Gould - Exposing Phallacy: an Exploration of Flashing in a Contemporary Context

Thank you to everyone who took part in interviews and surveys for your thoughts and candid tales of your experiences. You were invaluable.

Thanks are due to all my friends (non-flashers as far as Im aware) in particular, John-Paul, Justin, and Martin for remaining unflinching in the face of increasingly peculiar questions. An additional thank you to John-Paul for his great legal brain.

Thank you to Tariq Goddard at Zero Books for taking on the flashers and me, and for providing by far the most insightful, intelligent and helpful feedback Ive ever received.

Finally, that flasher, whoever he was, who braved The Blitz with his torch and brought my grandparents together.

Kate Gould has a BA in Journalism and MA in Gender, Literature, and Modernity. She has worked as an editor, book critic, columnist, agent and publisher submissions assistant, magazine editor, reader for The Scotsman and Orange Short Story Prize, hotel critic, English language teacher, research assistant to Shere Hite and Germaine Greer, and ice cream vendor.

Now a writer and chief editorial consultant at The Fine Line Editorial Consultancy, she lives in Edinburgh with her pet rats, Georgia and Minnie.

Female flashers are a brazen lot. Sharing their accounts of flashing experiences and pictures on exhibitionist forums, they tell of cycling without underwear to accidentally flash men; teasing teenagers in shops with glimpses of their vaginas, contriving to make it appear accidental by bending over to look through racks of books; they lie with legs splayed and vaginas shaved at nudist resorts; post pictures of themselves in chat rooms, their backs to the camera, bent over to reveal their vaginas; press their breasts against the camera, imploring men to show their appreciation by clicking on the like button and delighting in comments about them shooting their load thinking about what they want to do to them; they leave the house naked, hiding when they encounter a man; wear skirts that blow up in the wind and loose tops that fall open when they lean forward. Some begin as children, enjoying being looked at by male relatives and parents friends. They arrange meetings with strangers to watch each other masturbate in the back of cars; campaign bare-breasted for the same right as men to be topless in public; and fantasize about being locked outside, naked, and about men watching and getting turned on by them masturbating in public.

Its an exciting experience, a turn-on and an urge on which they feel compelled to act. The talk is of slick slits and throbbing clits. As a presentation of female sexuality, it bypasses the dabbling in soft porn so rampant in our culture and moves straight on to hardcore. There is no posing in Playboy t-shirts with breasts pushed up and jeans worn low to reveal g-strings; no glossed lips or tottering in heels wearing get-up said to be empowering by girls, sexualized at an increasingly young age, who have little real idea of the implications of their actions and are unlikely to be able to handle the situations in which their clothing and posturing may place them. These girls references are perkily plastic Barbies replacement, the Jenna Jameson doll (with removable clothes no less), modeled on a woman whose fortune has been made faking it from her breasts to her orgasms. Pornography is not only ubiquitous; it has become a standard against which sexiness is measured. Over 3000 women auditioned for positions as bunnies in the London Playboy Club, opened in May 2011; Ann Summers, with its crotchless knickers and cheerleader outfits, had a turnover of 117.3 million in 2007-08. Images of women, lust faked for the camera, are on the shelves of every supermarket - the trout pout is ridiculed, but plumped lips are a staple in the illusion of agelessness, and womens magazines encourage a pornesque performance in the bedroom. But these plays on pornography dont actually have anything to do with sex. They are the props of sexual desire, ersatz and a caricature of lust and sexiness, sexy but not sexual. Their enduring appeal is based on the ease with which they can be performed and their distance from the physicality of sex. Like the depiction of sex in mainstream cinema, the one thing conspicuously absent is genitals. There is no cunnilingus in Hollywood.

The female body is not whats on display. It is closer to the plastic of the Jenna Jameson figurine than to the flesh. This is not female sexuality. There is no life in these dulleyed porn star clones; nor is there any suggestion that they are there for anything but the titillation of men. They are a plasticized circus of silicon, collagen, and hairlessness; their act a desperate bid to be what their lad mag culture would have them believe is the ultimate male fantasy. From the handful of women made famous by pornography the porn stars they believe this is what men want and, therefore, what they should want and try to provide. This emulation ignores the reality of the lives of women degraded and dehumanized in the pornography industry, but it is a significant step towards accepting such treatment of women and seeing it as natural.

We assimilate it into our lives gradually or in a surge, if the spread of soft porn culture into mainstream is anything to go by. Women endeavor to meet the requirements of what they are led to believe is sexy. They imitate the demeanor and moves of women paid to put on a show. Pole dancing has become a fitness fad, moving out of strip clubs and into the gym. Women emulating and watching female strippers is taken to be rebellious and liberating. Speak to any stripper and the reality is anything but. They tell of being gang raped by men who took their routines to be a come-on. They are strained mentally as well as physically, struggling not to see themselves as the men see them as nothing more than an object for their pleasure or someone not worth spitting on, as one woman phrased it. Some talk of an initial excitement when they begin their careers the thrill of putting on a show but it quickly fades and the money becomes the only appealing aspect of the job. Women do it to pay off debts, support their families, pay for a drug habit, start their own businesses, or because there are no other jobs available to them. There is no mention of sexual pleasure. That side of stripping is faked and the more convincingly so, the more popular the woman will be. Men give higher tips to women who look like theyre enjoying it than to ones who may be more attractive but dont appear to be loving every minute. The womans pleasure is irrelevant to the spectator. What is important is her ability to create a simulacrum of it. Faking pleasure is something women do too well and too often.

Our culture has taken on the get-up and fakery of the porn star; it has allowed porns damaging attitudes towards and expectations of women to be trumpeted by the lad mag phenomenon as though it were an acceptable norm. What it hasnt taken on is the vagina. We can totter, pout, read up on how to finesse our blow-job skills, and risk loss of nipple sensation, permanent disfigurement and death for enlarged breasts. What we cannot do publicly, by law and culture, is show our vaginas.

By inviting men to look at their vaginas, female flashers arent parading these fripperies of femininity: they are confronting men with their femaleness. Though they are used to market everything from cars to politics (think of Blairs Babes), images of womens bodies have become normalized to the extent that the use of them for this is almost socially invisible. Purposeful display of her vagina by a woman seeks to re-value what has been socially translated into an entity that harbors only commercial worth. It is an overt display, utterly indulgent and an assertion of her own sexual desires. Look, she says. This is my cunt in all its slick, throbbing, fleshly glory. Youll love it like I do and Ill come thinking of the hard-on its giving you. But you cant have it. Surrounded by an epidemic of faking it for the boys, she has the power and the audacity to show the passion of her sexual hunger. Its the ultimate in female sexual expression, of a woman knowing the power of her body and experiencing the full potency of her desires. Or is it?