(and constructing/controlling sexuality)
At a time when muslim women are being attacked in public spaces for not revealing their bodies and not showing respect for ‘western values’, ‘western’ companies like Victoria’s Secret police women’s bodies in the private sphere while exploiting them in the public sphere.
Victoria’s Secret lingerie was once made by prisoners and today continues to be made by Women and children working in sweat shop conditions
Workers at the Intimate Fashions Factory, Chennai
In the US, Victoria’s Secret dominates the market in women’s underwear. It has over 1000 stores and its fashion shows on American television receive more views than the Superbowl.
On Wednesday 7th December 2016 Victoria’s Secret opened its eighteenth store in the UK at Westfield, Shepherds Bush, right next to the East India Company store. Limited Brand’s who own Victoria’s Secrets states that its mission is “to empower women and help its customers to ‘feel sexy, bold and powerful”
Ray Raymond, the heterosexual man who founded Victoria’s Secret, claimed he was too embarrassed to buy lingerie for his wife, so he decided to create a safe space where men could be comfortable’ (ie escape from challenges by those ‘other’ women) to buy lingerie which makes the ‘real’ Women in their lives more ‘beautifully feminine’. The victorian era atmosphere in these stores with their darkened rooms was designed to create the hush, hush, intimacy and privacy where adults (especially men) had ‘personal freedom’. This equation of intimacy with sexual intimacy and privacy brought into the the ‘bedroom’
In this early period Victoria’s Secret also attempted to cleanse itself from the ‘dirty’ image that ‘corporate culture’ associated with underwear and presented Victoria’s Secret as a form of high art. The adverts included soft lighting and images of women in light coloured, dreamy backgrounds with classical music. This approach was similar to the classical European nude painters. Many of these painters (usually men) thought that the ideal nude should be constructed with an arm from one woman, a leg from another and the face of another, all a created to gratify the objects owner.
A framed black white photo at the
A framed black white photo at the
entrance of the Victoria’s Secret store
at Westfield
The 1990s saw a dramatic change in Victoria’s Secret marketing. Instead of Women being portrayed as passive objects manipulated for male desire and the male gaze, they were now to present themselves as ‘sexually active and sexually liberated, freedom loving’ women living in a post feminist world full of choices where they are fulfilling their 'own desire' by reflecting and shaping themselves to fit the male gaze and desire of the corporate market.
In the text used for advertising Women’s underwear, Victoria’s Secret has not only incorporated heterosexual sex and used images similar to those in pornography but it has contributed to the ‘pornographication of culture’, where a pornographic sexualised presentation of the body is almost an act of rebellion, leaving behind an era when pornography and human sexuality were separated. Many of the ‘Angels’ in Victorias Secret catalogues are playboy models. Limited Brands claims to ‘redefine what it means to be sought after’. The message now is that these women are doing it for themselves. This empowerment (from push up bras to thigh high boots) comes from consuming and being consumed and is supposed to make women feel good about themselves. Victorias Secrets world is one where Women can blame themselves for their feelings of anger and sadness and on their own ‘bad and poor choices’.
East India Company shop and the pink Victoria’s Secret store on the left
They can also make these feelings go away with just one swift ‘free act’ of self indulgence’.. consuming and buying lingerie….Recently Jenny Shaffer, (02:12)(a former Marks and Spencer trainee, founder of Knickerbox and now a chief creative officer at Victoria’s Secrets) spoke about transforming the sale of the ‘unmentionables’ to creating the ‘joy of making the emotional connection with buying underwear’ while Jane Garvey, the radio 4, Woman’s Hour presenter directs the discussion to those ‘special bra and special pants’ (28:36). Bridget Minamore, poet and writer, the only Black woman on this Women’s Hour programme at least raised the racism experienced by the ‘muslim woman on the beach who wasn't even wearing a burkini' (33:51) after having recalled her own experiences of being rebellious teenage who was transformed when she was ‘persuaded’ to wear the right bra. The huge bright pink and shiny black store at Westfield with its all women staff (all dressed in black) and it’s all women customers has tall walls with high ceilings. On these walls are images of Women waiting to be consumed.
The tall walls screen the fashion shows where angels with wings ‘assert’ their desire and power wearing Victoria’s Secret lingerie, constructing and reinforcing a femininity and beauty (thin, youthful, tall, white) to fulfil white male heterosexual fantasies.
Front Entrance to Victoria’s Secret store
at Westfield
The Women who enact these fantasies are supposed to own this same corporate construction of sexuality. Women learn to value themselves according to what they have or do not have and anything that they do not have they can get by consuming or being consumed. This same corporate commodified sexuality seeps into lesbian relationships (30:02).
This commodity feminism while leaving untouched the structural factors preventing women from having it all, seems to be saying that there is no difference between what women want and what men want of them. Commodity feminism affects human relationships by changing them into relations between objects. At the same time this self-policing transforms external oppression into an internal regulation creating a new subject - a ‘smooth’, ‘slick’, ‘sanitised’ being stripped of ‘feelings’, a corporate identity which can easily slot into a world where everything is for sale.
Women are encouraged to internalise the idea that they are objects of male vision and are there to feed an appetite but not have one of their own that they have constructed. John Berger writes, ‘men act and women appear. Men |ook at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
The High walls screening the victoria’s
Secret fashion shows
This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object - and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.’ (Berger 1977, p47).
Kavita Krishnan Secretary of the of the All India Progressive Women’s Association (AIPWA) and editor of ‘Liberation’, publication of the Communist CPI-ML, states that women workers in Victoria Secret’s factories in Tamil Nadu are kept in prison like conditions. Kavita Krishnan states that this is just a mirror of the controls and policing women face in the family. Employers fraudulently recruit teenage girls under the now abolished “Sumangali Scheme” (p19), and their movements and social interactions are strictly controlled. The employers tell parents that this is all done to ‘protect’ the girls and ensure they are ‘good daughters’. This shows that capitalism does not liberate women from patriarchy.
Kavita Krishnan points out that these controls from “modern” capitalists are aimed at preventing workers from organising and mobilising(P53). The ruling party also sanctions these gender roles with its concept of ‘Industry-family’.
Cover of a report on Young Dalit Women experiences of working in the Garment Industry, April 2012
Victoria’s Secret is part of a wider misogynist sexualised consumption culture in London.
Susanna Cordner, researcher for the Victoria and Albert exhibition had great difficulty in finding out what underwear women wanted the man to be wearing ‘to titilate’. She found that it was the process of undressing captured by the 501 Levi Advert of 1985, that women found sexually attractive and not the sexual objectifying of the man. Susanna Cordner found it very frustrating that there was ‘no acknowledged market for this, ‘its women in underwear that are fetishised’. All this says a lot about the market in lingerie and the way it shapes the way Women see themselves. .
Women with purchasing power are at liberty to buy ‘Freedom and Power’ in Victoria’s Secret stores. However, those ‘other’ Women who refuse to worship this corporate way of life or who are destroyed by it can expect little or no justice from the state.
This idea of Women’s empowerment via the lingerie market is further reinforced by NGOs like Oxfam with its projects like Frip Ethique in Senegal. Here, Oxfam tells us that bra’s are very complex and as Senegal has ‘no factory to make their own bra’s’ Oxfam is helping to empower ‘these disadvantaged people’ with employment creating projects like Frip Ethique which sell second hand bras from the West. Oxfam seems to be blind to the obvious hygiene issues here, as well as its own cultural racism.
Victoria’s Secrets objectification and commodification of Women’s bodies, is extremely damaging. As the scale of violence against Women rises and the austerity measures imposed by Theresa May’s Conservative government force Women to stay in violent situations as they continue to cut funds to women’s refuges.
Donald Trump and his family, are also open supporters of Victoria’s Secret and Limited Brands, but neither of them are on the list of companies being boycotted
However despite all this there are individuals and
Some women have already started targeting sexist advertising hoardings as women did in the 1980s and demanding.
Jill Posener 1979 (Pho
A Protein World advert for Slender Blend, A weight loss product, 2015
There also others who have been demanding an end to licences for lap dancing
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