Benedict Cumberbatch is Not My Bitch: Some Thoughts on Objectification
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| Title: | Benedict Cumberbatch is Not My Bitch: Some Thoughts on Objectification |
| Creator: | Professorfangirl |
| Date(s): | February 20, 2013 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | Professorfangirl's Bordello of Learning, Benedict Cumberbatch is Not My Bitch: Some..., Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Benedict Cumberbatch is Not My Bitch: Some Thoughts on Objectification is an essay by Professorfangirl.
The post includes a large photo of Benedict Cumberbatch, something that Professorfangirl discusses.
Author's Notes
It has this note: "I’m reposting this because there’s an interesting conversation going on about fandom, embarrassment, and guilt, and I find that since I wrote this my attitudes have changed in interesting ways. I was new to fandom then, and just feeling my way through my own responses. I’m also writing about similar issues in regard to Ben Whishaw, and the ways in which my feelings are and are not the same interest me. Please note that this is a meditation on my experience, not a moral prescription for anyone else’s."
The post's author includes a postscript: "Postscript 5/14/13: Boy, have I come a long way in eleven months. I’m much more comfortable with the issues I describe here, though they’re still complicated. I explore them further with Ben Whishaw’s Body and James Bond’s Dick. (And you have no idea how much fun it was to type that sentence.) (Which is itself evidence of a certain, shall we say, evolution of thought.)"
Excerpts
I have to say that fetishizing actors and endlessly circulating their photos gives me pause, because I learned early on in my feminist education that when you objectify someone, reduce them to their physical attributes and use their bodies for your pleasure, you take away a little bit of their humanity. (Note: when I say “fetishizing” I mean something really specific: removing the object of your desire from its own context and using it to amplify and further your desire without regard to its inherent identity, meanings, or uses. So. Yeah.) Benedict Cumberbatch is a person, with his own motivations, his own life, his own interiority and subjectivity, and he has not consciously given me the right to take pleasure in his body. He’s given it to the world, of course, in his performance, yes, because his performance is a product of his agency, conscious use of his abilities to practice his chosen vocation. And here, yes, in his image: he’s let himself be photographed, he took off his shirt and put on the shearling (god help me), but he hasn’t given me the right to his self. He’s given his image, but given it at four removes: first, to the camera, through that to the photographer, through the photographer to the magazine, and only then to me. It comes to me highly mediated, and at each step he’s lost control over it—and gotten farther from it. By the time that picture’s gotten to me, Benedict Cumberbatch the man is nowhere to be found, not by me anyway.
As I say, he’s not given this right to me personally, but the pleasure I take in that image is personal; it’s not an objective pleasure drawn from an analysis of the aesthetics of the image (its composition, for instance, with the stairway cutting the frame at a perfect angle, or the lighting that picks out one cheekbone, or the sepia tones that give depth and interest to the deteriorating wall behind him). It is in some small inevitable way a subjective, personal pleasure. I have an erotic cathexis on this particular man, on the aggregate of his appearance, the characters he plays, the way he performs, and on the few facts I know about his life (for instance, that he reads all the source literature for his roles, and that he taught English in a Tibetan monastery after university). These facts would not appeal to me so much without my particular personality.
It’s disturbing because you could say that the man himself, the real uncommodified Benedict Cumberbatch, is appearing in an intermittence, in the space between the actor and the photograph. When I look at that photo, I tell myself, yes, I’m just looking at an image, a representation of “Benedict Cumberbatch” the commodity, and not Benedict Cumberbatch the subjective person. However, because I’m a fan I know some of that actual man’s biography, some of the facts of his personal life, and part of the erotic frisson here is that (imagined) glimpse of a live, potentially accessible human being between the image and the role. Ben Cumberbatch, the real guy with a history, a person you could fantasize about meeting and knowing, stages his own appearance-as-disappearance between “Benedict Cumberbatch,” commodity, and this image of a handsome man in a shearling jacket. This is something of a turn-on, but a disturbing one: whether consciously or not, I’m using the actual man in my fantasmatic, and that’s a bit not good.
What troubles me most about my response to this particular photo are his eyes — no, scratch that, his gaze. Because the eyes are so beautiful, and the gaze is so blank. There seems to be no emotion there, I can’t see any thought, and that seemingly passive acceptance of his objectification just makes me really sad. Even as—even because—it turns me on. (Note that I say seemingly passive acceptance—I am in no way speculating on what actual Cumberbatch acted on or accepted in the moment this photo was taken; I’m talking about what I see in the picture I’m getting off on.) It makes perfect sense that this saddens me, because what gets me going about Sherlock is precisely that he’s thinking, he’s always inhabiting himself and his thoughts and his responses, and those have real eroticointellectual power. So this blankness, this emptiness, takes me away from the original draw (which is a response to the character and the performance more than the actor), and puts in its place something shallow that appeals to my, shall we say, baser instincts. I’m embarrassed about that, and I think it’s healthy that I should be.