This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
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?
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.
"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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link