A friend from my days at The Link recently posted a link to an article in The Guardian that caught my eye. The piece in question is by Jill Parkin and is entitled “Why I won’t sell body and soul.” In it, the author explains that although she has made most of her career as a freelance journalist selling confessional pieces to magazines and newspapers, she has recently been surprised by the kinds of requests she has gotten from editors, who often want her to bare her body as well as her soul.
My initial reaction was a bit of a “Yeah, and….?”, since tell-alls and confessional pieces have been around forever. They’re what keep gossip columns running and sell autobiographies. Everybody loves a juicy confession, right? But Parkin argues that this is a particular form of writing that only women engage in, which makes it a problem for anyone who calls herself a feminist or believes in the equality of the sexes. She also argues that men would never be asked to do the kinds of degrading things that women do, routinely, for a story: pitting themselves against other women in a weight-loss contest, trying out for the latest reality show (which demands photos of potential contestants in their underwear), or other self-hating, body-abusing feminine acts.
Although I think her points are valid, in terms of editors wanting more grotesque confessions and pseudo-gonzo journalism in which the writer is the entire story (rather than just a participant therein), I would disagree that this is a totally female issue. Doesn’t anyone remember Nerve’s column “I Did It For Science”? The whole concept was that a human guinea pig named Grant Stoddard would be assigned to do humiliating and degrading things, all in the name of “science,” and (as is the nature of the website) with a sexual angle. He was a male stripper (for one night), had sex with a Real Doll, and even had a friend fuck him with a replica of his own penis. He event wrote a book called Working Stiff, further detailing his experiences at Nerve. Most of the acts he was asked to perform were humiliating, and as he notes in his book, he rarely completed his tasks without the use of drugs and/or alcohol. Still, he consented to engaging in these acts, he agreed to the price Nerve paid for the pieces, and he was able to have a lot of sex with a lot of women very publicly. Does this make him a victim? Hardly.
Similarly, I feel that anyone who is writing confessionals of the sort Parkin describes is being humiliated of her own accord. As Parkin notes at the end of her piece, she can always say no, and she says that she has been turning these degrading ideas down more frequently. It seems that, in the end, it’s about the frequency of the requests, and the fact that editors are hungry for these types of pieces. It’s not the fact that people can and will and in fact volunteer themselves to be humiliated, it’s that there is a market for humiliation pieces that delight in the degradation of others. It is, very much, a reality TV syndrome.
The one line I disagree with the most, however, is this: “Male writers also raid their family lives and their own psyches for copy, but no one asks them to tear themselves apart in the process.” Don’t we? Think about the last book you read. Think about the author of that book. Was he an alcoholic? A drug addict? The type of person who pays for sex? Was he simply a terrible human being, out of whose muck and filth a beautiful book grew? It’s totally Nietzschean:
“[…] one does best to separate an artist from his work, not taking him as seriously as his work. He is, after all, only the precondition of his work, the womb, the soil, sometimes the dung and manure on which, out of which, it grows—and therefore in most cases something one must forget if one is to enjoy the work itself.” (On the Genealogy of Morals, 100–101)
Male and female writers alike are asked to tear themselves apart in the quest to produce art. And, frankly, I don’t think that writers who are well-adjusted produce much in the way of great art. (Though there are, of course, shining exceptions.) I don’t say that tearing yourself apart will necessarily create art, but that this rending of self certainly isn’t new, and certainly isn’t an unexpected by-product in the creation of art.
But what do you think, you writers and artists? Is the destruction and even humiliation of an individual the only way to create art? And does it matter that the “art” produced by this behaviour is so lowbrow? Should we feel sorry for these women (and men), who feel they have no choice but to prostitute themselves—body and soul—through the medium of journalism for a few dollars? Where do your sympathies lie?