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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?
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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