Aly Raisman

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Take the young woman who showed up at the actor Aziz Ansari’s apartment to begin their notoriously bad date. While that unusual action did not, of course, give the man the right to do whatever he wanted with the woman’s body, it wasn’t long ago that going to a man’s home, especially to begin a date, would have been universally interpreted as a sign of intimacy, of presumed romantic interest. While in the past it was understood that certain actions have inescapable symbolic meanings, today the truth of things is to be decided only by the self’s feelings. It is little wonder, for instance, that Ansari made a move on the young woman. Given how the date began, and the fact that she went home with him afterwards, nearly all men would have thought she was interested in them. Presumably, however, she wanted something more than mere sex. In other words, the date should have followed an old-fashioned model.

Like Ansari’s naive date, Raisman thinks that her own choices and judgments should be absolutely sovereign; the external world must conform to them, not vice versa. Meanwhile, her actions betray the impossibility of her words. If Raisman draws some “confidence and happiness” from appearing naked in a magazine, it is not because no one has “judged her.” On the contrary, the woman has been judged as sufficiently attractive to appear alongside the other models. Like other beauties, Raisman’s relationship with those who admire her is symbiotic: She needs their regard, even as their lust needs her for an object. It is not, then, that Raisman does not want to be judged. Rather, she wants to be judged on her own terms. She wants to dress however she pleases, while never being thought inappropriate for doing so, or suffering worse consequences. At bottom, this is a familiar fantasy: absolute individual autonomy, without any pesky negative effects.

I do not mean to be unfair to Raisman or insensitive to what she has been through. As she says, she is a survivor who wants to help other women to overcome sexual abuse. But she also seems to be a vehicle for the worst aspect of feminism: the self as some kind of magical being, with the ability to transcend perceptions and beliefs about one that do not issue from one’s self. Although nobody will ever have such a power, that vain hope can set many women up for trouble, and given what Raisman suffered at the hands of Nassar, there is a terrible irony in her being a voice for that popular delusion, the absolutely autonomous self.

No doubt Raisman got a pretty penny for taking her clothes off for Sports Illustrated, and perhaps down the road she may be able to use that appearance to gain in other ways. But in any case, there seems to be something rather sad about the matter. The assumption is that, by appearing naked in a magazine, Raisman is now “an even bigger hero.” Yet this just reveals how saturated our culture is with sex. Women do not want to be reduced to sex objects, but somehow female sexuality can be attached to any issue whatever, on the view that to be half-naked or naked is to be empowered by definition. This is bizarre, and suggests that, in their own hearts, women think that there is nothing to themselves but their bodies. In fact, however, they are probably just bored. Given the poverty of American culture, and the nagging dullness of their jobs, many women turn to the body for welcome relief from the monotony of their own consciousness. You are on display, so at least you are not bored.