Media and Female Empowerment?: From the New Woman to Miley Cyrus

Emma Goldman c. 1890s 

Miley Cyrus performing at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards

“When is Miley Cyrus going to release a porn movie?”  My girlfriend’s sarcastic question was meant to make a larger point about Cyrus’ disturbing and provocative sexual displays over the last few weeks.  At this year’s MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) she surrounded herself with teddy bears, while bending over to flex her butt like a stripper (twerking), sticking her tongue out suggestively, and aggressively rubbing Robin Thicke’s crotch with a foam finger.  A week later her video for the single “Wrecking Ball” was released in which she licks the head of a sledgehammer and swings naked from the device that gives the song its name.  These sensational exploits are attempts to gain attention, failing to make any political statements about a woman’s control over her own body.  When we situate the pop princess within a context of modern feminism, her actions become, not only vulgar, but they also set back the entire movement.

The “New Woman” of the 1890s articulated ideas about shrinking boundaries between the personal and the political that influenced the first and second waves of American feminism.  Activists championed causes like birth control and a radical idea that women could locate individuality outside the domestic sphere.  Choosing careers inspired by artistic passions allowed these women to develop these new ideas about sexual politics instead of being chained to gender roles prescribed by patriarchal conventions.

Bohemian women in New York City usurped male dominance of the arts.  But literature most effectively allowed them to construct a daring countercultural figure within its larger creative context.  In American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century, Christine Stansell suggests the importance of the medium: “Just as bohemian identity was intimately intertwined with its representation in print, so was being a New Woman: what one read shaped how one lived,” (28) to which she adds, “These images were not templates from which women stamped out a stereotypical common identity, but proliferating magazines, novels and newspapers did disseminate characterizations and stories that helped form female identifications” (30).  Stansell’s distinction between identities and identifications is crucial.  If the images of New Womanhood had been “templates,” they would have been built on the patriarchal idea that there were certain prescribed roles for women.  Print, instead, offered young women a chance to mold their destinies on a blank page.

New Women inaugurated a new relationship with media.  Prior to writers like Mary Heaton Vorse and Neith Boyce taking charge of the written word, men dominated cultural production.  In my undergraduate course, Popular Music and Political Performances, I argue that women similarly took control of the medium of music videos in the 1980s and early 1990s.  One hundred years after New Women used literature to assert themselves, Madonna put forth an aggressive agenda of female empowerment in promotional clips that watched more like short films.  In “Papa Don’t Preach” (1986) she tells the dramatic story about a young woman deciding to keep her illegitimate child against her own father’s wishes.  And “Justify My Love” (1991) features the singer manipulating the male gaze with bisexual sadomasochism, all for her own indulgent pleasure.  These videos were a reaction to conservatives’ policing of gender and sexual mores during the contested culture wars.

    

Just as the New Women wrote through a lens Lincoln Steffens referred to as “the optics of  pleasure” (Stansell 19), Madonna, Cyndi Lauper (“She Bop“), Sheila E. (“Sugar Walls“), and others used overt sexual visuals to advocate liberal sensibilities.  The enlightened perspective faded in the 1990s as pop tarts like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera capitulated to male fantasies of teenage girls’ sexual availability.  Let’s remember that Spears introduced herself to the world in the first scene of her first music video wearing pigtails and a revealing Catholic school girl outfit.  Miley Cyrus’ VMAs and “Wrecking Ball” performances are the apotheosis of this misuse of the female body.  New Women used print to show America that females could excel as artists and intellectuals.  In our contemporary, oversaturated digital media landscape Miley Cyrus shows us that young women need to be careful with whom they identify.

Mechanization of the Self: Technological Determinism as Cultural Trope

Late 19th Century Factory Workers

In an episode of the BBC’s television series Doctor Who called “The Stolen Earth” (2008), the Doctor and his team of allies have their lives threatened by his arch enemy, an extraterrestrial mutant robot race called the Daleks.  To preserve their own lives and save Earth they have to rely on an elaborate array of weapons and the Doctor’s TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space) aircraft.  Machines are both the human race’s greatest danger and its last hope for survival.  2013 is the science fiction drama’s 50th anniversary, but “The Stolen Earth” engages a Western cultural trope of fear of and dependence upon machines that dates back to modern industrialization of the late 19th century.

 Alan Trachtenberg discusses the anxiety Americans faced following the Civil War as new technologies dominated every day life and dictated changes in labor practices in The Incorporation of America: Society in the Gilded Age.  Building on Leo Marx’s argument concerning mechanization’s mixed impact on the middle class, Trachtenberg reminds us that “Subtle interweavings of destruction and creation formed the inner logic of the industrial capitalist system,… ” (Trachtenberg 49 and 57).  Corporate restructuring dictated progress and increased productivity through maximized efficiency, achieved by reducing employees’ functions to automated regurgitations.  Humans feared machines, while also recognizing their role in the hegemonic project of advancement.  For economic and political growth, the nation had to utilize the potential of these instruments of change in an international market.

“Technological determinism,” as coined by American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen, suffocated skilled craftsmen and provoked a desperate desire for freedom. (For a revealing depiction of this fear and desire for escape it produced, see Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times).  Thomas Edison provided a hope for the psychologically incarcerated.  Trachtenberg suggests that Edison’s prominence was thanks to his ability to invent machines that did not overshadow his individual identity: “[he] seemed to embody in perfect combination precisely what many at the time felt America to be losing, its rural Protestant virtues of the self-made man, and what it was gaining in the way of material improvements” (Trachtenberg 66).  But I argue that we need to pay more attention to one of Edison’s inventions in particular to get a better idea of his cultural impact during the late 19th century.

As bourgeois America felt increasingly vulnerable, it had one exercise through which to exert agency: purchasing.  Given the high esteem for Edison, the public built trust in his products, even finding them inspirational: 

[he] offered reassurance that the old routes to personal success were still open, that the mass of inventions and improvements profoundly altering industry and reshaping personal lives truly emerged from the heroic wresting of the secrets of nature for human betterment.  The phonograph especially, the inanimate and animate, inspired rhapsodies of technological fantasies. (Trachtenberg 67)

The phonograph’s ability to bridge the “inanimate and animate” when it was designed in 1877 suggested that man and machine could co-exist.  Factories may have operated by programmed human commands, but a phonograph could reproduce the experience of communication with flesh and blood.  While reproduction was by no means as satisfactory as interpersonal contact, embracing the phonograph signaled a coming to terms with a new existence.

Edison in an advertisement for his phonograph, ca. 1890

Phonograph Advertisement, 1917

We must also consider the tactile element in this practice of listening that makes it a modern experience.  Physically selecting a particular cylinder turning on a phonograph was active, with the listener in control, unlike the passive position people were forced to assume as factory machines dominated or displaced them.  Listening to a cylinder on one of Edison’s devices was not threatening, rather it suggested life could be preserved through a relationship with recorded sound.  I argue that this is the formation of modern listening.

I haven’t watched the ending of “The Stolen Earth” yet.  Will the Doctor and his team find a way to defeat the Daleks and save Earth?  If we use the acceptance of technological determinism that began in the Gilded Age as an instructional dialectic, we can gain insight into how media in Western culture that produces and destroys our identities.