Ecopornography and the Sexualization/Objectification of Women

In “Ecoporn: On the Limits of Visualizing the Nonhuman,” Bart H. Welling draws connections between pornography and the sexualization of nature, especially of animals in nature. Although Welling admits that ecoporn “has received surprisingly little sustained theoretical attention (Welling, 54), the connections between pornography and the visual rhetoric of nature that we are presented with all the time are clear to me. 

I was intrigued by this novel concept of ecopornography as organizations, especially photographers, sexualizing and misrepresenting nature in a way that creates “sordid agendas with illusions of beauty and perfection” (Welling, 55). In line with the feminist critiques that we read for Tuesday’s class, the notion of ecopornography is incredibly sexist. Ecopornography provides an androcentric view of nature, which the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines as “the physical world and everything in it.” This poses an obvious threat to feminism, which the postmodern school of feminism would describe as aiming to “humanize society by bringing the values of women’s culture into it” (Smith, 342) and as aiming to “treat women more as individuals and less as entities that are hegemonically bound together in gender” (Smith, 344). An androcentric view to the physical world and everything in it is simply not in line with feminist theory. Smith also points out an attitude held by many feminists that “the perception of reality has been distorted to the masculine” (Smith, 344), emphasizing the idea that sexism could be grounded in something as fundamental as nature. This connection is made even more clear with Smith’s examples, such as videos in which the heroic Steve Irwin’s wife “tripping over ropes, scrambling to find a bag …, or smiling in the background” (Welling, 61) while Irwin both sexualizes her and performs all of the skills requiring dexterity. Welling also points out that animal skins and fur are often associated with wealth and female sexuality, and that models often advertise fur clothing by wearing nothing else.

I think that Welling’s version of feminism could be considered standpoint feminism because he focuses largely on just one aspect of feminism. Instead of focusing on feminism as a whole, he narrows in on sexist ecopornography and visual rhetoric. Although he doesn’t necessarily focus on a specific oppressed group of women (he doesn’t, for example, focus specifically the unfair treatment of African American women or specifically the oppression towards lesbian women), he does focus specifically on the sexualization, animalization, and objectification of women. “The function of desire and power in ecopornography” (Welling, 56) is perhaps akin to the function of desire and power that men often express in standard pornography. The visual power of ecopornography and the visual power of standard pornography both can translate to “a sense of private ownership,” especially when ecopornography emphasizes “total visual power over…nonhuman creatures” (Welling, 57). Welling points out that one of the few things that ecopornography depicts male animals doing is “mat[ing] in slow motion with docile females, whose sole purpose, in turn, is presented as that of breeding a new crop of males” (Welling, 67). If this is how animal sex is represented to humans, a species that often follows the “monkey see, monkey do” principle, then these scenes must “speak powerfully to our paradoxical need both to give expression or our animal selves and to control other animals and repress our own animality” (Smith, 67). I think that in this case, men are often expected to be the ones controlling and women are often expected to be the ones repressing. This idea is so grounded in the nature films and photographs that we’ve seen since when were young. Feminists must help bury this idea in order to move past the objectification of women and move towards (what Seyla Benhabib calls in “From Identity Politics to social Feminism: A Plea for the Nineties”) “’equality’ feminism” (Benhabib, 2). In other words, we must continue to move away from “the first kind of paradigm in feminist theory [which] fails us by dogmatically freezing women’s identity in the role of the victim” and towards the new wave of feminism that incorporates “plurally constituted identities” (Benhabib, 10). 

Sarah Davis

Smith, Craig R. Rhetoric and Human Consciousness: A History, Third Edition. Long Grove, IL: Waveland, 2009. Excerpt on "Feminism in the Postmodern World" (337-42).
Benhabib, Seyla. "From Identity Politics to Social Feminism: A Plea for the Nineties." Web. http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/EPS/PES-Yearbook/94_docs/BENHABIB.htm. 1-13.
Welling, Bart. H. "Ecoporn: On the Limits of Visualizing the Nonhuman." Ecosee: Image, Rhetoric, Nature. Ed. Sidney Dobrin and Sean Morey. Albany: State U of New York P, 2009. 53-77.