"The video is certainly an attention-getter. To the strains of “Fast, Cheap and Out of Control,” Greenstreet interviews women at Occupy Wall Street about the issues and their activism. The women are uniformly articulate and bright — but the camera loves to linger on their hair, on their lips, on tattoos peeking through bare skin. Greenstreet, on his blog, calls it “the sexy side of protesting corruption.” To others, it reduces women activists to sex objects."
This has garnered some controversy, actually, quite a bit:
"Steven Greenstreet was almost certainly out for publicity with his video “Hot Chicks of OWS.” After the controversy around the film was mentioned on CNBC, Greenstreet’s response was a tweet to reporter John Carney: “Thanks for the mention on CNBC for “Hot Chicks”! But maybe correct the spelling of my last name?” Female critics, on the other hand, he’s asked out for coffee."
http://www.salon.com/2011/10/18/is_this_video_occupy_wall_street_gone_wild/singleton/
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Steven Greenstreet was almost certainly out for publicity with his video “Hot Chicks of OWS.” After the controversy around the film was mentioned on CNBC, Greenstreet’s response was a tweet to reporter John Carney: “Thanks for the mention on CNBC for “Hot Chicks”! But maybe correct the spelling of my last name?” Female critics, on the other hand, he’s asked out for coffee.
The video is certainly an attention-getter. To the strains of “Fast, Cheap and Out of Control,” Greenstreet interviews women at Occupy Wall Street about the issues and their activism. The women are uniformly articulate and bright — but the camera loves to linger on their hair, on their lips, on tattoos peeking through bare skin. Greenstreet, on his blog, calls it “the sexy side of protesting corruption.” To others, it reduces women activists to sex objects.
Have youth, sex and activism always gone hand in hand? Or is this an unfair “OWS Gone Wild,” a film that lures women in under the pretext of taking them seriously, only to leer over their hotness?
The film caused quite a stir at Salon, where staffers debated the issues over email for several hours. Here’s a taste of the conversation.
Laura Miller: So this dimwit is making himself disagreeable to the women in the movement
Matt Zoller Seitz: For what it’s worth, I think the video is lovely. It’s the headline — “Hot Chicks of OWS” — that’s a problem.
The relationship between the two is that of a shallow jerk who goes somewhere looking to get laid, and instead falls madly in love and finds himself wanting to be a better person.
Laura: The video is pretty rather than leering, true, but even without the title, if I were one of those women (especially if he didn’t ask to film them first, explaining the context), I would be 1) creeped out and 2) annoyed that my attempts at political speech were reduced to appreciation of my looks.
Matt: It’s worth noting — and this really has no bearing on the video one way or the other — that protest movements throughout history have tended to attract people who aren’t really interested in the politics, but are only looking to meet interesting men and women. Social action as dating service.
Thomas Rogers: I went to the Act Up oral history project at White Columns Gallery in New York last year, and I remember a bunch of the people on the tapes talked about how the main reason they started going to Act Up meetings in the first place is because they wanted to meet cute guys — and then they eventually got involved for all kinds of other reasons.
Laura: People go to every kind of social event looking for romantic partners, including church group meetings, and there is nothing wrong with that. But it also doesn’t mean that everyone participating agrees to be photographed and presented as bait to lure those people into the movement.
in which a lot of women were sexually harassed with the argument that they should supply sex “for the sake of the movement.”
Rebecca Traister: The larger, simpler argument, outside of consent or permission, is: This video is sexist. It’s an example of women participating in public life — political, professional, social — and having their participation reduced to sexual objectification. That’s what happened here, nothing more, nothing less.
Andrew O’Hehir: Not to introduce the sometimes tiresome cultural-studies topic of the “male gaze,” but that’s exactly what Rebecca is talking about here. The public sphere is an unequal arena for men and women, who go into it with different expectations about how they “should” present themselves and how they will likely be viewed. It always has been unequal, of course; the only difference today is that feminism, metrosexuality, more widespread acceptance of homosexuality, etc., have complicated the picture and leveled the playing field a little. But not a lot.
Try to imagine a straight woman coming up with a blog or site like this, cataloging the hot guys of OWS. You basically can’t, and if she did it would automatically come with quotation marks. You can imagine a gay man doing it, certainly, and you can imagine a woman privately sharing with her friends thoughts (but probably not pictures) of the hot dudes she ogled at Zuccotti Park. But the eroticism of the “male gaze” remains permissible in public in a way that doesn’t happen for women, even if the equation is a bit more fraught than it used to be.
Emma Mustich: But isn’t that just what this website featuring men on the London Tube did, earlier this year?
Andrew: If so, I stand somewhat corrected. Did that site read as created by and for women? I would still maintain that public female lechery is in its infancy, relatively speaking.
See, that's my problem with this argument. We can't have a video of women at a protest unless we right away have the very same thing of men" What about the law of supply and demand? Isn't it possible that women don't necessarily look at men quite the same way men look at women and the reason there is no video is that there is no interest? That in reality what makes a man attractive to a woman is different? I think that what a woman finds attractive is based less on the visual and more on the aural-ie, less on what she sees, more on what she hears. Certainly physical looks are far from unimportant to women but the focus is a little different. I mean when discussing men and women it is legitimate to ask: nature or nurture? In reality probably the answer is both but I think the reason you don't have the exact reciprocal posture in everything men do regards women the other way is that not everything is purely symmetrical. To really risk getting off the reservation here, whatever feminists may think of some of the Freudian notions of gender, and whether or not they like the idea of the Oedipus Complex I think it's more nature than nature that there is no genuine way that you can put the shoe on the other foot and speak of a female Oedipus Complex-true there is the Eclectra Complex but that doesn't really have the same plausibility of the OC. To go a little further out in the deep side of the pool, it's important to remember that the relationship of a boy to his mother is not the simple same, reciprocal relationship of a girl to her father. A boy is in his mother's womb nine months before birth, a daughter is not correspondingly in her father's. The reason why woman it always the Other of the Other(Lacan-Zizek) is because her first Other was not her father but her mother as well just like her brother.
I guess I've tipped my hand a bit. I do think that the criticism of GreenStreet has been over the top. While some have complained that he shows no concern for the feelings of the women complaining, how much concern have they shown for his feelings? It does seem to me that in a way it's easy for women to talk about the Male Gaze but they don't know what it's like to be male, to be so visually focused. To have what Nancy Friday once called "men's hungry eyes."
While I absolutely consider myself pro-feminist, I get a bit restless when the conversation starts sounding like Andrew Dworkin or Catherine McKinnon who claimed that all heterosexual sex is rape.
I find this comment by Laura particularly irksome:
"And you know what? If this were a video that showed men and women, maybe made in collaboration with a female or even a gay male filmmaker, I doubt anyone would have any problem with it. But there’s a lot of historical baggage implied in the way it was, in fact, done. The framing matters."
So no straight guy is ever allowed to meet or even look at attractive women unless there is a woman or gay guy also present? What is this onus against straight men? Coming out on a limb like I have, I have found a woman who doesn't feel that this is degrading: my co-host TurboKitty. If you think that she's easygoing about degradation of women, believe me you do not know her! LOL
Overall to be honest, if you are a guy who wants to meet a woman there probably is not better place to go than a protest movement, it's like going to Church or something. Overall I do think on balance this generate more interest in OWS and I don't see how any women have been forced to be "good soldiers" for the movement. Fact is when you're in public you don't necesarily have the same rights to privacy that you have otherwise particularly when you as a social protestor are to an extent ignoring the normal rights of privacy and property of others.
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