Standing Female Nude, written by Carol Ann Duffy, is a poem which describes the condition of a prostitute who is struggling to make a living. Duffy, as with a majority of her other works, attempts to give a voice to voiceless women in the middle and lower economic classes in an effort to promote her feminist agenda. This poem is in fact very layered and explores multiple aspects which may not be spotted on a superficial level, and enables her to transmit her ideas to the readers. Duffy puts across her main ideas of society’s treatment of the prostitute versus the treatment of males, and the prostitutes introspective views.
Duffy creates a society, not too distorted from our own in fact, which objectifies the woman and values her purely for her physical assets.
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This directly corroborates society’s viewing of her as the description only includes her sexual physical assets. Duffy writes this because she is trying to convey the sufferings of women in society as they are consistently objectified, devaluing their nature as a human being, and she invokes people to make a change. This theme of valuing women in a restrictive way as one only notices the physical elements of a female is continued throughout the poem, for example when the artist “is concerned with volume, space”, or “You’re getting thin, Madame, this is not good”. This directly references the corporeal elements of a body. The purpose of this quotation is consistent with the aforementioned one. Society’s superficial viewing of women is also reflected in the poem’s wring, as it may seem that this poem is strictly concerned with a prostitute, but in fact it describes all females. The male representative in the poem, Georges, then asserts his superiority, despite their similar conditions of being poor. Although he is sexually attracted to her as he “stiffens for [her] warmth”, suggesting an erection, he is unwilling to accept her as a human being as he deems her question “Why do you do this?”