objectification!

[dadof2ofthem]

ok, this is a serious question
i was talking to a female friend of mine recently, she's educated and emancipated etc, i said "i dont get the 'objectification' argument, i've never once been aroused by an object"

she laughed and told me "it's object as apposed to subject " "ahhhh" i said as though it had just dawned on me what she ment.

if your objective your inpartial, well thats my understanding anyway, and subjective meants your subject to some other force , influencing your opinion.

maybe one of you can fill the gaps for me ?

OP if you are looking for permission to keep using porn, or to be told that 'some porn isn't that bad' or 'don't worry about it, it's your choice'
YOU WILL NOT FIND IT HERE.

Porn objectifies women. The very EXISTENCE of porn makes the lives of other, ordinary women more difficult. If you want to stop objectifying women you need to STOP USING PORN.

There is no 'good' porn, sorry. There's no way for you to both use porn AND claim that you aren't a misogynist. If you're reaching orgasm over a woman's suffering and degradation, then you are a misogynist.

Dad - There was a dad of somone discussing breast feeding last night, i was just being nosy and wondered if it was you

It's not people like dadof2 who need advice about pornography and objectification - it's their wives and girlfriends.

fifis no that wasnt me, i stay away from the breastfeeding/bottle threads, they seem to go around in circles
i'm not expecting a carte-blanche with all your blessings for me to go and consume porn. but some things all of you have avoided and you come back to exploitation, rape , suffering and degradation.
1, porn made by women for women
2, male strippers, it would be hipocritical so have fun watching a male stripper on a hen night or something and in the same breath condemn a female one
3, people who are exhibisionist by nature posting pictures of themselves for example on the 'voyeurweb' surely this harms no one and the 'subject'activly wants to be 'object' by people the subject do know.

HerBeX if your still watching here , i've been thinking about what you said....

i dont think the chipendales are gay dancers, wouldnt suprise me if some were , but i would think most were straight males.
men at strip-shows dont sit there wanking.
i do agree with you that men and women react in a differnt way to a striptease, women tend to have fun where men just look glumly on trying not to blink incase they miss something. but after all you have said condemning female objectification i find it hipocritical of you to condone male strippers.

Why should women have a view on whether the chipendales or other male strippers leads to the objectification of men?

If men were to start complaining that this is the case, then we will sit up and take notice, but until then we have no obligation to fight men's battles or resolve men's dilemmas for them.

If you can't see that men and women are treated very differently by society then you need to do a lot more thinking and learning.

you should have a view beacuse i'm asumeing you dont like the term 'hypocriet"

i'm dyslexic so please forgive my spelling, if i looked every word up i would be here all day

— hypocrite adjective
1 : a person who puts on a false appearance of virtue or religion
2 : a person who acts in contradiction to his or her stated beliefs or feelings

Given your comments in this thread it is a term that I like well.

As I said - the power imbalance between men and women means that it is not a like for like comparator.

Personally, I would not go to see a male stripper, but until men start complaining about how it is contributing to men's inferior position in society, I don't feel inclined to worry about it.

Where have I condoned male strippers?

I've never seen the chippendales, I'm not interested in them. I'm not particularly interested in discussing male strippers either, it's not my battle, I'm not a man and I don't feel that the chippendales are a massive problem for men - their existence doesn't promote the view of men as being there just for sex, they are simply irrelevant. They are always brought up in discussions about porn and stripping, by people who either want to muddy the waters, or who are just woefully ignorant about the real issues around feminism, porn, sex, women's position in society, equality etc. But the existence of the chippendales does not impact on all men everywhere in society, because men have not had a long history of being objectified, whereas porn, lapdancers, female strippers, have an impact on all women everywhere because it reminds everyone that in spite of all the advances we've made in getting more control over our own lives, at base we're still just there to fuck and we shouldn't get too uppity thinking that anything else about us is more important. That is not the case for men.

HerBeX
i take your point actually, i think there is a big difference between male and female strippers , but the wiff of hypocracy remains, but your right, it's not your battle. they dont bother attall btw...if thats relevant.
ok, i'm nearly exhausted from this thread now, i would like, at least, some of you to address:-
1, porn made by women for women
3, people who are exhibisionist by nature posting pictures of themselves for example on the 'voyeurweb' surely this harms no one and the 'subject'activly wants to be 'object' by people the subject do know.

in short i want to know if all of the above arguments against porn also apply here .
and then i promise i will stop harping on.

bother me attall*

I don't think you can separate the porn made by women for women. It is still too closely associated with the rest of the porn industry, for me to feel it's OK to use. In theory there's nothing wrong with it, but in practice, why would you bother? No one needs porn and the harm it does outweighs the pleasure it gives. In a world where men and women were equal, where women were valued as full human being and where men were objectified as much as women, as likely to be strippers as women, as likely to be raped as women, then there would be no problem with ethical porn, voyeuristic stuff etc. But we don't live in that world, we live in the world we have and so everything we do is circumscribed and affected by that.

And also, I think that if we lived in a world where women and men were equal, the patriarchal urge to objectify human beings, whether male or female, wuold simply not be as socially acceptable as it is now - people would look at you with pity if you were so odd that you wanted to turn your fellow human beings into objects, why would you want to deny them part of their humanity? For me, an equal society isn't one where we still keep patriarchal values and say men and women can have an equal opportunity to dehumanise and be vile to each other, it's a society where that sort of sick approach to humanity just doesn't hold sway anymore.

And practically, porn which says it's "normal, exhibitionist housewives" or whatever, is actually usally professional. Porn made "by women for women" is usually made by men for men, pretending to be by women for women. So from a practical POV, you can't tell whether the porn you use is ethical or not, so it's best to avoid altogether. I'm sure that Tesco stocks some products which are ethically sourced and produced, but they're such a bunch of bastards that I'm not going to bother going in there and trying to work my way through their stock, to find the sort of products I want to buy, produced by the sort of producers I want to buy from. I'll just go down the market instead. If I were an ethical person who had an interest in porn, I'd apply the same rules.

The whiff of hypocrisy as you call it, only remains if you don't understand the arguments.

I have not condoned the existence of male strippers I think the argument that men dehumanise women, so it's OK for women to dehumanise men, what's sauce for the goose etc. is morally vacuous. But I'm not going to pretend that the effect of male strippers on the perception and value of men in society, has the same effect as the effect of female strippers on women.

you make sense HerBeX the only part i would take issue with is the

< Porn made "by women for women" is usually made by men for men, pretending to be by women for women.>

my DP reads the viva, it's a dutch womens magazine, it came with a free DVD a short time ago this was porn made by woman for women and distributed to women.
(go to viva.nl that the magazines website, dont worry you wont see any porn there, it's just to give you an idea of the type of magazine it is, it's all in dutch of course but you will get the general idea.)
it's a serious womens magazine.

as a footnote , i was curious to see, when a famous dutch actress, tanja jess, was to appear naked in playboy that month, it was advertised in the viva. could it be that continental woman are more likly to celebrate a naked body for it's beauty?

No, it's just that continental women are more brainwashed that women being presented naked and objectified, is a celebration of women's beauty rather than a re-inforcement of their sex class status.

Dadof:

1.) and 2.) Porn made "for women by women" and the Chippendales male stripper thing seem to have the same explanation in my mind. It's a case of what HerBex calls "what's sauce for the gander is for the goose". Society in general sees nothing wrong with objectifying women; but it is now more acceptable for women to express their sexuality; thus, it occurred to someone somewhere that they ought to also have access to the same types of titilation as men do. So women are encouraged to objectify men in the name of "equality". I find this repugnant, as it tends to serve as yet another way for society to justify exploitive practises with the line "but women do it too!" (I bet you've heard that one before!) And as HerBex points out, strippers and porn aimed at women bears no comparison in terms of quantity or effect.
My view is objectification is bad whether a man does it to a women, a woman to another woman or to a man. It just has worse and more profoundly negative consequences when it is the man doing it to a women as it enforces and justifies existing prejudices and attitudes towards women that aren't found when talking about men.

3. "Exhibionist housewives" who "invite" objectification. I think this is the a deformation of the "she chooses to do xyz so that's ok then". Women choose to do things that harm them all the time (think of all those who stick with abusive husbands, for example). This doesn't make it something to applaud. I would be interested in knowing the reasons why these women choose to do this. are they doing it to please their partners (I'm thinking of reader's wives here)? Do they think that the only way they can get noticed or worse, get affection, is by stripping off and showing all?

I agree with you totally celadon.

I like Catin's point "Women choose to do things that harm them all the time (think of all those who stick with abusive husbands, for example). This doesn't make it something to applaud."

Porn harms women. All porn. My partner doesn't use porn BUT still, all porn out there harms ME personally. Know why? Because there are men in my life who DO use porn - whether it's the man who sells me a bus ticket or the man who interviews me for a job - and THAT MAN's view of women will be warped and twisted by the women he sees 'being sluts' - being degraded and objectified - in porn.

Doesn't matter who makes the porn. Doesn't matter who the porn is for. Porn reduces women to their bodies, stops them being full people. And the men who use porn are accustomed to seeing women in that way. Which makes life harder for ALL the women around them, the women they drive past, the women who teach their kids, the women who work with them. You get the idea?

That's the articulation I have been looking for blackcurrants, thanks very much.

My boss is semi-computer-literate, he asked me to fix something minor on his machine some time ago. Found some unpleasant history. Makes me feel icky.

to frame it another way, dadof2ofthem, the fact that there's porn in the world is going to harm your DD. There will come a point in her life - frighteningly soon - when she will start to worry about her body. When she will hurt and twist herself to look more like the pornified pictures that she will have easy access to. And there will come a point when one of her boyfriends tries to persuade her to do something she might not like, because that boyfriend has seen it in a porn film and thinks (1) all women do it and (2) all women like it.

If you need something to help you stop using porn, imagine your dd at 15 being pressured into anal sex.

Hope this helps.

i agree with you blackcurrants i only have sons but i take your point
as i said upthread, the sexualised images we see is society today /blond ,shaved, silicone women with pneumatic breasts does absolutly nothing for me , the images i look at are of ordinary women, often homemade, this isnt a descision of conscence btw it's just what 'does it' for me .
i'm not sure your right about what porn does to boys idea of women, maybe some less rounded boys will blur the lines in their heads between porn and real life, but like fairy tales or american soap operas most of us know where reality stops and fantasy begins.
i think the issues young girls have about their bodies , self loathing and so on is a real issue, i dont know what to do about it, but making porn ilegal wont help, this is more to do with the images of women in advertising, and size zero catwalk models. the bigger curvy models that 'nivea' use are more sexy to my eyes and better for the girls with the self-loathing. aslo, i dont think i'm alone here, i think many guys prefere normal looking women.

do you agree with my point that ANY porn (of ANY kind of woman) treats women like objects, and therefore makes life harder for all women?