Page 6 | Is it wrong to objectify men?

Athrawes · 2020-07-29T08:11:21+00:00

I suspect it is. I made a "funny" comment to a female colleague about the attractiveness of father's at parent teacher interviews - just a throw away line for a laugh whilst waiting. If I was a man saying that about the yummy mummies it would be very wrong. So I guess it's as wrong to do it in reverse?

It's tricky - on the one hand, it's not that great to treat anyone as if they were just an object to be looked at and separate their physical appearance from the whole person (goes for "ugly" people as well as "beautiful" ones).

On the other hand, we're not yet in a place where the power structure between a man making sexual comments about a woman is the same as a woman making sexual comments about a man (except possibly in the workplace where the woman is senior to the man). The underlying sexual threat isn't the same.

Watching a film recently, I did actually wonder how Chris Hemsworth feels having to take his shirt off in everything he does (it's pretty gratuitous) and always seeming to have some sort of subplot, or at least a few lines, about how physically beautiful he is. But then again - I suspect at this point in his career he can say no...and the difference is that, Ghostbusters aside, his characters always have other things about them going on which wasn't the case in the past for female eye candy.