luvluv

Mad:

"Yet one doesn't need to 'know' the other person to experience or enjoy these sensations. One's opponant's 'personality' is totally secondary to his/her actions. So it is with sex. You don't have to like a person, or even want to spend time with them outside of a ring to thoroughly enjoy fighting them. Neither do you have to like a person, nor want to spend time with them outside of the sack to totally enjoy fucking them."

Okay, would you wrestle with your father or brother? Now, would you have sex with your father or your brother? Get my point?

99Percent:

"False, it is themselves who chose to enter into that image. Women, like all people, take advantage of what gives them economic freedom. "

I don't want to keep dragging race into this but I think it is useful as an analogy. I grew up in the South and as I was a fairly big lad I did a lot of physical work growing up during the summers (construction, farm work, etc). Not always, but quite often, I was the object of scorn by my white superiors because of the fact that I was obviously articulate (as inapparent as that may be on this board at times ) Usually, these same white men favored, promoted, and showed the most deference to the black men who displayed the least intelligence and were the most, shall we say, ingratiating. I learned at a very early age that if you wanted quick promotion as a black man in a blue collar job in the South, the quickest way was to act as if you were a hard-working, smiling idiot. The more intelligence I displayed and the more I demonstrated that I was aware that there was a world beyond the farm I was working on, the less favorably I was viewed by my white superiors. Now, by your logic, the course of action I should have taken was to slur my speech and talk like a sharecropper from the Color Purple, because this would have been to my greatest economic advantage. My whole point about using stereotypes to your advantage is that you cannot do that without giving support to that stereotype, and no matter how much you profit from it someone else will be hurt by it. I use the racial analogy because I think that demonstrates more rapidly the self-humiliation involved in the chose to demean oneself by pretending you are less than you are to fit someone's image of you. Somethings just aren't defensible simply because you profit by them. This is only defendable if you value money over integrity and self-esteem. I personally don't.

T.O.M.:

"Are you seriously saying that people can only be exploited if they participate in their own exploitation? Can you explain to me how those killed in the Holocaust did this?"

I define exploitation as someone profiting, in some sense, at another person's expense. The Jews during the holocaust for the most part were not exploited, they were killed. You obviously don't need someone's participation to kill them. But you do need their participation to exploit them in a system like sharecropping or segregation or colonialism. As Gandhi and MLK and others proved, these things simply cannot operate if the people who are being exploited refuse to participate. To whatever extent the Jews in the concentration camps actually performed work for the Germans, they did participate in their explotation because they could have refused to do the work. They certainly would have been killed, and I'm not suggesting that they were weak or anything because they did not refuse to work, I'm just saying they didn't have to.

"I have some difficulties in what I see as your tendency to equate the terms "whore" and "sexually liberated woman"."

I never used the phrase sexually liberated woman at all. I never said that a sexually liberated woman was a whore. I actually said there was no such thing as a whore. (Titles are what we use to make objectification easier. When we want to deprive someone of their rights, we say "It's all right, he's a FOREIGNER" or if we want to use sadistic punishment for the incarcerated we say "It's all right, he's a FELON". We could never do these things if we had to say "It's all right, he/she is a human being.)

Lady Shea:

"Since it cannot be avoided nor changed (you cannot change the whole world), why not take advantage? "

This notion is one of the reasons I used the race analogy. If you would have told my grandfather that I would live in the state of North Carolina and work at a job where I had authority over white men, where I fraternized in unsupervised contact with white women (as equals!), and where a white woman would be in a position of power over the entire plant... he would have thought I was loco. The world HAS changed, it has changed millions of times, but the world will not change itself. It certainly won't change if people don't confront stereotypes. Yes, some people will always see blacks as being inferior but that is less true now than it was in 1850 and it will be even less true a hundred years hence. But it takes people refusing to embody the stereotypes to make it happen, it could not have occured without blacks refusing to be stereotyped even in situations where they could gain from it.

[ June 24, 2002: Message edited by: luvluv ]</p>

luvluv

brighid:

First off, excellent, well-thought out post. I agree with a lot of what you said but I want to focus on two areas with which I disagree. I would like to consider one of your quotes and one that was given by seebs.

brighid said:

"Women are objectified no matter what we do, what we were, where we went to school, or how high we climb the corporate ladder."

And seebs said:

"To a certain extent, the reason a given woman can't change the way she's seen is that none of the others are standing with her. This is, of course, vastly oversimplified; in fact, in the modern world, women *ARE* seen much more as people, and much less as sexual objects, than they were a hundred years ago, or a thousand. "

I disagree with both points. It is true that women throughout history have been, in some sense, repressed; but I think purely sexual objectification has been one of the rarest forms historically. Most women were seen as objects of domesticity: their function was to bare children and maintain a home. I don't think people in the chivalric ages or in the Pioneer era in the United States thought of women primarily as sex objects. I'm sure I will be taunted mercilessly for this but I actually think that contraception has a lot to do with it. It has only been recently that a man could afford to treat a woman as a sex object, because it times past sex with a woman risked the possibility of a lifetime commitment. True, there have always been prostitutes and these particular women were sex objects, but women by and large were seen as domestic animals more than as sex objects. In some ages women were even revered (as in the chivalric ages). While this reverence is indeed itself a form of oppression, I only mention this to say that the perception of women purely as sexual objects is not inevitable nor unalterable. It has not always been the case, and there is no reason to believe it will always be the case.

Secondly, I want to deal with your belief that women should be allowed to be, if you'll allow me to paraphrase, beautiful, intelligent, and sexy all at the same time. Now I agree with the first two, but I cannot, in my mind, seperate "being sexy" from "being a sexual object". I'm assuming that by sexy you mean something other than beautiful because you separated the terms more than once and never substituted the one for the other. Now, by sexy I can only assume you mean that you want your appearance to inspire lust in men (as opposed to beauty, which can inspire admiration and even inspiration in men.) I see this desire, the desire to be seen as sexy, as nothing more or less than the desire to be objectified. I would further venture to say that the desire to be seen as sexy is a relatively new phenomenon: it would have ranked low on the priority list of a farmer's wife during the colonial period of America, or a peasant girl in pre-industiral Europe. The desire to inspire PURELY SEXUAL attention from men, divorced from any desire from that man for commitment or love, is to seek to be objecitified. Though I shall no doubt again be laughed to scorn, I would say that this is due again to the fact that some of the dangers of sex have apparently been so lessened by the wide avaliablity of contraception. Before this, women would have probably wanted to avoid any sexual attention from a man who would not want to take care of the children which might have easily resulted from their intercourse.

And since I am already this far out, I will go on to say that I believe that the desire to be seen as sexy is every bit as much the work of social programing as the desire by pre-Industrial Age women to be seen as good housewives or good cooks. The desire to be seen as sexy is not a drive that has always been present with women. It is in all likeliehood motivated by the perceived economic and social advantages attached to the ablity to attract purely sexual attention. I think this social programming is largely a product of print and visual media, and it is constantly reinforced by scantily clad women on billboards and television selling products ranging from lingerie to chewing gum and iced-tea (seen that new Nestea Cool Iced Tea commercial? The one in the laundry mat where the snow man hands the girl with heaving bossoms back her misplaced bra? Why do we need sex to sell Iced-tea, for goodness sake?).

I would say that the modern image of the woman as sexual object is not to be laid at the foot of religion but at the foot of COMMERCE. The image of the woman as a sexual object is being promoted largely by advertising companies and by big business not in the name of freedom or liberation but in the name of exploitation. The magazines, billboards, music videos, films, television shows, talk shows, and internet sites portray sex because sex will get you to watch. And if you watch you will buy. In short, sex sells. Many things can be laid at the foot of the church as regards sexual oppression, but sexual explotation cannot. Sexual exploitation is a capitalist, not a religious, enterprise. We are being SOLD sex as a value because it is profitable, not because it is good in itself or because it is liberating. And the notion that sex is something sacred is being OPPOSED as a value not because it is unscientific or oppressive but because IT IS NOT PROFITABLE. Sex is big business and not just for the adult industry. It is big for every print media.

(There's a great, GREAT book called Following Christ in a Consumer Society by John F. Kavanaugh that explores why a overly-sexualized, overly-matierialistic (as in overly-consumerist, not overly-naturalistic) capitalist society must destroy or silence religious values not because they are wrong, but because they hinder money-making. It's a great book worthy of it's own thread actually.)

At any rate, I was told that I underestimate the role that consent plays in objectification, I think we have so far been underestimating the role cash money plays in it. I don't mean this in the sense that the individual woman is motivated by money to allow her own objectification (though that is obviously the case, quite often) but I am suggeting that the overall acceptance and prevalence of sexuality in our culture is not due to the fact that sex is an intrinsically good thing but because it is an intrinsically profitable thing.

[ June 24, 2002: Message edited by: luvluv ]</p>

ju'iblex

Firstly, and honest to goodness im not saying this to be a dickhead, luvluv can you please use at least the bold UBB code when quoting someone else &lt;or even the quote code would be nice&gt;, it actually makes posts a lot easier to read.

im a bit behind, so im going to regress to your original post and work my way from there. unfortunately i done have the time to scour your posts like i did earlier.
fair and i am more than willing to agree with that.

but here is the first step of the problem.

the feminist agenda is not tied to the complete removal of the idea of objectification, at least not in the sense which you mean it, my explanation will come as we go along.
the main problem i see here is your use of the word "objectification". Pornography et al., true enough does contribute to societies view of the role of women, but it is the symptom of hundreds of years not the disease itself.
Succinctly? No. Interesting that you would consider that pornography would restrict sexual freedom. but thats another story altogether. The real problem here is that you are actually conforming to the idea that pornography is about the domination of the woman, despite your attempts to fight this. By submitting to the idea that the woman only serves as the object in pornography, you have just contradicted yourself.
a priori
nonono! again, youre assuming the role of the women is first and foremost as the object. I dont deny in a lot of cases this is true, but you cannot ever make a generalisation so blatantly false as this!
whoa! acting out part of your partners, or fantasy is not objectification.
this is getting unbelievable. are you suggesting that a woman who has more than one partner is playing the whore, and has no self-respect? Are you also saying that in order for a woman to embrace her sexuality, a monogamous relationship is necessary? Curious you would consider reverting back to the values of the 50's to propel a post-modern idea.
how many times do i have to say "a priori" before you stop arguing ideas with no factual basis?

Amen-Moses

Why does luvluv keep ignoring me?

Pray tell why does an "object" feign pleasure?

If anyone is sexually objectified in society it is men, just one example from yesterdays daily newspaper; It is the first week of wimbledon and out of all the new players this year who gets his picture splashed all over the news? James Blake. why him? I'll quote the paper "Meet the male answer to Anna Kournikova ... James Blake is a tennis pin-up and a model ... James has never won a tournament .. the hunky sports star", this is accompanied by a topless shot with the caption "LOOKING ACE ... James is set to send female fans' hearts fluttering".

Tell me how this differs from so-called female "objectification".

Amen-Moses

snatchbalance

Linking thier products to sexual imagery is profitable because sex, in and of itself, can be a good thing. People like sex. People like to be sexy; always have, always will.

Take a look at the history of body adornment and facinantion with the beauty of the human body throughout history.

SB

[ June 25, 2002: Message edited by: snatchbalance ]</p>

AtlanticCitySlave

The problem with the majority of these posts is the women aren't objectified, at least not in corporate america, nor can they be. It doesn't pay to be seen as sexist, racist, etc., for an organization, and economists (especially at Harvard) have shown that being racist, sexist, etc., will ultimately end in financial ruin for a company. Maybe it's time women stop playing the victim and realize it's 2002 and get on with your lives.

brighid

Luvluv,

I am going to strongly disagree with your interpretation of a woman’s desire to be sexy and the role it plays in the objectification of women. I don’t believe “sexy” is a modern term, or even a modern phenomena. Different times determine what is or is not sexy, but women have always had a desire to be appealing to men and sexuality has always been a very strong vehicle. An intelligent woman knows the strength of her femininity, and in a world dominated by men that woman knows how to use it to her advantage, without playing the “whore”. Patriarchal societies have simply robbed women of that power and freedom and repressed them to the point that they believe they are powerless and dirty for simply being. The balance between sexy and slutty can be a very fine line, but the women who knows and achieves that balance is more powerful than any man. We learned along time ago that if we want to achieve our freedom, we must allow men to think they came up with the idea.

Edited to add: Prior to the very recent, modern and Western age women were not valued for their intellect or other qualities. They were valued for their ability to bear children and their submissive nature. They were either the type of women you marry or the type of woman you slept with. Because of the repressive restrictions placed on our abilities to live beyond the role of wife, nun, teacher, nurse and mother and because of the institutionalized oppression - unable to vote, unable to gain access to schools of higher learning, unable to own property, divorce, unable to control our reproductive futures and bound and enslaved by our wombs by legal and religious mandate - well, in this sense we have been oppressed and objectived based upon our sex. The most modern examples of repression and objectification can be drawn from those roots, based very squarely in the religious roots of our past. And the days of chivalry weren't days where women were respected and uplifted - they were protected because of their deemed inferiority and they were very restricted as to their ability to live, think and express any part of their nature. Perhaps men were more polite, but it was objectification and repression NONE the LESS.

Sexy does not mean micro mini skirts, bulging cleavage or stiletto heels – although this is one interpretation of sexy. A sexually provocative women is much more then her body parts and, in my opinion the sexiest women are not those who strut around like Pamela Anderson or show themselves as demonstrated within popular culture. That sort of blatant appeal to the inherent sexual responses of men is immature and shows a lack of recognition of the power of femininity. The sexiest women are those who are confident in themselves, who carry themselves with strength and grace, who flow through a room as if on air, whose eyes gleam with vitality and intelligence and whose presence demands respect. I refuse to desexualize myself, but I also refuse to confine myself to the notion that the more skin I show the more appealing I am. Everything has a time and a place.

Women are sexual beings, just as men are. To deny us the right to fully express our sexual nature is not only repressive but is part of the attitudes that confine women and add to the “whore” mentality. I am not a whore because I exude sexuality. I am not defenseless or a victim because of my gender.

Those commercial entities you talk about are owned and controlled by the “conservative” and often time religious factions of the US. They know sex sells and they abuse that. In this way I agree and I am tired of the image that a woman must meet some sort of ideal to be attractive. Thankfully, as a woman grows and matures she realizes that this ideal is not reflected in the reality of her experience.

Religion is at the root of the problem and I knew this even while I was a theist and the treatment of women as only their for sexual pleasure and procreation is at the heart of the matter. It is the attitudes that run rampant, although hidden behind some other “agenda” of a return to American, Christian values that sully the waters and are at the root of the repression we have sustained for ions. It is because of our ability to control our reproductive futures that some women (so many still don’t have easy access to either birth control, sexual education or abortion) are able to step outside of the realm of our past oppression. The black man was legally freed long before women were given the ability to vote and segregation was banned from this country before women were given control over their reproductive lives, and thereby their sexuality and their future. It is going to take many more decades of educating women, providing them with equal opportunities and educating men and boys about the fullness of feminine beauty before this objectification will lessen. Hopefully one day it will be eliminated, but not as long as we have people desiring to return things back to the “good ol’ days!” If I prayed I would pray fervently that women never be obligated to a time where they were denied sexual education, freedom, the right to vote, divorce, own property, etc. We have a long way to go.

Pornography is part of the problem, but not in the way I think you are getting at. Women do have a role in this objectification and must not tolerate being treated primarily sexually and men must act in unison with those women fighting oppression. Chastity and virginity are not the answers. Women only playing the role of dutiful wife and mother aren’t the answers either. Equality and honoring the diversity of the female experience, allowing full freedom of expression, thought and action (even in a counterproductive manner) ARE the answers.

And although I agree then people should not act as the stereotype and therefore feed the ignorant, I feel it is the responsibility of the ignorant to wake up and stop generalizing and dehumanizing people because a few set a bad example.

Brighid

[ June 25, 2002: Message edited by: brighid ]</p>

brighid

Now if that isn't the biggest bunch of bull shit I have ever heard ....

Sexual harrassment, racist attitudes, etc. are still well and strong within the economic structures of America. It may not be as easy to come right out and say and do things, but make no mistake about it they exist only more subtley.

The fact that women are economically penalized for having children and the men that father those child are not is one case in point. The fact that similarly educated women, with similar experience make between 25 and 50 percent less (depending on a woman's race, black women fairing the worst) is yet another example. The fact that women are made to choose between a career and children and all to often take jobs that are beneath their abilities is further proof that things are NOT equal, and the old (yet changing) ideas remain.

The fact that women must constantly defeminize themselves to be taken seriously ... the fact that women have had to sue to get tenure, or to be advanced within Universities like Harvard ... the fact that the majority of those in poverty are women and women of color ... the fact that women suffer from domestic violence at an outrageously different rate then men ... the fact that people still wish to outlaw birth control, abortion and teach abstinence only education ...
the fact that people like you think all things are equal and we should just shut up and accept the status quo is yet further evidence that things are not all okay ...

Corporations do PLENTY of things, such as lie, cheat, pollute, have racist policies (think of Mitsubishi) and sexist policies or don't do anything about it is testament enough that you don't a friggin clue what you are talking about. Those things are only economically disadvantegous when they are made public and going public with those types of things isn't so easy.

Brighid

[ June 25, 2002: Message edited by: brighid ]</p>

Jamie_L

Sex and love are separate, and they can be separate in completely healthy ways.

However, sexual objectification does have negative side effects, IMHO. The reason is that sexual objectification involves a sense of power and control as well as sexual desire. The objectifier (in this instance, the man) learns to like the experience BECAUSE he is in control - he gets what he wants when he wants. Reward this enough times with the all-powerful pleasure of sexuality, and you can alter that person's behavior to the point where they expect that level of power and control - you can create a desire and need to objectify women that gets in the way of normal interactions with women.

Does this happen in all cases? No. Does it happen only to men who are scum. Absolutely not. I know good guys who have tremendous problems in relationships because of exactly this problem. What's the solution? Beats me. It's certainly not any kind of legislation. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to seek a solution.

Of course, there's always an anecdotal example to prove anything. If "this is my experience" was sufficient evidence or arguement for something, we'd all believe in UFOs.

Jamie

snatchbalance

How can you compare the efforts of a man who devotes all his time and energy to his place of employment, to a woman on the "mommy track"? Of course thier levels of compensation are going to be different.

Men, in many cases, are still looked on as beasts of burden. Thier only worth lies in the level of economic support that they provide to thier family. Many women like this arrangement just fine; they expect nothing less. Personnaly, I'd rather be a sex object than a fucking mule.

Also, why do you think many men try to skirt the child support system? Because it's onerous and prejidicial to men. Men entering the legal system will be indetured and left destitute in many instances. Of course, then they will be vilified for not being supportive enough.

Anyway, the rank and file male, black, white, red or otherwise, faces his own daily obsticals, trials, setbacks, and frustrations. To me, what seperates the men from the boys, is that a man does whatever needs to be done without crying about.

Reliance on victimhood is a cop out.

SB

[ June 25, 2002: Message edited by: snatchbalance ]</p>