Why Art Should Make You Uncomfortable

Every generation finds new ways to be scandalised by art. What offends us might change, but the instinct to sanitise—to make art more polite, more virtuous, more aligned with the current moral consensus—remains oddly consistent.

But art has never been clean.

In fact, artistic revolutions have always emerged from the so-called margins—from those dismissed as immoral, degenerate, or simply indecent. The Impressionists, for example, didn’t just experiment with brushwork; they dared to depict the unpaintable. Instead of angelic nudes in mythic settings, they painted prostitutes. Real women. Real lives. Real bodies. This shift scandalised the establishment not because nudity was new, but because the context had changed. These women weren’t Venus; they were visible.

This tension—between respectability and expression—is what drives the pulse of culture forward. And yet, each time, we find ourselves back here again, arguing that art has gone too far. That it’s irresponsible. That it’s inappropriate.

So let’s say it plainly: attempts to purify art, to scrub it clean of ambiguity or transgression, are nearly always reactionary. They signal not progress but panic.

And here's the real twist: often, the impulse to sanitise doesn't come from power—but from powerlessness.

When you feel like you can’t change the system, you change what you can—your media diet, your social feeds, the behaviour of artists and creators. You find a scapegoat in the public figure who posts the “wrong” image or performs the “wrong” identity, and you call it justice.

But this isn’t justice. It’s displacement.

You feel alienated by politics. You march but nothing changes. You vote but it doesn't matter. And so, you turn your attention to someone like Sabrina Carpenter—someone you can influence. You can ratio a tweet, demand an apology, even get a photo taken down. It's a proxy for control. A small symbolic win that masquerades as activism.

But does it do anything?

Will shaming an artist for their portrayal of sex, beauty, or power reduce misogyny in media? Or does it simply redirect the conversation—again—towards controlling women's choices under the guise of progressive concern?

Let’s be clear. Women are not dumb. Women are not drones. And women are not aestheticised victims of their own self-presentation. The idea that every expression of sexuality is a performance for men—intended for their gaze and their gratification—isn’t feminism. It’s paternalism in feminist drag.

Because women know they’re being watched. That doesn’t mean they lack agency.

They wear makeup because they want to feel hot. They pose for photos because they like how they look. Sometimes they want to appeal to men. Often, they don’t. Either way, the point is: it’s their call.

If your feminism demands that women only express themselves in ways that you approve of—less sexy, less visible, more palatable to your vision of “empowerment”—then you’re not fighting patriarchy. You’re replicating it. You're just building a better cage.

As Laura Mulvey argued in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, mainstream visual culture has historically positioned women as “bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.” She writes, “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly.”

This is often misunderstood. The male gaze isn’t just about men looking—it's about a broader system where power determines visibility and interpretation. So when critics fixate on the way a woman looks in a photo—whether too sexy or not sexy enough—they’re not disrupting that system. They're participating in it. The real subversion isn't always modesty. Sometimes, it's defiance through spectacle—a woman knowing she’s being watched and choosing to perform anyway.

Mulvey isn’t saying “stop looking.” She’s showing us how the looking works—who gets to look, who’s made to be looked at, and what happens when that structure is challenged. When a woman stages her own appearance, knowing the stakes, she isn’t naive. She’s political.

And look, none of this means misogyny isn’t real. Of course women are objectified. Of course beauty standards are suffocating. But women aren’t objectified because they wear a dress or pose for a magazine. They’re objectified because we live in a patriarchal society that will project objectification no matter what they wear. Go full glamour and you're trying too hard. Go bare-faced and you're letting yourself go. There’s no winning under this system.

The issue isn’t the woman. The issue is the lens.

So when we criticise expressions of sexuality in art—especially when those expressions come from women—we should ask: What problem are we actually trying to solve? Are we resisting oppression? Or are we just uncomfortable with ambiguity?

If it’s the latter, then maybe the art is doing its job.