Sexiness and Empowerment: A Study in Contrast

This past Friday I went to see the movie Frozen. This post is inspired by that experience, so if you haven't seen the movie, don't read any further.



So, like just about everyone who sees that movie, I cannot now get the song "Let It Go" out of my head. It's a pretty awesome song and a pretty awesome moment in the story. It was also a moment I had read about before I went to see the movie, In particular I read this piece, arguing that the moment where Queen Elsa changes her look, letting her hair down and magically transforming her gown into something a bit more, well, slinky, sends girls the wrong message. When I first read it, I was tentatively skeptical, though obviously I didn't really know what I was talking about. Having seen the movie, I'm now more firmly skeptical, and I might even say that I strongly disagree. I'll give my arguments on the merits here at the bottom of the post, because they're not really the point. Rather I want to draw a comparison with another medium in which I saw a message telling girls how important it is to look really sexy, which I think casts "Let It Go" in a pretty sympathetic light.

I speak, of course, of the commercials that air on many LPGA Tour events for Pure Silk, a brand of women's (leg) shaving cream. They feature some LPGA player, I can't remember who although I think I recall that it's one of the ones who seems to brand herself as a sex symbol relatively more than most other players. Her lines are something like this:

"A swing like pure silk? That's hard. But legs like pure silk? That's easy!"

During the first half we see her hitting a golf ball, and during the second part we see her applying Pure Silk shaving cream to her legs and then shaving them.

These commercials have always bothered me, and in particular it bothers me to see them playing during LPGA events, which are of course celebrations of the ability of women to do awesome things other than look sexy. And it's not just that it's about shaving your legs. It's specifically about that first line. Because what's that telling the viewing female? It's saying, well, you can't swing like I do, but at least you can have sexy legs like I do. It is explicitly a message of disempowerment, or at least of the idea that being sexy can compensate you for not being, y'know, talented or skilled or successful. Ugh.

And next to that, "Let It Go" comes off looking pretty good. Let's assume for the moment that we reject or ignore my arguments given below, and accept that Elsa's makeover is about expressing empowerment through sexiness. The key point here is that it's still about empowerment, or more precisely, Elsa is by no means only expressing her power with her sexy dress. She builds a frickin' ice castle, guys. She says, "It's time to see what I can do/To test the limits and break through," and then she builds an ice castle. A really, really impressive ice castle. She is, in other words, pretty bloody powerful, quite aside from her own appearance.

And in that context, unlike in the Pure Silk context, it's not clear that her trying to look sexy would be problematic. At the very least the message is that being powerful and being attractive are not inconsistent; at best the message is that being confident in your own powers and abilities is itself attractive. Not, in other words, that being sexy means being empowered, or that it's the closest to it you're likely to get, as Pure Silk seems to say, but that being empowered means being sexy. That strikes me as a pretty good message, both thinking as a citizen and thinking selfishly as someone who is attracted to women and who definitely endorses that claim as being, for himself at least, empirically true. Given the realities of being a species that propagates itself through sexual reproduction, the desire to appear attractive is not going anywhere. It won't do, therefore, to just condemn any act of sexiness, especially when the sexiness is presented as a complement to or even a result of empowerment itself. We should save our condemnation for people who actually do present sexiness as a substitute for power, like Pure Silk.





Okay, the arguments on the merits I promised above. Basically, I think that viewing this moment within the context of the story wholly negates these charges. First of all, Elsa has just fled to a remote mountain peak and constructed a castle of ice where she purposes to live in isolation. Her new outfit, therefore, is most emphatically not designed to appeal to any men; she doesn't plan to be seen by any men, possibly for the rest of her life. (Obviously it doesn't work out that way.) The Stevens article describes Elsa's swishing of her hair as "subtly, but unmistakeably, a gesture of come-hither bad-girl seduction." But who is she telling to come hither, when she herself has fled thither specifically to get away from everyone else? Her behavior resembles that kind of seduction, and perhaps vis-a-vis the audience it's meant to, but in context that can't really be the intent behind it.

Moreover, one thing about Elsa's life up to this point that has felt kind of oppressive is the way she has to cover herself essentially head to toe to minimize the damage she does with her powers. She begins "letting it go" by casting away her remaining one glove, which she has used to keep her icy touch more-or-less under control. And when she changes her outfit later, she goes from a dress that completely covered her, arms, shoulders, collar, legs, everything, to one that shows quite a bit of skin. But I don't think that's because showing skin is sexy. It's because showing skin is something she didn't used to be able to do, because not showing skin was a part of her whole regime of control and containment that she is now rejecting. Also, her new outfit is a lot less warm than the one it replaced, reinforcing the line she first spoke when she cast aside her cloak: "The cold never bothered me anyway." She's probably the only woman in the kingdom who could comfortably wear that dress in that weather, and feeling newly proud of her powers she's flaunting that fact. The makeover, in other words, is not ancillary to her general embrace of her own powers, it's not just a "now I'm powerful so I'm also gonna be sexy." It's also part and parcel of the "powerful" part.