I think that the "natural" is a very complicated and dangerous ideological concept. Our western culture(s) have been really obsessed with what is natural and what is artificial for a long time, but the problem with that is that while the "natural" is used as a weapon or a means of determining good and bad, right and wrong, it is simultaneously a totally unstable concept. It means what the person using it wants it to mean. It does not have a steady connection to a single true meaning.
For example, beauty magazines talk about achieving a "natural look" with makeup-- this is an illusion that one isn't wearing makeup, but is instead "naturally" beautiful. But we don't even know what women without makeup on look like anymore-- we compare the actually "natural" unmade-up face with natural looks that were in fact painstakingly created with multiple products and techniques. In the commercial food and cosmetic world, at this point it's an open secret that using the word "natural" on a product is totally meaningless--manufacturers and marketers slap it on there because they know it has positive ideological value without meaning anything at all to the actual product. What I'm arguing here is that the "natural" isn't actually a form of truth but actually functions as an ideology and an aesthetic. That is, it is contingent on outside factors whether something is deemed "natural" or not-- it's not an innate quality.
People are called "unnatural" not when they do things that other animals "in nature" wouldn't do but when societies have decided that what they are doing shouldn't be done. For example, homosexuality has been constantly called "unnatural" because it involves non-procreative sex. Or certain kinds of crimes, like a mother murdering her child, have been called "unnatural" [abortion and infanticide get this accusation a lot] which is somehow then even worse than when a big strong man kills, say, someone in a bar fight-- because that seems more on the order of "natural" to us. And yet, zoologists confirm that nature is full of same-sex action between animals and that parent animals very often kill their young. So why do we call those things "unnatural"? Because we have a societal, cultural ideal of what is right and true, we believe that it should come without thinking or negotiating from "human nature."
Claiming something as natural is a means of claiming a kind of truth. Claiming something to be fundamental, pure, unmediated. It's almost impossible for me to think of more adjectives-- I keep wanting to say "natural"-- that is, the "natural" is for us practically fundamental in the great list of binaries that mean for us GOOD. The natural stands for a kind of good that we think should be automatic, that should not require thinking or reasoning, because it comes from somewhere before us or above us.
So, I prefer to try to avoid such broad, complicated, and contested words like "natural." Natural and unnatural are words that have been used very very often over history to control and oppress people, especially women and ethnically or racially marked people in ways that they can't win either way. Women have been considered "closer to nature" and therefore less rational, less civilised and unfit to participate in society at the same time they're reprimanded and derided for being "artificial" or superficial by using fashion, make-up, and so on. People have insisted that women should be "natural," condemned them if they're unnatural, and yet it is precisely their association with "nature" which guarantees that they could never be considered equal to rational men. This prejudice remains in small and insidious ways today when we accuse women of being "too emotional" or at the mercy of their hormones and therefore unable to be fully rational. The paradox of women's appearances being mercilessly critiqued at the same time they are criticised as artificial if they do too much to enhance their beauty is another way that the ideology of the natural is both itself socially contrived and negotiated and used to control people.
I don't think that the ideology of the natural pertains only to women, but it's easy to come up with many examples of how it affects them. I think all of us are surely both susceptible to the romantic draw of the natural (I know I love to buy organic vegetables, go into the outdoors, and all kinds of other things that could be easily labelled with the natural over the artificial) and potentially limited by the ways in which the natural gets tied to many other ideological directives and values. This is surely why ideologies keep on working-- because they do offer something we value or desire or enjoy, but I want to find ways to value those things without accidentally subscribing to things I think are damaging at the same time. I want to have my all-natural cake and eat it too.
oh look. A video. Heavy handed, but there it is.
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