by lissaredshoes
In a sensationalist plot where consumerism meets science fiction meets true crime, Jodi Arias emerges as the perfect fembot (or flesh dress) who obediently shaved her parts, donned superhero briefs and bent over tirelessly for her man. Their perverse game met a brutal end when Arias murdered her lover Travis Alexander. As Arias awaits sentencing, both her distorted public image and the media gorge-fest surrounding her case needs some serious attention. Did Arias consciously use submission as a means to control her psychosexual drama with Alexander or did mental issues propel her into becoming a sexually degraded Jodibot?
The fembot is the ultimate male fantasy. She is sexy and submissive and comes equipped with a slick array of techie gadgets like “pigtail whips” and “lube pumps.” She also comes with a dark side. The allure of the Jodibot is in her ability to walk the tightrope between total obedience and unfathomable sexual prowess and perversion. A mythic construct that serves hot male desire while feeding the public fervour. The Jodibot: A custom-made fembot, an exclusively designed sex slave-cum-sex object or a three-holed whore wonder who duly parts her flesh dress while cleaning her master’s kitchen. Did Alexander’s repeated use and verbal abuse of Jodibot cause her to malfunction into sparks of murderous rage?
In fifty years, we have gone from “blondes have more fun” to fembots do (domestic whores, custom designed to fit any male need or desire). The best part? If the owner gets tired of her, he can flip the off switch and trade her in for a better model. It is quite possible, based on the evidence at the trial, that Alexander flipped that switch once too often.
In the film, The Stepford Wives, a group of men discover the ultimate method of controlling their women. They create robot duplicates of their wives, which have no will and become men’s sexual and domestic slaves. When a wife is “re-created,” her appearance is of the upmost importance: molded into honey sweet perfection for privileged male desire. This runs counter to the aesthetic of creating a male monster (AKA Frankenstein or Robocop). In the adapted narrative, liberated women become repressed and sexualized monsters (the “Other”).
“The paradox of female sexuality being a vehicle for a woman to find a home, so to speak, and yet once she has found that home, needing to hide her sexuality or channel it into producing babies, means that all women live with the split of simultaneously having to be sexual and yet having to curb their sexuality.”
– Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique
Like many women who are fetishized in life or in the media, Arias is the object: “… isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualized property” [Friedan, 24], turned into a dehumanized monster. Here are but a few snippets of Arias chatter from the media and twitter sphere:
“There’s no question that Jodi Arias was a dangerous woman — slutty, nutty and, ultimately, murderous.” NY Daily News
“Jodi Arias is a monster, a media whore and a master manipulator.” Dayton Daily News
“You are the ultimate slut in bed… When it’s done, the intensity will make your body feel like you have been raped… You’ll rejoice in being a whore that’s sole purpose in life is to be mine, to have animalistic sex with me and to please me in any way I desire.” – Texts from Travis Alexander to Jodi Arias
“She’s got no soul, she’s a robot.”
“…the curtains in my living room looks better than that nasty skanks vagina.”
“#JODIARIAS has MEAT CURTAINS!”
“…it’s not like she didn’t put it out there for everyone to see. We’ve all seen our fair share of #jodiarias – meat flaps and all.”
The quotes above are but a small selection of disturbing epithets that have poured from the annals of the media and public since her trial began. Used not just by Travis Alexander and his sycophantic friends, but also by the trashy, profit-driven media that got off on feeding the opiate of Arias to the unrestrained masses. Jodi Arias, who once donned a t-shirt with the words, “Travis Alexander’s,” has now become the property of the State and her (un)adoring public. Splayed open for everyone to see, she is no longer human. She is a festering wound. A sexualized monster. A fetishized, female version of Frankenstein.
Despite her treatment by the media and public, Jodi Arias’ capital trial was not a porn flick nor was she a starlet debuting in her first seedy Noir film for mass entertainment. The intimate details were part of her defense, all of which have now been endlessly exploited for our consumption on every major Media website, blog, streaming YouTube and Network and cable television. Jodi Arias had no history of violence, but we do know that she suffered from a personality disorder that went undiagnosed and untreated while she engaged in a highly toxic relationship with a verbally (if not sexually) abusive man who was highly duplicitous.
There is no denying that Arias committed a brutal act and took the life of another. However, the portrayal of her in the media stream is extreme and far from realistic. Her public slut shaming since the trial’s coverage began is a telltale sign of a never-ending problem in gender relations. It signifies an underlying sense of masculine (or misogynist) entitlement and a feeling that women’s bodies and sexual proclivities are public property – displayed in whatever manner of conjecture makes the most profits and reduces her to a sexualized monster. No matter how powerful and independent you are as a woman, the male gaze and fetishization of the female body still dominates.
Yet something curious happened in the exploitation of Jodi Arias. Although she has remained a “fetish” for consumption, her erotic body has also become the ‘anti-fetish.’ Let me explain. French theorist Jean Baudrillard, in describing how the beauty of the body is fetishized, points out that a model of beauty is constructed so that…
“It is the sign in this beauty, the mark (makeup, symmetry, or calculated asymmetry, etc.) which fascinates; it is the artifact that is the object of desire.”
The make-up of ‘beauty’, of the erotic body, is a process of ‘marking it’ through ornamentation, jewellery, perfume or through ‘cutting it up’ into partial objects. For Arias, this translates into images of bare genitals, girly pigtails and a cute but sodomized ass. What happens when the beautiful and erotic body of Arias becomes deviant and murderous? We rail against her. We protest by marking her body with violent and debasing gestures or thoughts.
This work (of fetishizing) creates the body as a series of signs, turning it into an object of significant value – one that we desire and adore – but in the case of Arias, an attractive body that is now perverted. Thus, we rage against our desire to consume her beauty (or sex) by ravaging it instead. We respond by publicly violating Arias and wishing her dead rather than showing her compassion. It is a fascinating revelation. How can we expect a society to exhibit compassion for a mentally disturbed woman who is already “made” a “thing” by her objectification as the sexualized female other?
Women learn as young girls that their primary power lies in their looks and their ability to attract and sexually please men. Women are fetishized or picked apart constantly throughout their lives – they are either sexy and beautiful or too fat, ugly, old, hairy, with their vaginas all wrong. The derogatory quotes about Arias’ naked genitalia shows this to be true. Anger at Arias’ brutal act and sexual proclivities provoke us to cut at her where it hurts the most: her beauty, her genitals and her sexual attractiveness. Thus, while the description of Arias as a whore, skank and ugly slut who displayed her putrid “meat flaps” is disturbingly misogynist, it is not surprising. It reveals the continued objectification of women in American society as either good versus evil, beautiful versus ugly, or perfumed versus putrid.
Can we at least acknowledge that Travis Alexander exhibited these misogynist behaviors and pathologies with joy and abandonment? Didn’t he even call himself “a bit of a sociopath?” In the context of their relationship, Arias was either comfortable using her attraction and submission as a means of getting or manipulating her man, or she was a victim of her own mental issues which compelled her to submit to repeated emotional and verbal abuse. Once Arias made herself vulnerable to Alexander’s degradations, he likely grew more disaffected, and her humiliation grew into a rage that exploded into murder. Why is it so difficult, given the circumstance, to acknowledge or accept this fact as a conceivable (even defensible) human response?
The pair engaged in sex that can be degrading to a woman – unless the man acts with care and sensitivity or the woman is in full command of her self-esteem and sexuality. Based on psychological testing Arias suffered from low self-esteem and had severe abandonment issues –that were gleefully toyed with and exacerbated by Alexander. Arias described a good deal of anal sex between them, which Alexander reportedly assured Arias didn’t count as sex within his Mormon faith as pre-marital sex, just as oral sex didn’t “count” (and then sodomized her on the day he baptized her). Is this not a sign of an emotionally disturbed or misogynist man who prepped and conditioned his Jodibot for self-pleasure? Sadly, people seem quite willing to forgive (or forget) Alexander’s transgressions because he was brutally murdered rather than exploring the wider problem of gender relations that are exhibited in this case.
Revenge is A Dish Best Served
The problem with female images used to sell a highly publicized trial is that it continues to treat women as commodities or fetishes for the male gaze. It also serves to keep women and men in their places. The Jodi Arias saga is a sad commentary on men’s continued privilege and our willingness to accept the violations of women – “othered” through her portrayal as an evil skank rather than a more measured portrayal of a human being who fell prey to her own untreated pathologies and misogynist ideals about women. It is a battle that Arias will likely never win. Despite views to the contrary, Arias did not author or mediate the intimate details of her relationship with Alexander. Like it or not, Arias is also a victim – now at the mercy of a ‘pornified’ and ‘bloodthirsty’ public who want to fuck her or skin her alive.
This leads me to Arias embodied as a flesh dress. She walks down the red carpet of death row adorned in a couture meat dress. Originally created by artist Jana Sterback, Lady Gaga has also adorned her body in a variety of stylish meat dresses for events and performances. Her use of the dress is a clever play on women as chunks of flesh or pieces of meat for consumption, pulverisation or putrefaction. The metaphor of consumption or rotting flesh is a powerful one. It conjures up images of a public who wants to devour or violate its flesh and blood property (women).
Jodi lies on her stomach (naked) like a pig with a bright red apple stuffed in her mouth, splayed across a table overflowing with delectable foods and wine — a kind of Bacchanal feast. Cameras roll while an angry public revels in her chemical induced death while eating flesh off roasted drumsticks, baring their teeth and washing meat down their throats with gulps of juicy red wine that stains their lips. What a decadent feast!
For me, it conjures up scenes from Peter Greenaway’s film, The Thief The Cook The Wife and Her Lover. The Wife is the brunt of her husband’s (the Thief) verbal and physical violence as they consume ostentatious meals served up boundlessly by the Cook. The Wife wears a dress that artfully shifts from scene to scene. Lady Gaga’s meaty dresses, meticulously and artfully crafted, are also richly symbolic. Her attention to detail taps into the artistic tradition of the memento mori or the still life. The still life, after all, is a meditation on mortality and the state of decay. You have the flowers and the vegetables, but all the corrupting elements as well.
Greenaway’s sympathetic treatment of The Wife turns the film into an engaging feminist treatise on domestic violence with a beautiful array of subtlety and nuance. However, Greenaway does not rest on his laurels in portraying the Wife. She is an active character, not just a passive, sympathetic victim. In the end, the Wife takes action (murder) to put an end to all her torment and suffering. Alexander wanted to have his sinful cake and eat it (or slap it) too. What he really wanted was to repeatedly smear his gooey goodness all over Arias’ dirty bits, lick it up and toss her (the leftover cake) into the trash. A bit too harsh? Not even by the tiniest of crumbs. Just like the Thief in Greenaway’s film, Alexander paid a deadly price for callously spoiling “the goods” with his deceits and misogynist ways.
The exploitation of Jodi Arias in the media is the product of a culture that objectifies women and tells us we are simultaneously delicate flowers and ugly trolls. We live in a culture that treats women like trash, blames them for their own abuse and oppression and then, on top of all that, encourages them to hate one another. It is all very well to watch Mad Men and have a chuckle at the quaint, naïve sexism of the fifties. However, do not assume that because men can no longer smack your ass on a whim at work or call you ‘honey-bun’, that sexism no longer exists. The slut shaming and (anti)fetishization of Jodi Arias proves that our society still has a long way to go, baby.
Click below to view lissaredshoes’ previous posts:
Blood in the Snow: Belligerent Drunk Gets Starlight Tour to Highest Power in the Land
Guilty Pleasures: Film Noir, Gay Porn and Other Forbidden Flowers
Missing on Christmas Eve: The Grisly Discovery of a Young Man’s Body
Bring in the Clowns: The Nefarious Paintings of John Wayne Gacy
Stalking Is Not a Love Song (Unless You’re Sting)
Sex Police and Other Sordid Tales: Censorship and the Criminalization of Art in Canada
The Deathly Siluetas of Ana Mendieta
lissaredshoes is a visual artist and writer living in Canada who writes about art and the criminal justice system with a special focus on wrongful convictions and the role media and arts play in contemporary culture. She runs her own blog, My Spotted Couch, a website for her visual art, and writes occasionally for Galleries West.http://spottedcouch.wordpress.com/