Naked as Eve, Naked as Caroline
Delphine Horvilleur, one of the few women rabbis in France, wrote a few years ago an essay called En tenue d’Eve, or “Eve’s outfit”, a common French expression for “naked”. She wrote it as an answer to Jewish fundamentalists, who use the religious concept of modesty to hide women’s voices and bodies. The essay is delightful, it is a breath of fresh air for Jewish women: making fun of these nonsensical anecdotes about Hasidic Jews, and revealing how another voice can be heard… But I also found it to be somehow disappointing, perhaps because it was such a delight. Horvilleur writes as she speaks at the synagogue, creating beautiful speeches, mingling old and new references, making short stories sound profound and abstract, showing the delicacies of words with puns and word games (so. many. puns. in this essay.). You are entertained and you feel smarter for a moment. But when you dig deeper, you find a lot of unanswered questions.
In Eve’s outfit and in the synagogue, Delphine Horvilleur does not want to settle. She leaves the reader free of interpreting the text, as it is a key difference with fundamentalism. The sacred texts are rich enough to hold many disagreements is the only idea she settles on! But I found myself in the position of the protagonist of many Jewish jokes: the man nagging his rabbi for advice in every matter of his life. What should I wear this morning, rabbi? Or, as Rachel Bloom asked: how much boob is too much boob?
Horvilleur could just throw away the whole modesty shtick. It is a worn-out concept, used by conservative communities to control not only women’s sexuality but also their public life and voice. Asking a woman to be more “modest” would be a very strange and rude thing to say in everyday life. The English word, “modest”, seems mainly used by fundamentalist Christians, like the Mormons I met in Tara Westover’s autobiography, Educated. But the French word, “pudeur”, is still used more broadly, to explain your relationship to our body, our clothes, but also our speech. “Je suis pudique” (I’m modest/shy) is something you may say when you don’t wear revealing clothes, if you fear to go to the pool when you’re a teen, or if you don’t want to reveal intimate information about yourself. In French, the term has partially switched from a conservative policy to a self-conscious discomfort. I guess it is what Horvilleur is referring to in the very beginning of her book, when she is talking about society’s evolution towards more transparency, especially with Facebook and social media in general. The world is becoming more revealing, more transparent, and that is why modesty should not be just thrown away. It could be a personal moral compass, especially online.
As I work in social listening, my work thrives on indecency. If I want to understand my clients’ targets, I need them to share personal bits of their lives, to then analyze them. In a way, I sometimes feel like a voyeur. And voyeurs don’t have a good reputation in the Bible. David peeping at Bathsheba, old men at Susanna,… They were punished by God himself! The first voyeur to be punished was H’am, one of the three sons of Noah. Noah, after he came out of the arch, drank too much wine, and fell asleep, naked and drunk, in his tent. H’am entered his tent, “found his nakedness” and decided to tell it to the two other sons. These two did not look at their naked father and put a blanket on him. H’am was cursed, and his children after him, when the two other brothers were blessed.
The Bible may teach me that stalking carelessly online is a sin. And it is true I feel that way, especially now that I follow the Instagram account of the Instagram sensation Caroline Calloway, who became famous by sharing daily very intimate moments of her life, not only naked pictures or sexual content but also… everything. Her long captions and raw pictures revealed every aspect of her life, her relationships, her messy apartment, her crying, her therapy selfies… I truly feel as if I am looking at a very drunk man, but I cannot close my eye or put a blanket. That is, unfollow her.
Should I act like a bigot and tell her to cover up, and act modestly? Of course not, she is free to post what she likes, and I am free to unfollow her. Even more today, where communication experts seldom encourage to keep quiet and to hide. When a bad buzz happens (and Caroline Calloway happens to have experienced a lot of them, from using a ghostwriter for her Instagram caption to breaking a 375,000$ book deal), the main advice celebrities or politicians get is to “reclaim their narrative”. A story has been said about them, they cannot make it go away. Now, they have to tell their own story, with their own frame. That’s what Calloway has tried to do when her former best friend and ghostwriter, Natalie Beach, wrote in The Cut the story of their friendship. We are still waiting for Calloway’s article, even though she already thoroughly shared her answers in an Instagram patchwork of posts and stories.
Reclaiming your narrative the right way means showing some sort of vulnerability, enough for people to believe you, while also explaining yourself in a more positive way because you chose to do it and show agency. You unveil some nakedness but on purpose. To sum it up, if you want to protect yourself from your bad reputation: transparency is good, secrets are bad. That’s what Taylor Swift (a big inspiration for Calloway) learned when she asked to be “excluded from this narrative”, the narrative being her feud with Kanye West. After her request, she did not, obviously, was excluded. And she became a viral meme.
Caroline Calloway seems to enjoy the public eye, whatever she may sometimes claim. I have the intuition she feels brave and resilient about this ordeal. But she still lives in a state of symbiosis with her audience, even the hateful and critical one. On Reddit, there is a forum (a subreddit) dedicated to this audience: r/carolinecallowaysnark. There, people gather up to share snarky comments and real interpretations of the influencer’s behavior. And yes, I am part of it. But oddly enough it is clear Calloway visits this subreddit, and also read many snarky tweets about her. She makes clear references to her subreddit, but she cares and acts accordingly, making more indecent revelations, more scandalous comments, to generate reactions, while sometimes complaining about hurtful comments. She repeatedly said on her Instagram the usual “if you don’t like what you see, just unfollow me”, pushing the responsibility on the voyeur. Fair enough. But it is still difficult when Calloway is craving for attention and reaction. Who is responsible then? Who is the sinner?
The first story Horvilleur studies is the one of the first sinners, Adam and Eve. When God punished them by exiling them from the Eden, he nevertheless gave them some clothes “made of skin”. This garment has been widely discussed by Jewish scholars, but the most interesting comment was made in the Zohar: the garment could be human skin, to protect the then skinless humans from the outside world. A bit gore, I guess, but interesting, because it shows Adam and Eve as a symbiotic element of Eden, they don’t need protection because they are fully part of this perfect world. When they are cast away, they need protection, a separation, between our cold world and them.
When I watch Caroline Calloway, I feel sorry for her extreme vulnerability. She has no skin, she is total symbiosis with her world, but a harsh and cold world, made of voyeurs and criticisms she still wants to woo. She is the pure creation of her audience, dependent on the feedbacks she can find on many platforms.
I feel Caroline Calloway aims at becoming a Sophie Calle social media avatar. Calle is a contemporary artist who turned her indecency into a form of art. For example, in 2007 Sophie Calle received a break-off letter from a lover and asked 107 women (from Jeanne Moreau to Françoise Héritier) to interpret it through the lenses of their professions. Sophie Calle’s art is amazing because she also took the time to be a voyeur first: her first work is Filatures Parisiennes (1978/1979), when she decided to follow people in Paris, taking notes and pictures. Her art also shows some reflexion: instead of showing it daily, as a reaction, she took the time to reflect on it before turning it into an art. This time of reflexion breaks the circle of symbiosis. Museums and social media are very different mediums: you don’t have such an immediate relationship with the artist in a museum for obvious reasons. Her reflexion, her work, and the museums she puts her art in how she may be different from what Caroline Calloway is aiming at.
Taking the time to contemplate our nakedness. Meditating on our personal expression and even on the voyeur’s reception. Being mindful of the disruption we will cause and cause it with full intent, not by depending on the voyeur’s reaction. That is how “Tsniout”, or “modesty”, or “pudeur”, can be saved. Not as a conservative system to police sexuality and women’s existence, but as personal protection of our “self”, to protect our experience from a world which become more and more porous through social media, but still a very harsh world. Especially when you have a subreddit dedicated to you.
And as for the voyeur’s moral compass… Well I should close my eyes and unfollow a lot of people, that’s for sure. I’m working on it. Promise.
PS: Thank you for reading this article! As English is not my native language, feedbacks on spelling and delivery are more than welcome. But also on the content of the text, of course.
