's just in this case I was the subject...

Anywho, first we can see the obvious puritanicaldynamic that the United States has had since, well, the Puritans came over from England where their particular brand of fanatical Christianity proved too much even for the fanatical Protestants breaking away from the Catholic Church in the Reformation. The Puritans loathed the body and tried to exert strict controls on sexuality, particularly female--read The Scarlet Letter for all you'll ever need to know about this. We continue to have their reactionary discomfort with the body, and so we too find it an object of obsessive fascination. Basically, by making nudity taboo, we've guaranteed its centrality. As Feminist Scholar Susan Griffin notes, the priest and the pornographer operate on the same value system--both mark human sexuality as disgusting, and then one says "turn your eyes away," while the other says, "look here, look here!"

So these kids were hoping to capitalize on our Puritanical sense that we should be ashamed ofsomething as banal as our own bodies, trying in effect to mark me with the Scarlet Letter. "Ummmm, let's tell on her," is in effect their motivation (which my husband has aptly branded "juvenile"), and that way we can get her in trouble with patriarchal authority, in this case the administration at USC. That will show her for disagreeing with us! Put her in her place!

Now we need to take responsibility for our part in this. These young people were raised by us, and we are the ones who have taught them that they should have revulsion for nudity and sexuality. We have also taught them that it's appropriate to police women's sexual behavior, that they have the privilege to interfere in female self-determination. As Americans, we have failed them, and I hope that we can continue to evolve as a culture in a direction that is more life-affirming and less fear-based. I have dedicated my life's work to this type of education, one that shows the history of and contexts for our current beliefs and actions and therefore gives us the power to change, should we so choose.

There's a lot to digest there from a feminist perspective.  First off, the historian in me feels compelled to shriek at the notion that The Scarlet Letter offers an accurate portrayal of Puritan life!  Hawthorne wrote in 1850, some two centuries after the zenith of American Puritanism -- and he was, to put it mildly, no historian.  Want to understand Puritan sexuality in all of its contradictions and complexity?  My good buddy Richard Godbeer (formally at Riverside, now at Miami) has the book on the subject: Sexual Revolution in Early America.  Read it, and you'll see how wrong Hawthorne was.

But I'm not here to quibble with Blaine's reference to Puritanism, even if it is a bit inaccurate.  In the main, she's right that we live in a culture that is extraordinarily ambivalent about nudity and sexuality.  She's right too that the young (apparently male) students who "turned her in" for her topless pictures were trying to "police her sexuality" in a way that is fundamentally very traditional.

Clearly, Diana Blaine is doing her best to "match her language and her life".  In line with many "sex-positive" feminists, she argues for a radical revisioning of sexuality and gender.  She is highly critical of traditional sexual mores, perhaps particularly because those mores have alternately repressed and exploited women.  And on her eponymous blog, she's going to make it clear -- in her words and pictures -- that she lives a  life that is fully congruent with her expressed personal and intellectual values.    In that sense, she's doing what all good feminist teachers do: she's inviting her students to look at her as a role model for a particular way to live out one's ideological commitments.  Her topless photos are, it seems, clear evidence that Diana Blaine will not be bound by a traditional understanding of what is appropriate for a woman, a scholar, and a teacher.  I'm sure she hopes to give inspiration and encouragement to her students; judging from the laudatory reviews she's received, she's clearly succeeded.

If you hunt around in my photo albums, you'll find a pic or two of me showing as much skin as Diana Blaine does.  I've put up a few pictures of me running (or collapsed after a run).  My male privilege allows me to put "topless" pics of myself on my blog without significant criticism.  Diana Blaine and I are a lot alike: two married UCLA Ph.Ds who teach gender studies and maintain blogs that mix the personal and the professional.  We both have pictures of our naked chests on display.  But for any number of reasons -- most of which are rooted in the very sort of traditional mores that Blaine finds so troublesome -- my bare chest is unremarkable while hers attracts calls from the Oprah show.  That is sexism at its most absurd.

Of course, I've made it clear on my blog that I am trying to do something fairly difficult: I'm trying to match a passionate commitment to the traditional goals of secular feminism with an even more passionate commitment to evangelical Christian faith.  On issues like abortion, for example, this has left me tied into knots of nuance where I end up alienating everyone with my tortured and self-indulgent ambivalence.  On other issues, such as pornography, my feminism and my faith lead me to precisely the same conclusion, and I can speak clearly.  On this blog (and sometimes in the classroom) I also talk about my own experiences with abortion and pornography.  My students deserve to know that I do match my language and my life -- they need to know, too, that my theories are rooted both in intellectual inquiry and in personal experience. 

One of the classic battle-cries of feminism is that "the personal is political". In different ways, with differing views of feminism, Diana Blaine and I are both living that out in the conscious decision to blur the line between the public and the private self.  While I sense that she and I would differ on many issues, she has my full and complete support in her decision to reveal so much of herself -- literally and figuratively -- in her very public blog.

Alas, not all feminists are as approving of the personal decisions of their allies. In the comments section below Bitch Ph.D's post on the subject of Diana's blog, a "dr. igloo" writes:

...I personally find her feminist street cred slightly tarnished by the fact that she has apparently taken her husband's last name. Is there really a credible feminist defense of this practice?

Aha.  So when Diana Blaine makes the CHOICE to put topless pictures of herself on her public blog, she's a "good" feminist, but when she makes the CHOICE to create unity with her spouse by sharing the same last name, she's a bad one?  Lordy, I hate the feminism police.