Rodafowa wrote:
Sexual attraction isn't the same as sexual objectification, man.
Oh indeed - I know that. But it seems that the two do sometimes get conflated by people arguing against the sexualisation of everything.
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The feminist argument isn't that nobody should try and look nice. It's certainly not that sex is automatically demeaning to women. It's that far too often the media potrays women as things that exist solely for the pleasure of the male observer, and that that's a bad message to be sending out to society as a whole.
I think that's part of it, yes, but I do often come across articles which seem to work from the assumption that anything involving women and sex in the media is
automatically portraying women as soulless objects there only for the edification of men. And this simply isn't true, and is a very patronising attitude to take to the women concerned. Yes, there's a problem with the way that absolutely
everything is being sold with sex now (it being bloody tedious, for one), and there's certainly a problem with playboy thongs being sold to pre-pubescent girls, but the whole lot seems to get wrapped up into one big ball of Victorian prudishness, and the outrage at the things that are genuinely problematic spills over into everything else that to a sexually-liberal mind are entirely healthy (porn, for instance, Ann Summers, lap-dancing lessons etc etc. I've seen columns decrying women taking pole-dancing lessons as degrading themselves, as if somehow by virtue of being a feminist you get to tell other women what they can and can't choose to do in their own bedrooms).
Hell, even
this discussion is all over the place!
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It's easy to say that the men who leer at fils or catcall at Mimi are just individual misogynist fuckwits who'd obviously be that way even if the media wasn't subtly telling them that it's OK. That sounds worrying close to "I'm alright Jack, bugger everybody else" to me.
That's not *quite* what I was getting at, though. I do think that the chaps who do that *are* individual mysoginistic fuckwits, but I'm saying that there are broader societal effects that have caused or contributed to it being seen as an ok thing to do (by the shouty chap rather than by society as a whole - any time you see a bloke shout at a woman like that you'll see a number of men staring at him with contempt. Me included). I don't think that the blame for that can be laid wholly or even mainly at the door of the portrayal of women in the media. This sort of behaviour isn't new at all - it was around 200 years ago as well. Ill-educated, insensitive men have always acted like clods. The problem with this is *bigger* than FHM and Nuts, is my point.
There are plenty of nice chaps on here who may enjoy the pictures of the nuddy ladies. It doesn't make them go out and yell "PHWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAR" at innocent women minding their own business. So what does make men do that? I think it's a centuries old, hell, milennia old problem with the way society has developed, with men nominally at the top and women as the servile homekeepers and baby makers. To lay the blame for this at the door of the media is to miss the deeper problems of the ingrained sexism of society.
As with 99% of things, education is the key.
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This is a really, really easy subject to get defensive over - after all, saying that something you enjoy/consume/aren't actively offended by is sexist is by implication calling YOU sexist too, and since you know you're not then OBVIOUSLY there's no problem with whatever the actual subject of the comment was, and the complainer is clearly a joyless nitpicking PC drone out to spoil everyone's fun.
P'raps, but I think problems caused by certain elements can be overstated. For instance, I'd lay far more blame for women's body image problems at the door of hateful rags like Heat than I would at men's unrealistic expectations fuelled by watching pron.
I'm not really defensive about this, as I'm quite happy that I'm not sexist. But I am concerned about the possibly over-puritanical direction we could head in if this "all sexy stuff is bad" nonsense gets too far. We're already seeing unfortunate self-censorship in the arts coming in due to this "extreme porn" law, for instance. It also drowns out the quite sensible discussions about the various pernicious effects of the media.
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(This is a general observation about a non-specific "you", by the by. I don't know you personally, anything like well enough to make any sort of judgement as to what's going on in your head. But I've seen this reaction so many times in so many places, I've certainly justified shit to myself in the same way and I thought it was worth mentioning in passing).
Oh heavens, even if it were, chap, I'm not the sort to take offense. I know who I am, and I'm comfortable with my lovely inclusive lefty right-on liberal-itude.