This article makes one wonder as to precisely the qualifications that led the Guardian?s editorial team to promote him to Arts Editor. Let us, for the moment, leave aside his suggestion that when a 16-year-old Kate Moss was blackmailed into doing a topless shoot she, ?took one for the team? and focus instead on his argument that ?without nude models, art history as we know it wouldn't exist?. Perhaps he has missed the fact that this history is a contested one in terms of what it means. In the view of many critics, it is a history of the objectification of the female body for the prurient enjoyment of the male viewer; according to these critics the gaze of the artist??perfectly exemplified by Manet?s 1863 Le déjeuner sur l'herbe (a picture Needham references in the article in order to give his celebration of the visual exploitation of a teenage girl?s sexual vulnerability the semblance of artistic merit)??is the Male Gaze.
Moreover, if these pictures are to be celebrated, as Needham suggests, for having ?redefined the prevailing ideals of beauty? then they are also deeply implicated in the creation of damaging beauty myths that celebrated heroin chic and idolised the almost pre-pubescent form of a 16-year old Kate Moss; at least the woman in Manet?s painting is clearly an adult.
But back to ?taking one for the team,? a phrase that denotes someone willingly choosing to do something they would rather avoid in order to gain some anticipated advantage for their fellows, often deployed in the sexual badinage of a lad?s night out. Needham acknowledges that Moss was ?coerced? and ?blackmailed? into the shoot; hence the question of a willing choice is irrelevant. In terms of advantage gained for others, in Needham?s view these are new standards of beauty; one need only compare the diminishing bodyweights of supermodels from the 1980s through the 1990s and into the 2000s to see that these new standards were no better than the old, and perhaps worse if we consider the increasing rates of eating disorders and cosmetic surgeries as a measure of beauty?s impact on female bodies and psyches. As to the idea that this so-called advantage ? the ushering in of heroin chic beauty myths ? was in any way anticipated by the victim in all this, that is beyond laughable. In an instant, therefore, this phrase trivialises not only the sexualised exploitation suffered by Kate Moss and many other young female models forced to disrobe for the camera (see Emine Saner?s Guardian Blog piece Was Kate Moss exploited as a young model? for a discussion of these issues), but also the larger question of the ways in which teenage female sexual vulnerability is used as a means to sell product.
Needham?s article is also a sign of the times. Like much that has been said and written in the post-Savile era, what he finds unpalatable is also reassuringly in the past. Sure, magazine editors, and photographers might have dealt inappropriately with teenage bodies in the 1990s, but that's just what it was like back then; we have clearly moved on, so lets not dwell upon the mistakes of the past when they produced such great art. What rubbish! Such relativistic standards did not excuse Savile; nor do they excuse Corinne Day (the photographer who ordered Moss to strip or else lose the gig). As to the idea Day?s gender somehow made her behaviour less problematic (which Needham implies though never states outright), or that it is only coercion when the blackmail is explicit, he clearly needs to think through the ways in which the reification of the male gaze results in models, from fashion to porn, being forced into acts and out of clothes in ways that deny their common humanity and reduce them to the objects of male fantasies. That such exploitation is somehow diminished because Needham believes that fantasies about ?wonky and fallible? pre-pubescent female bodies are somehow better than those fixated on ?some passive fantasy glamourpuss? perhaps says more about Needham?s predilections than anything else.