The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

What's So Funny About Pretty Panties?

Nayeli, I'm with you in favor of adorable underthings. Definitely worth the money for the personal confidence and the occasional zing in the eyes of one's date. (Someone I dated briefly liked to call me a "smartypanties.")

And yet at the same time, like Lucy and Amaka, I feel sickened by the culturewide commodification of sexuality—of intimate life and personal worth, really—especially when it's aimed at children (by which I mean anyone under 20! I'm old) who are still developing a sense of self.

As the Rolling Stones knew well, all consumer advertising peddles one basic thing: dissatisfaction. We're constantly being sold the idea that we could be happy if ... if we just fixed X problem by buying Y product. Soft-porn merchant Victoria's Secret, like Abercrombie & Fitch, is in the business of selling the belief that you should be sexier. Sure, they have a right to do it, and I even sometimes wear their underthings. But it is especially disgusting to peddle to young girls—and here I'm not targeting VS alone, but also MTV, Girls Gone Wild!, and the soft-core underage porn culture et al.—the feeling that she's really a ho in training, that her personal worth depends on arousing others' lust. That's selling the idea of being an object, not a subject—-a big difference, although sometimes hard to define.

There's a subtle line between liking to wear fancy panties ... and needing to see others drool over your bottom before you can feel worthwhile. One is powerful; the other's an eating disorder in waiting. One is finding power in enjoying yourself and your body in a mature and confident way ... and the other is a degraded manipulation of self by instincts out of whack and in thrall to others. Sometimes, of course, both are at work at once. Which is why we're having this discussion: figuring out which is which isn't so easy in the consumerized world in which we live.

There's a very odd overlap here between feminism, on the one hand, which wants women to take power without being pornified, and on the other, Christian activists who also want to resist the consumer culture's attempt to drag us around by our gonads and insecurities. At their best, both groups want to respect the individual as being more than just her body, as having a meaningful inner life. This resistance against personal degradation is also why feminists and Christian activists have a similarly uneasy alliance against sex trafficking.

I'll take any and all allies in standing up against personal commodification, whether "chosen" or forced. Christians talk about maintaining a meaningful inner life as having a relationship with God. The God-language can make some feminists gag, but I respect it—even though I don't necessarily agree with each and every one of God's self-appointed personal emissaries. Especially not when they think they know exactly what I should and shouldn't be doing with my smartypanties.