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.
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.))
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link