“My wife”, continues the scandal of the Facebook group: “Here’s how the female body becomes online exchange coin”

“My wife”: the expression is polyisemic. It could play harmless, almost domestic, yet to issue a certain big possession. On the homonymous Facebook group – closed to date – private shots of women, often unaware, were circulating, like entrance to an entrance to a community vivified by sly or trivial comments, winks and invisible hierarchies. A kind of low budget version of Castle of Kafka: the subscribers were looking for validation and visibility, measuring their status through the object of their own exchange, useful for accumulating a share of “Alpha-Crediability” within the community. Bizarre to say, but nothing that had directly to do with sex. Power dynamics, self -referential virtuosity. He had guessed him in unsuspected times a famous dandy cha made his seduction his playing field, writing: «Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power».

The amateur shots that, voyeuristically, propose fragments of home intimacy recall remote times in which the gaze on the intimacy of others already constituted a gesture of symbolic appropriation. Pompeii’s parietal paintings come to mind, which return caught bodies in more or less explicit sexual acts; The chronicles of Renaissance shorts, where the art of mischievous confidence determined the value of a favorite; Or the “Male Merlo”, an Italian comedy in which Lando Buzzanca performed the body of his wife, Laura Antonelli, as a banklocentric trophy.

The mechanism remains unchanged: sex has never been simple private deal. The reification of the female bodies has rather represented tool for social and productive control. Nothing new under the sun, if not the technological platform that multiplies the speed and scope of this phenomenon. In this sense, female identity becomes once again a negotiation ground between visibility and invisibility, between intimacy and entertainment.

The phenomenon, however, creates an interesting short circuit. The contemporary woman, as a social creature, is a full subject: she works, votes, enjoys, claims her pleasure. He says “I”, not “us”. He expresses his sexual subjectivity with the same legitimacy with which he opens a current account, signs a contract, writes novels no longer considered “erotic” or “confessional” but universal and with a literary vocation, makes stand-ups on masturbation, shot feminist porn films.

And it is here that the man, lost, reacts by operating a symbolic theft: he empties the woman of his voice and the thus. AND Objectification Theory Farsa relegated: screenshot, stolen photos, “Santini” of meat and skin to be exchanged in a circular ritual. I don’t want, but accounting for a pack that measures one’s virility by silenced female voices, downgrading them to mute icons.

Because in the fragile arena of the digital male the only way to feel “higher” is to resize the other. Thus online sexuality is reduced to Piazza di Trasi, where the woman is currented and the consent is the unvaded guest. The scene is grotesque: males who recite the rite of virility as tired theater, as minor actors who persist in interpreting Hamlet in front of an empty audience, convinced that the world is still looking at them.

• White lavinia He is a character who was born on a blog in the early 2000s and moves to social media after 2010. Alter Ego and pseudonym of the author (who is actually called Federica Lyon) by “Potential life”the new scandalous book published by Gramma Feltrinelli. In these pages, in bookstores from September 2, the writer reveals the pain of virtuality, tells a secret world of people who are no longer able to live if not hiding, or pretending to be others. This novel tells, with paradoxically ironic writing, the unspeakable, the darkness, sex but also depression and fear.