So Larry, do you take off your socks or do you take from your socks?
And you misunderstood the yellow star reference completely, and willfully. I know your relatives were murdered in the Holocaust, as you have stated it often. To restate: the Jews of Europe were made to wear yellow stars that were meant to mark them as different or of lower status, 'untermenschen', to objectify them, to persecute them, to make their murder and all the other crimes perpetrated against them, including rape seem inconsequential because they didn't matter.
Yet this attempt at differentiation or objectivisation occurred only in the eyes of those who beheld them. It reflected the opinions of those in power. The Jews themselves were not any different just because of the badge they wore. People could choose to see them as the Nazis wanted to portray them or they could choose to see them as they always had, as neighbours, colleagues, friends, relatives, or as people who needed help -- the yellow stars didn't have the intended effect on those who tried to rescue the Frank family in Amsterdam for instance, and there were others (not nearly enough) who chose not to objectify the Jews either.
From an article entitled Queer Eyes and Wagnerian Guys; says it better than I can -- 'All symbolic objects are polysemous, their meanings shaped by the complicated network of references embedded in any given sociocultural system. Given this multivalent potential, a viewer has some power to ignore some meanings in favor of others. The choice between one set of meanings and another can be powerfully influenced by the cultural knowledge available to the viewer. The perspective that ascribes one set of values to a particular image for one person may differ radically from the values available for another person. Consequently, the understanding taken away from an image or object by a viewer well versed in the values of a particular subculture may differ radically from an understanding gained from the point of view of the dominant culture'
In the case of the Nazis, their own psycho-sexual problems, problems in their upbringing, and problems in the general culture of the German world wrt male identity led them to vilify homosexuals just as they targeted the Jews, deprive them of civil and human rights, incarcerate them in death camps and kill them. Nazism had a culture of hyper-masculinity;the 'Queer Eyes' article here details some of the sexual insecurities and homoeroticism of the Nazis themselves (their cognitive dissonance) and their presumably unintentional production of art and artifacts that appealed to the homoerotic in themselves and some of those they persecuted.
It takes only the beholder to make an object out of someone. It takes the choice of an observer to objectify uniformed Catholic schoolgirls, or women wearing stilettoes, or teenage girls wearing pretty much anything barring a misshapen potato sack and a brown paper bag over their heads (see the kiosks of used knickers). The choice is informed by the culture of the beholder.
I bet you're here all the same Larry.
It has come to my notice lately on MN due to the presence on many a thread of posters identifying themselves as men, not going to name names, who crash around like bull elephants and genuinely do not seem to share a common language with the (mainly) women who are there. The mind-blowing obtuseness has been quite a spectacle. I have been considering LG's experience of learning 'women's' Japanese in light of this -- something is being lost in the translation (funny enough a film set in Japan but that's neither here nor there...), some vital part of the apprehension and comprehension of experience is not happening. Even the reason women post the way they do, the terms they use and the problems they post about seem to cause umbrage and gross misunderstanding.
The Japanese woman may have been playing a huge practical joke, or she may have assumed LG knew without being told that the rules were different for men's and women's speech in Japanese, or LG may have assumed Japanese women have naturally high-pitched voices because men appeared to sound natural to him so therefore the women must also be using their natural voices. He seems to have picked up the derogatory terms men use for women yet failed to notice or pick up the terms women use for men, and thought therefore that there were none. He took what the teacher taught as gospel too -- are men more willing to accept received wisdom even if it sounds a little high pitched, than women are?
Are men more likely to suffer from cognitive dissonance than women are after the Feminist Revolution? It seems that some are in a state of distress at the alternative view of reality proposed by feminists, and that there is an active pushback going on in wider society that appeals to the worst instincts of humanity, as a result.