"The Modern Version of the 'Burning of the bra' ":
Sexuality, Agency and Post-feminism in lastnightsparty.com (by Jade Blair)

I met Jade on her birthday

"Where were you last night?" This titillating question hangs as the subtitle from nightlife photographer and provocateur Merlin Bronques' book, webpage, and myspace account. The old refrain "Do you know where your children are?" rewritten into a self referential, directly controversial, and intensely personal question. The website, and subsequent book, lastnightsparty, follows beautiful young people around New York City, and around the world. Started in 2004, the website receives 40,000 hits daily, and features racy photographs and urban pinups, more recognizable, perhaps, in relation to soft-core pornography than to photojournalism. Aimed at educated, upper middleclass, young people and showing their partying peers, it seems to implicitly suggest that those posing, and those watching, should know better. And that's where it gets interesting. The not-for-profit website does not engage in the most obviously exploitive aspects of porn: the men and (mostly) women featured show only what they wish to show. There are no contracts signed, so if at any point, any subject wishes to remove or censor any picture for any reason, they may. While there are many pictures of typical "playboy style" girls in submissive poses, there are many more of people of various looks, colors, shapes and sizes in dominant, if still sexualized, positions. Does the fact that an educated audience looks at various women who choose their level of representation show that this photoblog is a positive feminist media, or is this supposed choice and friendly sexualization a post-feminist fallacy?

First of all, there is the matter of lastnightsparty's audience. As famously stated by Bourdieu "taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. " Positioned as the nightlife record for New York City's elite hipster community, the people in lastnightsparty are wealthy enough to reside in or around Manhattan, and cultured enough to know of, and get into, whatever location is being featured that night. The audience is also sufficently cultured to find the events and people catalogued relevant enough to be consistently engaging. One could presuppose that this would make the average subject and/or viewer of LNP, due to background and education, familiar with feminist discourses. When a recent urban pinup photo features 'Emma' pulling her shirt to reveal her breasts and midriff, while her heavily rimmed eyes look directly into the camera, the viewer can assume that image "[is] engag[ed] in a well informed and well intended response to feminism." The viewer, aware of feminist history, and dimly aware, if not consciously, of Mulvey's theory of women as the object of gaze, can think to themselves "Thank goodness it is permissible, once again, to enjoy looking at the bodies of beautiful women." It is this statement that McRobbie sarcastically presents in her induction of "young women [who endorse] the ironic normalization of pornography, [and their] approval and desire to be pin up girls." It is not in spite of the subjects' or audience's knowledge of feminist histories, but because of it, that the website, and the sexual subjectification found within it, is embraced by the modern generation of women. The audience can assume, wrongly, that the need for harsh criticism of images like these has past, and enjoying them is an evolved form of feminism.

I do not wish to deny the empowerment many women receive from posing or viewing the photographs presented by Bronques, in fact I have met many women, personally, who claim experience as a positive one. A woman who shares this view is Sarah Lewitinn, a prominent New York DJ, who stated in the introduction to Bronques book: "I first met Bronques in the woman's bathroom of a bar and found myself revealing things to him one would only expect to tell a best friend or a shrink. Something about Bronques made me want to open up almost immediately... The partygoers on Bronques's site were showing more than a possible wardrobe malfunction and were doing things for his camera that were physically revealing as that first conversation we had."

The charges of exploitation are dimmed if viewed through the lens of such intimacy. As Bronques himself states, "Only one person has actually asked me to take a photo down because of nudity. When people ask, it's because of pressure from their peer group." And yet it is this statement I find the most damning critique of the site and the society that embraces it. If the pressure to be viewed as a sexual object wasn't overpowering, than it would be logical that many women would be uncomfortable with their decision to be photographed in various states of undress. Especially when one considers the usual conditions of the photo shoot, frequently at alcohol and drugged fuelled parties, by an unusually charming photographer, who happens to have an open policy of photo removal, it would seem that many would wish to remove their pictures from the world wide web.

And yet, according to the 2005 interview, only one had. Consider Probyn's exploration into choice and how it raises "epistemological questions about the status of public images and their relation to the material world." Rather than dealing with images associated with the typical roles of women Probyn directly explores (deified Madonna or denigrated whore), the images on Bronques' website are of a purely sexual being. The fact that women wish for this representation of them to remain so widely available would seem to suggest a societal pressure, and consequently false sense of empowerment from the position of sexual subject. According to Gill, the power of society works, not in a monolithic or crude manner, but "in and through subjects... structuring our sense of self, by constructing particular kinds of subjectivity." Gill has earlier described current women's most dominant societal subjectivity: "young women are under greater pressure than ever before... expected to live up to ever narrower judgments of female attractiveness and to meet standards of physical perfection that... only a mannequin could achieve." With overpowering pressure to be impossibly sexually appealing, it is no wonder many women take pride, or claim to take pride, in their public portrayal and affirmation as sexual subjects.

The audience distances itself from the exploitive nature of the photos through the protective buffer of a supposedly successful feminism, claiming an ironic understanding of sexuality without acknowledging the pictures obvious connection to pornography's dubious history. The agency of the woman is removed, not by an exploitive cameraman or uncommonly compliant or subservient subject, as is the typical complaint of western pornography. Instead, the basic autonomy over the body, and the basic choice of whether one should wish to be an object of sexual pleasure, is a choice not offered by modern conditions. Within this framework of a highly forgetful, highly ironic and highly sexual modern world, Bronques does manage to do something subversive: he portrays women as powerful sexual agents.

The pictures found on lastnightsparty are sexualized, and there are photos to be found with classically pornographic poses with typically considered beautiful women (read blond, slender, busty.. ) And yet there is much more to the images, and the women in them, then what can normally be found in classical images of pornography or even mainstream advertisements. In one picture, named for the subject "Barbie", it features a woman with features not typically glorified as beautiful: a realistic figure, dark curly hair, and a large nose. She sits on a bathroom counter washing herself in the sink. Unlike many pornographic photographs where the eye of the camera stands in for the presence of a powerful male figure, in this image the photographer is not present. It appears more as a private moment of sexuality between the woman in the photo and herself; she does not stare seductively at the camera, and there is no come hither look. Instead she admires herself in the mirror. Even Emma, described earlier, who is traditionally beautiful and acknowledges the camera and viewer, is placed in an unusual position. The camera is located at her eye level, and she is allowed to challenge the invisible photographer and viewer. Thus, she is not placed in a position of subservience, but instead she appears in control of her circumstances, and by proxy, her sexuality.

Bronques himself has stated "lastnightsparty is the modern version of 'the burning of the bra'." After being asked a barrage of question by me over email, a seemingly tired and evasive Bronques responded with only this analogy. And yet, the one line manifesto defines much of what the website and book are about. The paradoxically empowered and discredited figure of the bra burner said "no" to a certain kind of femininity, while meanwhile, reducing herself to a stereotype, and one based on physical parts and attributes. The women featured in lastnightsparty choose to dramatically remove the restraints and sexualized subjugation of a certain societal authority, but by doing so make themselves equally as sexed and subjugated as they were before, perhaps even more so. By claiming the tranformation as entirely 'on their own terms' they may not realize their reaction is wholly determined by the previous incarnation, and perhaps is just as constraining. These subjects featured in lastnightsparty, in addition to the photos and the website that houses them, are a product of society and its norms. While Bronques and his subjects attempt at some level to prove agency and autonomy over their own sexuality, there very view of what is sexy, and their unflinching and tireless desire to represent it, comes part and parcel with the very cultural norms they are trying to reject.

Endnotes
Caspar Llewellyn Smith, "Through Merlin Bronques' lens, New York nightlife looks more sexy
(and sleazy) than at any other time for 20 years." The Observer Sunday September 17, 2006
Pierre Bourdieu, "Introduction," Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MS: Harvard UP, 1984) pg. 6.
Angela McRobbie, "Post Feminism and Popular Culture" Feminist Media Studies Vol. 4, Nov 3,
2004 pg 255.
Ibid pg 259.
Ibid.
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/01/17/025027.php
Brooklyn Vegan, "LastNightsParty vs. Cobra Snake" Brooklyn Vegan, January 29, 2005,
retrieved on November 19, 2007
Elspeth Probyn, "Choiosing Choice: Images of Sexuality and "Choiceoisie" in popular culture"
in Ngotiating at the Amrgins: The gendered Discourse of Power and rupture, eds. Sue Fisher and Kathy Davis. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pg 281.
Gill pg 76
Gill pg 73