Sexual objectification of men

[DSM]

Maybe not feminism, but not sure where else to post..

Am I alone in being uncomfortable with the sexual objectification of men? Was just watching this morning where holly willoughby was interviewing some young chaps from the new twilight film.

Commments such as 'within the first minute you had your top off and I though 'oh yes, there it is'' and 'we've all been waiting a long time to see your sex scene'. There were many references to their bodies, their beauty and the fact they get naked, all met with 'phwoarr' type comments.

I felt like the men were being objectified, and if it had been a man making those comments to a woman on daytime tv, all hell would break loose.

Why is it accepted from female-male? Surely in the interest of equality this kind of behaviour shouldn't be acceptable to/from either sex?

Am I over reacting?

Great idea :)

it's already been done. Anti-FeministBingo
Had fun reading it tho. .

okay, I retract the word geek. What I'm arguing against is a system that gives men advantages, reproductive advantages, that they would never have if we lived outside of a patriarchy. ANd this is an extremely important point to consider... because if women had true equality a lot of men wouldn't get the opportunity to reproduce. Think of all the women out there who fall into marriage (or have arranged marriages!), or all the women who don't make it to the abortion clinic, or the women who conceive through rape. IN a system of equality there would be no prostition. Women wouldn't be coerced into having sex. If women had real political and economic power in the world, many of them would probably decide to have less children, or no children at all

THis very thought sends chills down most men's spines! They see their reprodutive future sliding out of view. So they bandy together against women and regard women as the enemy (hence all the killing of women that goes on).

But their worldview is distorted. Women are not the enemy, other men are! (idiots)

I suppose my ultimate point is, there is no such thing as a feminist man. Men have just got too much to lose if women were liberated.

I hate all the wild generalizations about 'how men are' because it appears to be just as ill informed as wild generalizations about women. To me one of the key attractions of feminism is that it seeks to enable women to be recognized as individuals. I am not woman first and myself second, but the other way around and that is how I see my fellow humans, whether they are male or female. I'm not better than every man I know because I am a woman, and to think so would be horribly arrogant. That there are men who think this way about women is of course true and reprehensible, but it's not a game that I want to play.

I also think it is an incredibly sad view to think that all individuals only value looks, which appear to me is sakura's argument in saying that geeks would never otherwise have any sex or chance of fatherhood over handsome men. In any case geeks are as likely to be good looking (and whose definition of good looking anyway?) as any other man. It's a bit pathetic to assume that being interested in technology and socially awkward (the usual definition of geek) means being unattractive. In fact you appear to be suggesting that women are only attracted to macho poser types (surely the opposite of geek) who in my experience are also the most likely to be chauvinists. I chose my dh because of his personality as well as his attractiveness to me, and in thinking about fatherhood material I place far more importance on brains than looks. Looking around me I don't think this is a particularly unusual practice.

I do agree with the general argument about objectification being more imposed on women than on men, and collectively more damaging for women as a group than for men as a group.

Sorry - the conversation had moved on somewhat since I started that post (spending a few hours playing computer games mid post with my geek of a husband can do that)

nooka, I retracted the word geek, because I didn't actually mean a specific stereotype of socially-awkward-but-intelligent men, i.e the ones who are usually associated with the word. I just wanted to make the point that women have got the upper hand in evolutionary terms and this makes men's blood boil, so they reddress the balance by using the political system they have created to give them the upper hand. What this means is that all men have got power over women, and this is an unnatural state of affairs. I really believe that men understand this, and they know what's at stake if feminism were to succeed.

While women are individuals, we're going to get nowhere politically if we say that women have no common identity. In fact this is the patriarchy's latest strategy, and we see it most clearly in trans politics. WOMen don't exist as a group, they say. Even a man can be a woman, ergo there is no need for feminism at all, because if women cannot identify as a group, then they have no common interests or political goals.
THis is very clever, actually. It means that women's biological vulnerability, and the fact that all females are assigned the feminine gender at birth can be glossed over and dismissed as irrelevant.
Despite our differences, we have more in common with each other than we have with any man. Saying otherwize weakens our collective strength, and this is exactly what the goal is. If you go down this route you could even say that the reason women are poor and oppressed is because each. individual. woman. doesn't have what it takes to beat teh menz. What you're doing, then, is completely ignoring the structural difficulties that make it impossible for women to gain economic and political parity with men.

there was the wallmart case, wasn't there, where a group of women took Wallmart to cout for sex discrimination. Younger and inexperienced men had been persistently promoted over ther heads. The court decided that they didn't have a case because women don't exist as a distinct group
They were told they could each take their individual case to court.

But the fact was, they were discriminated against because they were women.

That's really good point about the gender imbalance to come, Lenin and wht that will mean for the future. It makes feminism EVEN MORE relevant and why the current backlash must be reversed. It's creating a more hostile environment just when the circumstances for a lot of women is about to get worse - in an unprecedented way. I suppose we are (re?)building the foundations for the battles that will be fought in ten years.
The objectification of women and pornification of society does not bode well for a world where females are outnumbered. 'A scarce commodity' to use the corresponding terminology.

Actually I think that liberating women will liberate many many men and that you can have a man who wholeheartedly agrees with and supports the tenets of feminism. I don't think that divide and conquer works conceptually or practically.

I think it is also really unhelpful when making a point (and don't get me wrong it is a very very valid point) to say things that are not actually true, and then on being challenged to say it's anti feminist to do so. You can make the point that men as a group are much more likely to be violent than women as a group. This is indeed so and backed up by plenty of evidence (I was reading a really interesting court judgement about polygamy yesterday that showed among other things that societies with more men then women have higher levels of violence). However to state that male violence is mainly inflicted on women and to get annoyed when reminded that that isn't actually true seems to me to be shooting yourself in the foot. Yes two women a week are killed by their partners and that is a terrible fact, but most women are not killed by their partners (to get a rate of how 'fatally dangerous' cohabiting with a man is you'd need to divide the number of deaths by total number of women living in partnership with a man).

Now I should admit that I am a risk manager and have public health training too so I am probably a bit of a pedant when it comes to this sort of thing. I like to see evidence based arguments, but if you claim with total certainty 'men like dominance, women like intimacy' then you have to back it up, otherwise it's just an opinion and totally up for challenge. I totally get that sakura thinks that men as a group are pretty despicable. Fair enough. There is plenty out there to show that women fundamentally lose out under patriarchy (I think that many many men do to) that change is required, and that for those men (and women) who benefit from patriarchy there is plenty to lose. I agree that we are seeing a significant backlash right now and that the future doesn't look very bright at times. But I still think that distorting facts to suit any agenda is counterproductive.

The polygamy case I was referring to is here:

Rats. Messed up that link. www.courts.gov.bc.ca/jdb-txt/SC/11/15/2011BCSC1588.htm It has some really interesting stuff about what happens when women are a scare commodity, whether from sex imbalances or where those on top of the heap (and polygamy is very very patriarchal) have too many.

Nooka, I agree with you wrt generalizations towards men as a collective lump being problematic.

I think that it's one of the problems of feminist language, of language in general; on the one hand you need to be able to identify harmful patterns that exist instead of treating each case as individual, so that you can get to the cause of the problem and fight against it.

On the other hand you don't want to lump everyone together in the same category because that's unfair and just plain antagonistic.

It would be nice if there were a words for "men/women" that came with some sort of disclaimer!

I think I love you a little bit, nooka

I find it really tedious having to say: not all men all the bloody time. DH often stops me mid track to make me say it. FFS I'm a feminist. I'm talking about overarching and underlying patterns and it is really boring having to reassure.
Its a thread on feminism and womens rights, not on 'protecting male feelings'. Sometimes you just want to move on from 'preparing the ground in order that you can speak about feminism' onto 'speaking about feminism'.

I was a bit grumpy last night so that might have come out a bit strongly, but it wasn't about 'protecting men's feeling'. I'm not so bothered about that in general. I just absolutely hate being told how I should behave as a woman and I can't see that doing it the other way around is helpful. I'd be perfectly happy with 'many' men rather than 'all' men which isn't asking for much in terms of extra typing :) Also I guess professionally I have become very accustomed to qualifying statements so I probably react particularly strongly against absolutes. To me when people start throwing around 'this is how the world is' type statements it a) just gets my back up and b) makes me think that the person is probably talking twaddle. That can really distract from what may otherwise be a really good and interesting argument.

Sakura - "What I'm arguing against is a system that gives men advantages, reproductive advantages, that they would never have if we lived outside of a patriarchy."

Men have the reproductive advantage of not having to bear children and risk loss of life in childbirth. Getting to a position of living outside of a patriarchy, how is this going to change, or have I missed something ?

Not giving birth to children isn't a reproductive advantage, it's a disadvantage reproductively if you want your genes to continue, because you may never get the chance to reproduce.

Nooka
I'd be perfectly happy with 'many' men rather than 'all' men which isn't asking for much in terms of extra typing

I dunno ? I think ?men? is much easier to type and more accurate than ?many men? when you?re talking about men as a class. It also is ?asking for? a lot, in terms of watering down your statement to the point of unhelpful inaccuracy in many cases. For example, in an anti-racism forum, if someone makes the statement ?all white people benefit from racism? ? there is nothing untrue about it. If there wasn?t the structural inequality creating barriers for people of colour, if there wasn?t the racism conscious and unconscious in the minds of people with power upholding those barriers, and if there wasn?t the internalised racism preventing people of colour from attempting to break through those barriers,?.. then all white people would have to compete more for the better jobs, all white people would have less confidence of being seen as a responsible citizen by the police when reporting crimes or being questioned, or a reliable witness in a court of law, etc, etc, etc - up to and including being served first in a queue or being able to catch a cab. It is vital that these ?all? arguments are recognised and discussed and not weakened by replacing it with ?many?. The only reason why you do that, is if you don?t want to offend the white people in the forum, or someone pipes up and says ?well by DH or DW or BF is white??.etc?yawn.

Also I guess professionally I have become very accustomed to qualifying statements so I probably react particularly strongly against absolutes.
Are you aware that this statement comes across as a bit toffee-nosed? You feel as though you have been through the drill and learned the ?correct? way to argue and present a point, and the plebs should just get on board with you?

To me when people start throwing around 'this is how the world is' type statements it a) just gets my back up and b) makes me think that the person is probably talking twaddle.
Yes you have been trained to ?not hear? and ?dismiss? a perfectly good argument because it contains mistakes that you have been trained to look out for. In cases where that person is not talking twaddle and you are perhaps being pedantic, maybe you are actually missing something?

That can really distract from what may otherwise be a really good and interesting argument.
I'm not distracted though...I think it is in the interest of the listening party to try to understand what is actually meant by the underlying argument, rather than get hung up on distractions that they are paid to get hung up on at work. I am able to get it when people talk about patterns in what appears an absolute way, (otherwise all the distractions would make it tedious to hear - with all the ?don?t shoot me down? qualifiers)..
I suppose I?ve come down a bit heavy on you here because pedantry is one of the annoying tactics of the misogygeek MRAs ? even picking on bloody spelling.
I?m not having a go at you personally though, but I think it can come across as righteous or 'lording it'.... iyswim

FoodUnit It's widely accepted that making sweeping generalisations about a minority group perpetuates the oppression of that group, as it homogenises the members of the group and strips them of their specificity and humanity.

But if I understand your position correctly, in your view it's OK to make sweeping statements about a group perceived to be dominant, in the interests of furthering a debate or discussion, as the potentially oppressive quality of generalisation is mitigated by the dominant position of that group?

In other words the inherent power differentials allow for generalisations about white people or men, as a disruptive challenge to the seamless ideologies of dominance, but not about black people or women as they are already the target of oppressive stereotyping?

OTheHugeMjanatee
I broadly agree with what you have said, but perhaps not the the exact phrasing.

I totally hold to the idea that the 'inherent power differentials' within groups is central to one group oppressing the other group. Without that power differential there cannot be oppression. I would also say that 'making sweeping generalisations about [an oppressed] group perpetuates the oppression of that group' whilst also perpetuating the dominance of the oppressive group. (I'm being a stickler about the word minority because you don't have to be in the minority to be oppressed - take women as a group for example ). So making sweeping statements about the oppressed group serves to widen the power differential between the two, whereas making generalisations about the oppressing group cannot.
In fact generalisations, by helping to name and piece together the underlying structures that formalise one groups dominance of the other, can actually help to narrow that power differential and move towards equality.

See, I can see how you can argue the case for that point of view. I can also see how saying 'Ohoo, look, you generalised about [dominant group, you're just like them' is a truly annoying way to derail a debate, and can/should be called out as such. But to me the idea that generalisations [dominator] > [dominated] = invariably bad while generalisations [dominated] > [dominator] don't fall under the same rubric still seems problematic.

I realise this is way off-topic and quite an abstruse point, so I hope you don't think I'm being a derailing arse. But to me it seems that if we accept the idea I outlined above then we run the risk of reifying exactly the structure of power differentials that we're trying to challenge: we're describing the [dominator] group in a way that ascribes to it a monolithic identity and ignores fissures or fault-lines within the group that could, themselves, be avenues for positive action.

To take a crude example, masculinity can operate quite differently among working-class or ethnic minority men in comparison to white upper or middle-class men, and the specifities of how that impacts on women also varies accordingly. Lumping all these masculinities together under 'patriarchy' (while having some rhetorical value) could end up missing specific feminist responses to varying masculinities, that have evolved in different contexts.

I think you can have a mulitplicity of approaches.
When you are at the 'jamming out ideas' stage, finding your feet, etc, you can be a bit sloppy and i think temporary reification is both allowable and actually desireable. For example, in solving a puzzle it is worth dismantling it to see whether there are commonalities to the component parts, generalities as it were. Then you can kind of order them and get a feel for the whole, then you can put them all together to solve the puzzle.

I understand that some point, unless you want a violent revolution, you will need to negotiate with the dominant group or oppressor. Of course at this stage, because they have all the bargaining power and choices, it is important to avoid anything that alienates them, so you have to bend over backwards to make sure every statement is qualified and no flicker of aggression is spied on your brow when they display the nonchalant, narcissistic, self-important sense of entitlement that is a mark of their privilege, (bouyed up by the oppression of others they are so blissfully ignorant about).

Also to this: To take a crude example, masculinity can operate quite differently among working-class or ethnic minority men in comparison to white upper or middle-class men, and the specifities of how that impacts on women also varies accordingly. Lumping all these masculinities together under 'patriarchy' (while having some rhetorical value) could end up missing specific feminist responses to varying masculinities, that have evolved in different contexts. I think there is a greater danger, by not viewing 'patriarchy' as a whole, of perpetuating the 'divide and rule' of the oppressed group - in other words it is a barrier to solidarity. Women, for example, are much geared into action when reality of their inferior status across boundaries of class, nation, ethnicity, religion, etc is remembered. And as the 'patriarchal bones' are always there, behind the behaviours of male dominance in whichever context, I don't think there is a problem of describing these bones, whilst also naming the variations in the flesh, which allow for specific feminist approaches.

FoodUnit, would you rather I just said 'stop talking such crap' when I see totally unsubstantiated statements of 'all women this, all men that'? I don't think these are good arguments just not very well expressed. I think they are ill informed rants and I find them very annoying. I'm fairly sure I would think that regardless of having been trained to look for evidence, but I was trying to be generous really. I probably was a bit toffee nosed, but I was just trying to explain why for me statements of opinion as fact are a particular red flag (and would be just as much in a debate about parenting, or anything else really). I just don't think that such statements should stand unchallenged. I don't think they would elsewhere on MN and I don't think that feminism should have some sort of special status. If anything feminism needs especially good arguments, and no I don't think it's the job of the listener to try and find the meaning behind the rhetoric.
Anyway it wasn't your posts I had an issue with in any case. I think you make interesting points, and you are right I might personally find sweeping generalizations incredibly annoying, but unless they are made by those in power about those without, and affect the treatment of the latter by the former then they don't really have any huge influence I suppose. On the other hand I don't think that one woman challenging another should be taboo either, just because we both possess a womb.

I've kind of skimmed through a bit here. I think there IS benefit in being as specific as possible with points both to avoid confusion and to prevent those who disagree accusing you of you being too generalised and therefore dismissing your arguments out of hand.

I think there is a huge danger in saying men are like this and women are like that, which follows a biological argument. Such arguments are popular amongst misogynists because they depict traits, characteristics, behaviours, attitudes, interactions, etc. as something innate, immutable and uncontrollable. In other words, men are at the top of the tree, just learn to live with it and stop whining.

Cordelia Fine is often name-checked here as someone who has blown huge holes in all those biological determinist theories, but it's worth mentioning this again I think. I don't believe male and female humans are motivated solely or even primarily by the urge to reproduce. If anything, I wonder if sex is pleasurable as the carrot to get people to procreate! That would explain why many Lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, straight couples, transgendered people, etc. still form happy relationships with other people, still enjoy sex but do not choose to reproduce.

Really though, I believe the mechanisms of power, privilege, control and oppression aren't due to biological sexual differences (any more than those relating to ethnicity, class or sexual orientation are down to nature.) It's all due to social conditioning. SO, coming back to the earlier point of the discussion, it's surely more accurate and less debatable to say, "men tend to be socially conditioned to be X while women tend to be socially conditioned to do Y." That allows the understanding that there are people who buck the trend whether through having an atypical upbringing or through individual choice. It also recognises that gender stereotypes are foisted upon us, are present from birth, are all around us, just part of the furniture, which makes them more difficult to pinpoint and tackle (as they are seen as "normal.")

It also frames the concept of patriarchy and the institutions that promote and sustain systems granting some more power and privilege than others in such a way that it can be argued as damaging for ALL, not just for those lower on the totem pole.

Just a few musings while sorting through the holiday decorations! :)

I think it is essential to be able to speak of 'men as a class' or 'women as a class' in order to discuss feminism. It is also important to be able to zoom from the political into the personal and back again, in order to discuss the overarching patterns, personal experiences and underlying principles that place us as women, where we are within the status quo - as it is for any group trying to establish the truth that is hidden/suppressed from mainstream discourse.
The kind of slack I think needs cutting, is not 'because both possess a womb' , but because both (two women or two or more of any other shared common oppression) are trying to extracate the tangled roots of their history and politics from the voracious and dominant group, in order to get a chance to thrive. It involves being able to hold ideas lightly in the mind, to absorb the truth from them, rather than off-hand getting into (what often ends up as petty pedantry) exacting criticisms, in a 'superior' or aggresive way, which is a suppressive method the dominant group uses to prevent newly forming ideas from becoming established.
There's nothing preferable about 'don't talk shit'. That's still you trying to marshal others into the familiar trenches of discourse you find less irritating - but just being more aggressive about it.