Who owns Regina Lund’s body?

The Swedish singer Regina Lund is shocked. Youtube decided namely to stop her music video for the single “I’m invisible”. The reason? In the video, Regina Lund uses her naked body to become visible in the infotainment arena, expecting to reach larger audiences and make more money.

- I think I’m mature enough to use my naked body as a means of expression. My body is just a tool to prove something. I am a female Jesus, crucified naked at the end of the video. There are, after all, naked men, naked Jesus statues in churches worldwide, says the singer to the tabloid Expressen.

It’s really that simple? That a 42 years old European woman has the right to assert her own body, confiscate it or make it a public commodity whenever she wishes it and for any reason?

As Foucault stated 1977: “The body is molded by a great many distinct regimes; it is broken down by the rhythms of work, rest and holidays; it is poisoned by food or values, through eating habits or moral laws; it constructs resistances.” (Foucault: A Critical Reader)

Regina Lund’s mouth-watering, naked body, like all bodies, is specifically marked by its existence and her particular habits, predilections and misadventures. Her body remembers and creates everyday unique memories.

Regina Lund wants us to believe that she with the video is claiming power and self-determination; that she, by embodying the icon of the male, naked Jesus, is attempting to stress women’s control over their bodies and sexualities.

As a middle-aged man, I of course appreciate the erotic appeals in her video. I’m glad for her willingness to satisfy my needs by letting me watch over and over such a blissful loss of self.

But even so, it’s difficult for me to understand how a woman like Regina Lund, equipped to control her sexual and financial economies, in order to make money reduces her body, that adorable, private surface of libidinal and erotogenic intensity, into a purchasable, public commodity?

All women do not need to be feminists. And I do not expect Regina Lund to be that. But a middle-aged, literate woman, who besides singing also writes poems and plays theatre, should know when she is constructing the image of the female body as a spectacle. She should understand the social and political practices that have constructed her astonishing, naked body and the meaning of it in the public sphere.