Historically, the image of the woman as sexual object, and her exchange value on the market, devalue the earlier repressive images of the woman as mother and wife. These earlier images were essential to the bourgeois ideology during a period of capitalist development now left behind: the period where some ‘inner-worldly asceticism’ was still operative in the dynamic of the economy. In comparison, the present image of the woman as sexual object is a desublimation of bourgeois morality – characteristic of a ‘higher stage’ of capitalist development. Here, too, the commodity form is universalized: it now invades formerly sanctified and protected realms. The (female) body, as seen and plastically idealized by Playboy, becomes desirable merchandise with a high exchange value. Disintegration of bourgeois morality, perhaps – but cui bono? To be sure, this new body image promotes sales, and the plastic beauty may not be the real thing, but they stimulate aesthetic-sensuous needs which, in their development, must become incompatible with the body as instrument of alienated labor. The male body, too, is made the object of sexual image creation – also plasticized and deodorized . . . clean exchange value. After the secularization of religion, after the transformation of ethics into Orwellian hypocrisy – is the ‘socialization’ of the body as sexual object perhaps one of the last decisive steps toward the completion of the exchange society: the completion which is the beginning of the end?
- Herbert Marcuse, Nature and Revolution. 1972
Delacroix, La Liberte Guidant Le Peuple
