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Notes -
Sexual Objectification
There is something that bothers me about watching progressive/feminist content on youtube, especially regarding the topic of objectification, and its particularly emphasized in this video, as follows:
To rehash for someone not familiar, objectification is defined as: the act of treating a person as an object, a commodity, or a tool, rather than as a whole human being with their own agency, feelings, and rights. The most common form, (sexual) occurs when a person is reduced to a mere object of sexual desire. It often involves judging someone solely based on their physical attributes or breaking their body into separate, "consumable" parts (e.g., focusing only on legs or a torso).
The main issue here is that this idea, at least on the surface is that it seems to be fundamentally in conflict with the the sexual revolution and sex positivity of many previous & current progressive movements. Pornography, prostitution, and strip clubs all fit the objectification bill quite neatly, and the data seems to support the authors argument that "sexual objectification" leads to or plays some role in many of these harms:
I struggle to see how these individuals may square this perspective that sex work is valid, despite fitting the bill of objectification. Perhaps there is something I'm missing?
Is this not just an instance of Sailer’s Law of Female Journalism?
In this case, by problematizing the appreciation of the women currently considered hotter than her as "objectification".
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obligatory PhD comics.
At the risk of sounding like a hippie commie, objectification is the default mode to relate to trade partners. The relationship of an Amazon shareholder and a worker in a fulfillment center or software programmer is one of 100% objectification. The shareholder does not know or care if the worker is putting in the hours to pay for college for his kid or to finance a substance habit. The only thing he cares about is that the fulfillment of the orders happens in a cost-effective way. Humans are only employed because robots and LLMs are not cost-effective ways to replace them (yet).
Nor do I think that this is bad, or would be different in some commie utopia. The ideal would be that humans use each other as tools in ways which incidentally also improves the situation of the used person. But this is merely a question of trade balance. I do not want my coffee to be produced by someone whom I can appreciate as a person with agency and feelings, perhaps deciding that today I will buy coffee beans from that farmer because I sympathize with his backstory or whatever. I only care about the general stuff in aggregate, that he is not enslaved and not overly exploited. Otherwise, my caring takes the form of pieces of paper with pictures of presidents on it, and I do not expect him to care about my specific situation, why I feel the need to caffeinate etc. As long as I care about his well-being in the abstract that I don't want him exploited, and he cares about mine enough that he does not want me to drink coffee with a lot of mercury in it, objectifying the other as a source of labor or funds seems perfectly fine.
Nor do I think that the objectification in sex work is one sided. If the guy sees the sex worker as a collection of tits and holes, it seems likewise reasonable to assume that the sex worker will see the john as a wallet with a cock attached to it.
When I walk through the city, I tend to model other people as bounding boxes for collision avoidance. Does this make me more or less evil than a guy who instead models the people around him as a collection of sex organs?
I do not have a bigger point to make (I am not into super-transactional sex, personally), but I find it dishonest to pretend that objectification is bad when it is the default way we relate to other people in any polity larger than Dunbar's number. "The cashier scanned my food" is as much as an objectification as "the big-chested blonde walked by my table".
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Yes, Gen Z video essay women and Boomer hippie free sex women disagree about a decent number of things. I'm unfamiliar with that specific Youtuber, the clip you linked to makes it sound like she's mildly disapproving of the female social media influencers who wield their sexuality to perform both trad wife and Only Fans.
Edit: looking at her Youtube thumbnails, she probably has mixed feelings about her own desire to generate more clicks by wearing extremely low cut blouses, but then in the actual video she's hiding behind a large microphone. She wants to be a serious writer and book reviewer who isn't just liked for her looks, but also to get some attention based of of her looks, because it's a savage competitive market out there. This isn't fair, for sure, but performance and storytelling in general aren't, especially among young women.
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If you don't bite the bullet and become sex-negative (many do) you can make the same argument left-wingers make for decriminalizing drugs: sex work being work doesn't make it unpleasant (plenty of work is), it just means it should be brought out of the shadows to better protect those very vulnerable women and given the protections of any hazardous job since those women are gonna do it anyway (apply the left wing skepticism, arguably selective, of prohibition here)
Millionaire actresses don't have to strip every four minutes on Euphoria unless
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Imagine you're at an evening social event. It's comprised of men and women around your age. GigaChad is there as well. At some point, one of the women starts complaining about objectification and the male gaze. In the midst of her spiel, GigaChad (who was talking to another woman) turns to her and says with a smirk, "you don't need to worry, no one is objectifying you."
Do you think the woman would be pleased or upset by this comment? What does your answer tell you about the underlying true nature of complaints about objectification?
Is "people will happily debase themselves for someone they have the hots for" a compelling argument that debasement is actually good?
On the flip side, the stereotypical 45 year old overweight Karen wife implicitly offers the deal that if you shower her with gifts and expensive dates she will not nag you quite as much for a week and you might even get to have sex. The MRA-adjacent sphere is quick to point out that it is unfair to men that society basically approves of this arrangement where they have to dump their paycheck in return for basic human decency/being treated like they have any worth at all. Yet, male simps will happily dump their paycheck for a mention by a titty streamer, a smidgen of attention from a hot classmate, or a 60-second handshake with a J-pop idol. Does their existence invalidate the MRA complaint?
(Also, your fantasy scenario is implausible mostly because the GigaChad as imagined by male incels and female 50 Shades readers, who is so hot that he can make stranger women drop their panties with a wink and drop creepy porno pickup lines and be universally liked for it, does not actually exist, any more than the mythical GigaStacy who can be like "you will buy me that diamond necklace, right" to a random man does. In both cases the outside onlooker confuses instances of dominance over a self-selected followership for a universal power.)
Clavicular might not be quite capable of doing this but Roy's standard is somewhat lower. For example, Clavicular was talking with some girl that wanted to be exclusive with him and he went 'lol no, I'm gonna fuck other women' and she instantly folds:
https://x.com/permabulla/status/2045527650098171927
That seems pretty analogous to what roy was saying?
Gigachads and gigastacies might be very rare but are not wholly imaginary.
If the standard is just "one guy somewhere has said something that is generally considered bad to a woman and she was okay with it", then surely the instances of whipped husbands and wallet-cattle men should count too (and say the same thing about the "underlying true nature of complaints about" men being used as paypigs).
In fact, if that's the standard, a lot more things meet it. For example, the existence of 80 hour workweek hot-desking, hot-bedding startup drones in SF exposes the underlying true nature of complaints about workplace exploitation and work/life balance: you don't actually want reasonable working conditions, you are just waiting for a hot GigaChad industry like SV startups to give you the tingles!
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There are sex negative feminists who largely agree with you here. They tend to be anti-porn and anti-sex work.
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I suspect this stems from a pre-existing contradiction in certain predatory strains of male sexuality/sexual behavior (note, emphatically not all all male sexuality! Normal gents who want to honorably date a nice smart girl, enjoy common interests and glance appreciatively at her ass from time to time, not describing you).
The contradiction: Among certain predators, on the one hand, you get the objectifying impulse that says "this girl only exists in relation to my sexual desire, the only important parts of her are the physical parts that make me hard or that I envision fucking."
On the other hand, you get the aggression and post-coital disgust impulse that underlies the whole body-count discourse: My erection is so meaningful that being able to fuck this collection of holes and bulges is the most important thing in the world. But once I cum, these parts are disgusting, destroyed, degraded, and the body/mind attached to them should be cast out of my sight.
In its most extreme cases, this is the standard serial-killer's repeated torture, rape then kill/discard scenario. For prostitution and porn, it comes out in aggressive disgust/rejection impulses to prostitutes and female performers. Today, that's the folks who thought Riley Reid shouldn't be able to get married to a cool, successful athlete because all the penis contact made her gross. Historically, it was the consensus that once a woman had been traumatized or desperate enough to have sex with men for money, or let a man take pictures of her body for cash, she (but NOT he) should be expelled from normal society and untouchable by anyone but criminals, with no valid life course but exile, increasing degradation, then suicide.
So some feminists respond by saying, OK, objectification is bad, but even worse is the destructive disgust impulse after. So emphasize that women retain human value and agency even after being fucked over, establish that they are reasoning people who responded to the circumstances they were in, and that could include conditional compliance with predators wanting to reduce them to a collection of body parts.
And some feminists respond to the upstream objectification impulse by saying, nope, we need a system where women aren't reduced to a collection of body parts, period.
It's basically the Danegeld or Poland 1939 question: compromise with clear terms, or open resistance? But those are two different strategic approaches to a common problem, not really internally contradictory.
I feel like your depiction of historical prostitution is a little exaggerated. Obviously there's a whole category of high ranking courtesans who could do pretty well even without being actual wives of their clients. But even regular prostitutes were sometimes able to retire into respectability.
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Perhaps my male brain is too compromised to process this, but I've never really understood why sexualising someone is an act of "objectification".
The Cambridge dictionary defines objectification as: "treating people like tools or toys, as if they had no feelings, opinions, or rights of their own"
To sexualise someone means to explicitly render someone as the target of sexual desire - putting an actress in a short skirt allows us to see more skin, which allows us to muse about what she would like naked, which we imagine we would be privy to in a fantasy scenario where we have sex with said actress. It has very little to do with denying someone's opinions or rights, but rather honing in on one specific part of their human existence, i.e. their potential as a sexual mate. Am I objectifying a waiter when I only consider him as someone who brings my drinks and my check when Im a customer at a café? Would I be morally wrong to be weirded out if said waiter suddenly started talking about his personal issues and opinions and I told him I really only want him to serve me my order and nothing else? According to the Cambridge dictionary, I would be "objectifying" him in that instance, which sounds blatantly absurd.
But most importantly - being the receiver of sexual desire is a foundationally humanising experience! People want to have sex with other people, not with objects - that's why most sex toys are shaped to resemble human genitalia or body parts. That's why high-end sex dolls are painstakingly manufactured to appear as human as possible. To want to have sex with someone is one of the bedrock human drives that will forever separate us from machines - and thus likewise, being the receiver of sexual desire equally represents a bedrock of the human condition, limited nigh-exclusively to humans (a fringe amount of people are sexual deviants who want to fuck toasters or animals, but they're irrelevant to the larger topic).
The issue seems to emerge from the fact that alot of people, notably feminist academics, endow words with moral weight they simply do not possess - since they consider most forms of sexual attention as bad, it MUST be described by a strictly pejorative term that also conveniently opens up the act to monumentally larger implications - suddendly, lusting after someone also must imply you want to treat them "like they have no rights of their own", i.e. perceive them as essentially unworthy of human dignity. This is such a massive jump from wanting to fuck someone that it feels essentially alien to how anyone actually experiences sexual desire. When I looked at Jennifer Lawrence's leaked nudes as a teen, that last thing I was thinking of was restricting her rights and opinions - I was thinking about how amazing it would feel to have sex with her and literally nothing else.
Of course, there's an obvious subtle truth hiding behind all this: the profile of the person doing the sexualisation is exponentially more significant than the sexualisation itself in evaluating if its "objectifying" or not. As a man, being told by an attractive woman that she only wants me for sex and nothing else is a mostly extremely rewarding experience that has given me lasting boosts in self-esteem. Similarly, a fat ugly girl hitting on me and drunkenly attempting to create a hookup situation with me left me feeling disgusted.
Objectification as a term only really makes sense if it leads you to dismiss the person's agency in a context where said agency is relevant - i.e., interrupting a woman speaking to tell her to take her top off, which would imply you aren't interested in her humanity beyond her sexual potential.
A glance at the roots and political development behind the term should immediately make it obvious that we are dealing with an ideological concept, not a neutral descriptor:
How the FUCK does treating someone depending on their human body render the person an "object"? Humans ARE bodies, first and foremost. HOW you treat the body is what matters.
So virtually any transactional relationship is an act of objectification - seems somewhat insane to simultaneously insist that the term describes an objectively negative quality when it also applies to me working a job or asking my roommate to get groceries for me. Either objectification is wholesale bad, in which case it's definition needs to be reworked from the ground up, or objectification describes an inevitable social process with no inherent moral weight, in which case feminists have to stop using it as a buzzword for negative behaviour.
You're overthinking it.
Women want (hot) men to think they are hot. Unfortunately:
Women become less hot with age.
There's always a hotter woman.
Women are aware of these facts, and these cause insecurity. Men who go to the movies to ogle Sydney Sweeney's huge rack trigger both older women and women who suspect Sweeney is hotter than them because it directly competes with them for sexual attention from those men (some of whom are hot). In contrast, I've never heard of a woman in a relationship with a man she finds attractive complaining about her man "objectifying" her. It really is that simple.
You don't even have to go that far. The vlogger linked in the OP is rather flat chested, and still sometimes wears very deep cut blouses anyway, clearly visible in her thumbnails. She does not enjoy watching more voluptuous women looking sexy. Men also complain about media that flaunts being for someone with opposing preferences when they didn't think it would be going in. She seems to feel that way about Euphoria.
You and I may have different standards for "very deep cut".
I think this is basically what I said.
I'm not sure what you mean by this (I don't know anything about Euphoria).
I was basically agreeing, but for that clip you don't even have to go into aging at all.
I don't know anything about Euphoria either, but it sounds like she thought she would like it, thought it would be female gaze compatible, but then it wasn't. Like, I tried watching Outlander, enjoyed the love interest, enjoyed the costumes, but did not enjoy the rape and torture. So I stopped watching, but if I were a media vlogger, I would have stopped watching and also complained about the rape and torture on the way out.
Edit: looking at the trailer, it does look like the initial pitch to viewers is a lesbian romance between Zendaya and a flat chested blond girl, and them doing drugs together. It does look kind of like it might be a gender reversed version of what they were ineptly doing with Star Wars. "But what if we could reel in more young men with BOOBS though?"
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A lot of 'objectification' discourse is just a political weapon -- as you say, ideologues uncomfortable with sexual desire who turn to any argument against it -- or the Dworkin-style criticism of industries that doesn't meaningfully discuss or respond to specific acts or creations.
Unfortunately, the Dworkin/MacKinnon-style one is what's present here, and in a lot of youtube content dating back to Sarkeesian, so that doesn't help. Because it's supposed to be a criticism of broad structures rather than specific acts, it's largely not interested in specific acts... and coincidentally is largely unfalsifiable, up to and including handwaves when confronted with increasingly broad spectrums of pornography that either don't fit its model definition (femdom, gay porn) or do fit its model definition but don't actually objectify (women's erotica, woman-to-consumer sales, the growth of parasocial porn). The waiter counterexample just gets a 'mu' here: it's just not a relevant question to their framework.
But there is a meaningful steelman (and not some recent or made-up one) that's worth keeping in mind if you every write smut or romance (or even 'normal' stories that feature romance).
There is a difference between treating people like tools or toys, and sexualizing them or making them targets of sexual desire. It's the line between a character that's sexy, and a fleshlight with a smil. You can treat a tool well, or a person poorly, just as being a target of desire can be humanizing or not depending on framework, norms, and reciprocity of interest.
For an extreme (and het) example, look at het free-use style BDSM.You can play into the same kink by literally stuffing a woman into a hole in a wall and treating her like a sex toy for a parade of men to use, or you can tie her down to a breeding stand and then make a game out of getting an orgasm (or too many orgasms) out of her or tease her so long that she's begging for more stimulation. Hell, a lot of straight guys find the latter option hotter (or the former a little gay). There's no difference in agency between these two implementations: they can and often do have near-identical framing stories, and it's even easier to make the 'I'm a sex toy' version more clear about its consent. But the former is about the men's pleasure and the women's appearance, while the latter centers the woman's feelings and desire.
In writing, erotica or pornography with more of a story, that can be more varied. A lot of less experienced writers will try to make sex scenes so low-friction that the sub does nothing but sit there, look sexy, and maybe squeeze a little. But there's a lot of mileage in highlighting the sort of pinch points that show up in real sex. Overstimulation and 'forced' orgasms are kinks of their own for a reason. A sub finding a position uncomfortable and wanting to swap, or needing a different tempo or some time to adjust to the big dick in them, or wanting more foreplay before penetration, can be a great pacing tool. Someone using a safe word because they can't physically bend that way is a perfect tool to make clear that they are comfortable with or at least enjoying everything else, or act as a scene break. These inevitably inject questions about who can make what call and how those desires are negotiated, even if the writer ultimately wants to just to treat them as one-liners.
Now, I'll make the separate argument that objectification isn't always bad. The counterargument to objectifying a waiter ultimately ends up asking a lot of emotional labor from someone who, in reality, just wants you to leave a tip and get out of here so the table's clear. In sex, a significant portion of women (... and some men) like smut that objectifies the character they're projecting themselves into, because of that objectification. It gives them a vehicle to see their desires instantiated, without having to replace an existing character's conflicting desires and feelings, or require that projection to vocalize and admit their own desires. That's a particularly big deal for people who've been raised to stigmatize or hide overt expressions of their sexuality: denying the interior experience of 'their' character may be the only way they can really come to grips with it.
The steelman of the feminist argument is that objectification can be dangerous, even for the people who get the most out of it. Some men like the woman-as-sex-toy framework because it does make it easier to think about sex as solely about 'their' own pleasure, up to and including at the expense of what their partners want or what their partners are comfortable doing. Some women who need objectification as a way to bypass their shame do so to their own detriment, either ignoring or refusing to use environments where they could admit to their desires safely, or by internalizing the self-abnegate to destructive ends.
I don't buy that as a common concern, but I don't think it's a non-existent failure mode, either. The academic research is bad, since it's mostly revolving around priming effects with little pre-registered study and even fewer direct replication, and a lot of signal only shows up if you divide 'violent' (mainstream) porn from general porn, which doesn't encourage about direction-of-causation or salami-slicing-reasons. Still, unless it's entirely fraudulent, there's some level of signal, and if so the pro-sex side's larger population-scale data is partly recognizing other variables.
Your own example of leaked nudes is a central version: you weren't restricting her rights or opinions, but you weren't recognizing them as matters to care about either. That's why the objectification theory uses that word, not just to smuggle emotional loading from the Dworkin version: you don't deny the rights or opinions of tissue paper, after all, but you still treat it as an object. I'd guess that she didn't want her nudes to be present everywhere on the internet, and legally she might have had a cause of action against the leakers and redistributors.
((caveat: I don't follow celebrities, so if she's separately a well-known exhibitionist, objection withdrawn.))
You've said alot of interesting things that I largely agree with, so I just want to hone in on one element I take issue with :
I disagree - in this specific scenario, my teenage self fantasising about having sex with a famous actress is not imagining fucking a lifeless ragdoll that just happens to look identical to Jennifer Lawrence. The fantasy obviously involves her being enthusiastic, willing, and desiring me during the encounter, which pretty explicitly means that her "opinions" or "rights" are comfortably sublimated in an affirmative manner into the fantasy itself. Furthermore, if I mention Jennifer Lawrence and not one of the million random porn stars or e-whores you can see naked on the internet, it's because wanting to fuck Jennifer Lawrence is bound to her personality, status, etc. making her more desirable than other women, which means that her physical attributes are only a minor part of the overall attraction.
This is true but it's a detail relative to the specific example I chose - I could just as easily have mentioned Keira Knightley in Pirates of the Caribbean, in which case the non-consent angle vanishes.
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Mostly unrelated but the recent Twitter discourse on CNC orgies has been funny. Especially Aella indicating that it's hard to ensure less attractive women attract sufficient rapists
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"Objectification" is, like "Male Gaze", originally a serious philosophical concept (in this case, from Hegel, who uses the term to refer to making something real, so for instance "shelter" is objectified into "houses") which was picked up by American scholar-activists in "Studies" fields who saw it and thought hey that's a cool term, it sounds bad, let's redefine it as Bad Thing my outgroup does. Funnily enough the Hegel term is closer to how men and women actually interact, and you could easily make a full feminist theory out of it, but that's hard and academics are lazy.
So what happens if the catcaller is black?
We know what happens
It disappeared faster than Kony 2012 once people started criticizing.
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You get mad at some vaguely proximate white guy.
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I largely agree with your analysis, and I think it's worth adding that there is a certain irony here. Ultimately, the feminist concept of "objectification" is based on the idea that male desires are illegitimate or unimportant. From the feminist perspective, men are just supposed to serve women without asking for or expecting anything in return. Without having their own independent and legitimate desires.
In other words, the concept of "objectification" is itself rather objectifying.
In any event, "objectification" is like any other feminist concept in that it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The actual core principles of feminism are (1) more goodies (money, power, status, etc.) for women; and (2) punishment and humiliation for men. Of course, feminists don't like to admit to themselves or others that there's is an ideology of naked selfishness and hate. So they come up with concepts like "objectification" to act as philosophical fig leaves.
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This is a standard case of society having a different set of standards for men and women. Women are liberated beings and can have sex with who they want. Men are dangerous predators until proven otherwise, and must keep their desires in check.
Because women are free, liberated individuals who can choose to use their bodies however they please, sex work is a valid occupation that should not be shamed.
Because men are dangerous and predatory, any man who uses sex workers is the worst kind of person who sees women as merely objects with no agency or value besides the hole between their legs.
Thus, being a sex worker is perfectly valid, although dangerous. Buying the services of a sex worker is one of the worst thing a man can do.
In discussion of Graham Platner today on Breaking Points, Platner is given kudos for claiming he was a bad boyfriend in the past, but that the current accusations against him and nebulous and thin gruel. Points to them for not falling back on Believe All Women (even if because the worst complaint against him is from a Republican who dated him, so it's thought to be motivated), but it occurred to me how unlikely it would ever to for a woman to feel the need to 'fess up to being "a bad girlfriend" and atoning for it, for a political career. It'd be like, "Psh, yea I was a BRAT, and anyway who said I was a bad girlfriend? Probably some douchebag who thought he was owed sex."
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Even if we take this figure seriously, what fraction of retail workers experience economic violence on the job at some point? "Sexual violence" is defined broadly - if we defined "economic violence" equally broadly then it wouldn't need to be a robbery - a shoplifter pushing past a security guard would qualify.
Honestly, why shouldn't we define "economic violence" that way?
Stealing sexual value is to women like stealing economic value is to men (for control over that is what that sex uses to impress the other), so a regime that treated men and women equally should logically treat both just as seriously.
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That's one hell of an error bar, so the research is garbage.
Repeat after me: progressives are not liberals. I get that it's very confusing, especially if you're in certain bubbles that made much hay claiming they were the same (because in large degree the marriage of convenience between the two was still running at the time). The difference is that liberals actually like sex and aren't turbo-butthurt about its existence, while progressives are existentially threatened by anyone else but them controlling sex and sexual expression (because it is all the value they offer- that's part of why they're so attached to education as an alternate path). Needless to say this is mostly a thing with female progressives; the men might parrot it but they don't truly understand it (the ones that do tend to be traditionalists, which is just progressivism with the opposite gender valence).
The clue is that progressives tend to believe it should be legal to sell sex, but illegal to buy it, which takes the price of sex up to infinity. Any sex (or sexual expression) that occurs must be maximally monetized, or it's offering an alternative to that monopoly.
This is why progressives get extremely angry about older men dating younger women: the
mottecope is "she's being taken advantage of", thebaileytruth is "she's getting more money for the sex than I ever would, which drives the price I can get for my sex down".When women say the existence of something "devalues sex", they're being literal because it actually does.
So it's not the sexual objectification they're objecting to, it's getting around the fee they feel is due. Sexual labor (which for women is "being observed while sexually desirable") without pay. Progressives don't like sex work because it makes that fee legible, which is a threat; its legality is generally a compromise they struck with the liberals in the original anti-traditionalist compact. They do reserve the right to play at sexual labor, though, which is how they justify to themselves having made that deal, and is also why they don't really have much problem with non-straight sex (it's orthogonal to the market).
Which is why it's also important to identify what kind of feminist you're dealing with- some are just happy not to be under traditionalism (and will deploy patriarchy and equality arguments to that end- that's who they originally came from, and still have some truth to them), while others are trying to impose a matriarchy instead (and generally using the descriptive liberal arguments as prescriptive weapons).
Score one for AI. Claude traced it to here, and said it was a range of results across different studies (with different methodologies and populations), not error bars for a single measure. I retraced the source and read the abstract, but I honestly didn't gain anything that the AI didn't hand to me already.
As an aside, I've stopped listening to the news in my car because I can't fact-check them while I'm driving, but it's easy to do on the web.
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Does the author believe that female nudity and violence on screen can serve an artistic purpose? Also, can that purpose not be a feminist one? Because if the answer to those is no, as it probably is, there is scarcely a point in discussing this.
Also, isn't visually expressing sexual desire for the simple sake of showcasing how powerful, seductive and all-encompassing desire can be an artistic purpose in it's own right? We all feel it, we're all extremely affected by it, so shouldn't it naturally take up a prominent space in our artistic expressions even if it doesn't serve to advance a larger narrative or make a political statement?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Xpef-FKYAf4
The opening scene of Godard's Contempt is literally Birgitte Bardot being reduced to her physical attributes, as Belmondo praises and declares his love for each of her individual body parts separately. But this "objectification" is so obviously an act of devotion - after all, how could you truly love a romantic partner without also loving their waist, their hands, their ankles, their genitals?
You could fully cut this scene from the movie, and the narrative would be unchanged. It exists entirely to showcase physical desire of an exceptionally beautiful woman. And it's absolutely wonderful.
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The basic core principles of feminism are (1) more goodies (money, power, status, etc.) for women; (2) punishment and humiliation for men. Of course feminists don't like to acknowledge this to themselves or others, so instead they rely on a smorgasbord of more reasonable sounding principles such as:
(1) Women are the same as men and must be treated equally;
(2) Women are different from men and must be treated differently;
(3) Objectification of people is harmful and must be avoided; and
(4) Women are autonomous adults who should have the freedom to make their own choices in life;
(5) Women have been brainwashed by the "patriarchy" into making poor choices;
and so on.
Obviously these principles are not consistent with each other; feminists just use whatever is most convenient in the moment. If someone points out the contradiction, that person is ignored or silenced with accusations of "misogyny" or whatever.
So yeah, you are not the first person to ask "what if a woman objectifies herself"? But the reality is that feminists do not sincerely care about objectification. If objectification is perceived as beneficial (for example Taylor Swift doing a concert while wearing a slutty outfit and getting paid a million dollars), they are fine with it.
I think it's also worth noting that this idea -- that nudity should serve a purpose -- is far more flexible than it seems on its surface. For example, consider the sexy naked woman who makes an appearance in The Shining. One could certainly argue that her nudity advances the plot, since it helps to demonstrate Jack Torrance's sexual excitement and the seeming attempt to seduce him. On the other hand, one could argue that basically the same thing could have been accomplished without nudity, for example by implying that the woman is naked without actually showing it. Or by putting her in a seductive dress.
It seems to me that you can pretty much always argue it one way or another. And for feminists, it will almost certainly come down to the following: If feminists don't like it, then it doesn't serve any purpose. If feminists do like it, then it does serve a purpose.
I disagree that these principles are contradictory. They all express problems with a certain part of reality. It can be that women are not treated the same (or at least historically weren't) in certain areas where they should be, and yet it remains true that women are different from men and treating the sexes differently is better in other areas. It is also true that women (and men, too, of course) made choices in a restricted space of a certain unnecessarily gendered way of looking at the world, which it is good that we are overcoming or in many ways have already overcome; yet at the same time, both sexes should be seen as autonomous individuals. I don't see a contradiction, just a nuanced take.
And yet by some strange coincidence, these "principles" are applied so as to reach the conclusions which are convenient and advantageous for women.
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Stop saying "women" when you mean "feminists". (Incidentally, advice which most people should think about most of the time.) Feminism isn't a pure grift - individual feminists genuinely want other feminists to get more gibmedats and not just themselves - but the point isn't to uplift women as a whole, it's to subsidise a particular female life script (see Obama's notorious Life of Julia ad, but the critical point is that women who seek to have children in actually-committed relationships with men are SOL) with the goal of changing female behaviour such that a large enough pool of able women pursue meritocratic competition that they can achieve a 50-50 power elite by affirmative action without promoting obvious numpties.
I'll stop when self-proclaimed conservative women in positions of political power don't consistently fall back on feminist rhetoric the moment they feel cornered for their own actions.
As long as our conservative female defence minister here in Austria proudly asserts that mandatory military service should remain an exclusive male burden and that women can't be expected to share this obligation because "they still suffer from systemic injustice in other domains such as a housework or the gender pay gap" (her actual reasoning), I will continue to assume that feminism is mainly a in-group cudgel for women to wield against men and society for virtually any reason that they see fit in helping them get ahead.
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I'm not sure what you mean by the word "grift." To me, if a group of allied people work in informal concert to grab resources, it's still potentially what I would call a "grift."
In any event, I don't see much point in distinguishing between "women" and "feminists." If a traditional stay-at-home non-feminist wife is having a dispute with her husband (for example suppose they are getting divorced as a result of her infidelity and the woman stands to get very little alimony) I'm pretty confident most feminists would NOT say "Well that's what you get for being a stay-at-home-wife and cheating on your husband. You should have been a good feminist, gotten a marketable degree, and stayed in the workforce." Rather, they would strongly support the woman.
The thing is, most women have strong in-group bias. And that's all feminism really is -- partisan support of women, right or wrong.
To be sure, women's interests are not all perfectly aligned. What is good for a upper middle class secular careerist woman in the West is not necessarily what is good for other women in the world. And this tension surely informs the goals of feminists. Especially given that Western feminists are part of a larger coalition with some very non-feminist members.
Nevertheless, "more goodies (money, power, status, etc.) for women" is a reasonable approximation of the core goals of feminism.
I would say an activist movement is a grift if the primary goal is to transfer other people's money to the activists and their immediate social network, but not a grift if the goal is to transfer money to the group the activists claim to be speaking for. The organised BLM movement, for example, turns out to be a grift on this definition - they raised a lot of donations and mostly kept the money. The traditional Black urban political machines are not pure grifts on this model - although they take a lot off the top, they spend more taxpayer money on their constituents than they do on themselves.
Well you are free to define the word "grift" any way you like for purposes of discussion. Regardless, feminism is what it is: An ideology of avarice and hate which pretends to be about equality and basic rights. Grift or not.
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Note that in the original form, the principle was that 'If a gun is shown on stage, it must be fired later in the story.' Live-theatre productions usually do not have as elaborate set decoration as film or television.
But was it portrayed as actually happening within the storyline, or was it a dream or hallucination? (I haven't seen the show.)
The movie/TV equivalent is having a shot that draws attention to the gun. But Chekhov's gun is more suited to very tight productions (visual equivalents of short stories or novellas rather than novels); something like a movie or especially a TV series will have many things which are not directly relevant to plot but go to characterization or setting. For instance a movie has a barfight, the barfight itself may be completely unimportant other than to demonstrate it's the kind of place where barfights occur. And certain genres rely in misdirecting the audience and will deliberately focus on unimportant-to-plot details to do so.
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There's some conflict between 'only mention that which is important' and 'create a realistic world'. Screenplay tends to be heavier on the former, but the underlying principles show up to a lesser extent in written form and even fairly expansive worlds. An RPG sourcebook is expected to be filled with piles of random junk... and it's also random junk that you should be able to use in a scene.
On the flip side, going too extreme towards minimalism or functionalism risks making the puppeteer's strings too obvious. Minor details and background characters that are inexplicable are a good way to make the world seem larger than your main characters.
At least from a google search, it's a daydream that's supposed to parallel the character's growing and destructive popularity as both an onlyfans and right-wing influence. Because subtly is for cowards.
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The checkov’s gun thing is still a part of storytelling. The general idea is to avoid telling people about things in a story that seem important but actually are completely irrelevant to the story. So I can’t tell you that “oh, by the way, Batman has a Time Machine,” then never ever mention it again.
Sure, but the specific phrasing of "if it's shown on screen, it must be used" is false for TV and movies. We don't expect that if a movie set has a bed in the background, the character will be shown sleeping at some point. Whereas in theater it probably is the case that if a bed is part of the set, it'll be used. The two media just have very different expectations for what is a normal level of background detail on the set versus a deliberate inclusion.
I mean if you insist on the very narrow definition of chechov’s gun. On the other hand there are lots of TV shows or movies that would be ruined by forms of the gun. One huge one is the abilities of characters and technology in science fiction and fantasy. Once I establish that Spock can do the mind meld and read a guy’s mind, the audience tends to question why that isn’t happening when this would be the obvious solution to the need to find out something that the characters need to know and the bad guy does know.
I think the rule is better stated as “don’t bring up a potential solution to the problem and then ignore it.” I tend to like Sanderson framing of the issue which is that ideally, your characters should try everything that the audience would think would work and have it fail. The gun would ignore that rule, because you have characters fighting and the gun is right there so the audience is thinking “why not just shoot the guy with the gun that’s sitting right there”
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Female sexuality is NOT suppose to make logical sense. So it’s the female ID but blown up at macro societal movement scale. The early Game pioneers like that odd Magic guy but also the NYT writer guy who wrote the book The Game had a word for it: Shit Test. So I googled that word and found a definition for it that I think works:
“What Are “Shit Tests,” Really? The term “shit test” isn’t about malicious manipulation. It’s a shorthand for the subtle challenges, disagreements, or uncomfortable situations a woman might introduce into a conversation or interaction. These aren’t always obvious, and they’re rarely intended as deliberate attacks. Instead, they’re often subconscious filters, designed to quickly assess your emotional stability, confidence, integrity, and self-respect , qualities that suggest you’d be a reliable and supportive long-term partner.“
I guess I should cite but no reason to click thru: https://medium.com/@therealdating/decoding-shit-tests-in-dating-a-guide-to-confidence-and-connection-bf3a41ee45c5
So the whole you can’t objectify thing/me is sort of just a giant shit test at a societal level. My gut says any female spouting don’t objective women or me is actually just shit testing. And providing you are the right guy really wants you to have uncontrollable sexual desire for her.
One girl who I sort of loved I remember one day I was walking her home I think after dinner. I think some form of can I come I asked a few times and she said No. 15 minutes after I left I get a text why didn’t you come up. Guess I played it wrong and misread the situation.
Female sexuality should not be looked at thru a rationalist brain. It has its own games it plays.
For her. As a total package, personality and mind as well as body. Not "that's an amazing giant set of honkers right there, but if an even better, bigger, set of honkers came along I'd go for them (too bad the honkers, which are the only things I'm interested in, have to come attached to some stupid broad but oh well)".
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"Objectification" is a broad term. Certain acts that we could label as "objectification" are benign or even desired, others less so. For example, a woman's body being appreciated by a desirable man, most commonly a partner, is an example of the former - note that this is almost always in a context of the two people knowing each other; so the objectification isn't really absolute. In the moment, the focus could be on the woman's body and sexual desirability; but overall this situation is only desired by the woman because it is in the context of being seen as an individual, not just a body. On the contrary, a set of female boobs plastered on a product, a gratuitous scene in a movie, or porn, are different in that they lack the underlying layer of intimacy of knowing a woman as a person, and appreciating her for more than just her body.
I think this would still be selling short female desire for objectification though it’s clearly on a spectrum. Some of female desire for objectification being in a relationship may even be limited by social and religion conventions and perhaps more universal. Aella is an example and since she’s basically in the canon of rationalists communities can be used as an example. She clearly expresses rape fantasies. I think rape fantasies are an example of female sexuality of a desire to be exposed to uncontrollable male lusts and objectification. In pop culture 50 Shades of Grey would be the leading brand.
On political don’t objectify movements I think the conventional view is it’s a bunch of fat tatted up liberals that men don’t desire. Who desperately desire to be objectified but created this form of feminisms that it’s bad since they can’t get it. The giant societal wide shit test by females I am proposing is probably a secondary mechanism.
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Why not? It's just the mirror image of stuff men do that women haven't correctly communicated when to and not to do, like that whole "take them seriously but not literally, also ignore half the things she says because that's how the emotional spam filter works [and the 'attractive self-respect' thing comes from the 'doesn't respond to every emotional outburst about X']" thing.
It's not a direct counterpart, but men and women are different and start from initial conditions (inherent scarcity, etc.), so it's going to be expressed differently. Men (especially straight ones- it gets complicated when they're not) don't really have the circuitry to appreciate why you'd want a Cluster B werewolf billionaire, so it's difficult to know when to act like one (re: PUA, which as I understand it sums up to 'treat them like they're in a porno'; women will do the same thing to men sometimes, but less often because it's [socially] costlier for women to do that).
I don't know what pornography you're watching, but as I understand it, it's closer to "women sense desperation, here's how you can signal your interest in sexual congress while simultaneously implying she's not a big deal to you".
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The standard feminist answer is that women objectifying themselves is empowering, but men objectifying women is degrading to the women. Of course, there are plenty of issues you can raise with this, but the standard feminist way of dealing with it is not to think about it too hard and to shame others who do - which, to be fair, is the standard way of dealing with most/all ideologies' thorny points.
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