August 24, 2008 9:06 AM

The Ubiquitous Image

Pictures may now rule, but taking the long view of history, the ability to reproduce an image and make it widely available is a reasonably new invention. You can thumb through literally hundreds of pages of the New Hampshire or Providence Gazettes from the 1770s and never see anything more than this crude elephant, (above) advertising Hill's Variety Store. (Other than the King's Arms masthead of the newspaper itself, this is literally the only image reproduced in the paper at all for nearly a year.)

Most of us don't know what our ancestors even looked like, prior to the photograph, because even a primitive folk portrait or cameo would have been beyond the reach of most country people, and the photo-realistic renderings of, say, a Copley or a Trumbull, would have been the province of the uber-gentry. Prior to the Renaissance, we don't really know what even royalty looked like.

Enter the age of copper-plate engraving, full color lithography, RGB television monitors, bill-board banner-printers, ubiquitous plasma displays, and ultimately Adobe Photoshop™ on every desk. The last sixty years have been the age of not just the image, but the ubiquitous image, the omnipresent full motion image, the image in the newspaper, the image on your web home page, the image on the freeway, the image in the junk mail, the image on the doctor's office magazine rack, the image on sidebar of your Xanga/Facebook/Myspace page, the image even on the grocery divider you use to separate your Cheerios from the other family's.

The image is everywhere.

For the most part, it's not just a good thing--it's a great thing. We know what things look like now. You can have long-distant face to face meetings without every using any gasoline. Doctors can compare notes from around the world. Kids can see what all the animals look like, from afar. (That "elephant" above threw me for a loop. Until I read the words "At the Sign of the Elephant," I thought it might be some mythological wild boar.) The age of the image has made our perceptions of the physical world a little more accurate, at least.

The Ubiquitous Image: Just what is being sold here, class?

If you're a woman, you may want to stop reading, now, but if you're a man, you will have some sympathy for what I'm about to write. Guys, we are surrounded, day in and day out, by images of women that our ancestors might only have seen on their wedding night--or in a cat house. I'm not talking about the "blue stuff" either. I'm talking about the non-stop parade of everything under the sun being sold by a beautiful woman, some dressed, some sort of dressed, some wearing only shadows.

Generally, I don't think it's a bad thing to sell products with beautiful people. Let's face it: some smiles are just more winning than others, but there are categorical differences between the way men respond to an image and the way women respond. Years ago, Candid Camera filmed the audience reaction of a group of women watching a male stripper. The gals were cheering, making jokes, whooping it up. It was very light-hearted. Then they filmed men watching a woman do the same thing. The men were nervous, distracted, kind of just gulping and sweating. Only a feminist with braided armpits would argue that men and women are only socially conditioned to respond this way. We're made differently.

There is no real "policy" dimension to this issue, except, perhaps, to pray for a return to good taste. Muslim societies completely cover their women, and beat them if they refuse their ridiculous head to toe veil, and that is as demonic as the opposite extreme of a Bangkok style exploitation. In striking a balance, however, women--ladies, anyway--should understand that the modern western man lives in a kind of Solomonic, full-color palace of billboard concubines, made possible by the technology of the image. We live in Solomon's temple without the benefits. Women live in that same lithographic palace as well, and their fashion sense is unavoidably influenced by it. An evangelical pastor once told me he had trouble getting through a sermon because a woman was so spandex-plastered in the pews, she might as well have been wearing nothing at all. An evangelical close friend of the family once complained that men followed her out to the parking lot at work, to ask her for her phone number. She acted annoyed by the attention but everyone in the family was thinking the same thing about the way her clothes were spray-painted on: if you put the honey out on the table, in broad daylight, the flies are going to gather. A year or two ago, Grandma Riley told a new granddaughter in law to start wearing more clothing. "You're giving the boys a free show." The new member of the Riley clan replied, "but I'm married now Grandma." Grandma didn't miss a beat. "You think that matters?" she said, "all the more reason to put on something decent!"

In this age of the ubiquitous peep show, the sort of woman who pretends her body just isn't there, who believes her clothing decisions are merely hers alone--and not her brothers' as well--is really a kind of power-monger, a would-be goddess craving worship, and a liar as well.

If any man tells you differently, ladies, he's been drinking too much soy milk.

 

More of the Farm Journal -- August 23, 2008