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Oh, I'm not saying the girls weren't foolish to do that. But the people benefiting from that were the men running the show and the TV network, not the girls themselves. And they got themselves the reputation among the men watching them as nothing more than wank fodder. Now maybe "My angel is a centerfold" is a true representation of a man's view of such women, that he would be delighted to date her and not think less of her and would still treat her with respect as wife material instead of "woo-hoo, I get to bang the thot".
And maybe not.
So like. Suppose, hypothetically, that it has come to pass sometime in history that a teen girl saw on a screen an attractive male professional entertainer who is a stranger to her and who in some part earns his living by being good at titillating the opposite sex. (Leaving aside the central cases of Johnny Depp making dreamy eyes or Elvis doing a really good hip gyration, suppose it’s just some softcore fanservice bit with a buff dude in shower in a TV show) Suppose watching the bit, she experienced some not unpleasant mammalian reaction not entirely unadjacent to the act of mating, that contributed to the viewing experience, and she shudder liked that.
Now would you equally be of the opinion that she ought be scolded for cheapening the well rounded human personhood of the actor in particular and the male sex in general (what if he was your brother!), and if she’s such a gross creature that she gets this morally bankrupt little thrill as a reaction without really choosing to, it’d be at least basic manners to carefully pretend she doesn’t? Maybe an exception can be made for when somebody personally familiar to her like Timmy from Accounting is courting her?
Or is it more of a quod licet Jovi non licet bovi thing?
Yes. If we got a show where hunky young men in as little clothing as the censor will allow bounced up and down so we could gawk at their crotches and see their junk jiggling, then yeah I'd scold her for treating men as pieces of meat.
But female sexuality is more along the lines of the Asian dramas created to appeal to the female fans so they cast pretty young guys and have them act the damsel in distress role. No jiggling junk, but it's a must that you look pretty while coughing up blood 😁
Even assuming it is "different", the idea that you can only objectify people if you can see their junk is an idea I reject. Traditional "sexy poses" for men include things like action poses, strength and power poses, work poses, rebellious or defiant poses, etc. And if those men are all the way naked, then you can't see that they can afford that Hugo Boss suit, or what kind of work they do, or whether they're in some kind of uniform, or what kind of social status they have, or whether their sleeves are rolled up as a signal that they are about to get their hands dirty. Men are often sexy because of what they can bring in the way of protection, social status or resources. The way men are objectified reflect that, and just because they are based on what men can do or have or can get or earn doesn't mean they aren't objectifying. Being objectified as a tool as opposed to an ornament is still objectification.
I also very much disagree with the idea that female sexuality is anywhere near as PG as your portrayal. There's many examples of women cheering over and consuming scenes with men in various stages of undress, e.g. those in Twilight, which featured widely popular fanservice scenes of a shirtless underage Taylor Lautner who had to undergo short-term dehydration and consume 5,000 calories per day to maintain his muscle tone; he eventually had to negotiate for fewer shirtless scenes. Or, you know, the very many times Ellen featured shirtless male dancers to titillate her female audience, for example here and here and here - video 1 is a full-scale performance featuring male "entertainers", video 2 was a challenge for male Bachelorette contestants who had to dance sexy for the women in the audience for tips (said tips were stuffed into the pants of the men), video 3 is a strip dance Ellen set up for a specific woman in front of a live audience. Let's also not forget the constant male nudity on display in majority female-viewed dramas like Bridgerton, which features a very nice array of exposed asses, here and here are some examples. Also I'm not unfamiliar with gay porn (as a member of the target audience), a genre that apparently has 50% female viewership, and I can tell you there is a lot of cock.
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I have no idea how this meme cartoon of "Sally will take flirting from Chad but not from Weirdo Wes" arose, but okay. I'll concede. All the young white guys are being held down and oppressed by The (Wo)Man! You can't get jobs! You can't get dates or sex! You are not getting what society owes you! And it's all the fault of women who won't go on a date with you when you walk up to her in the street and tell her to take her knickers off, won't put out on the first date, won't do the particular sex acts or kinks you picked up from porn, won't simultaneously be 'good in bed' (read: perform all the sex acts and kinks from porn) and be a virgin for you who never even looked at another man before you, won't marry you, won't have four kids and run the house and have her own independent income so you don't have to be the main breadwinner, won't meekly and tamely accede to a divorce when you get tired of her because now she's thirty-five, the hag, and you want that hot new twenty-three year old intern at work, and won't tell you that you are marvellous every hour on the hour. And their (and your) mothers. And feminists. And single women. And lesbians. And DEI. And Boomers, because you'll never be old yourself one day and want/need a pension and health care. And the government, both left and right.
Anything I'm missing out?
EDIT: I should do my own meme! 😁
What men think women want
What women really (1) want (2) want
Where did you get any of that from what he said? You've basically imputed all of your own imaginings onto him based on one comment posing you a hypothetical.
For what it's worth, I agree with @TitaniumButterfly. Your commentary is routinely so incredibly low quality I barely respond to it, but I would honestly prefer not to see it here.
This is her whole thing. She hallucinates stuff to get indignant over and then mocks anyone who objects by implying they're too dumb or insecure (or whatever) to see her point.
Yeah the absolute gall of this user never ceases to astound me, especially considering she routinely violates so many of the rules of this forum. So many of the rules are about limiting antagonism, charitability, kindness, avoiding low-effort participation, avoiding weakmanning, providing evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory one's statement is, and she just freely flouts all of these rules as if they shouldn't apply to her. In this thread alone she has done this to at least two separate users: she has assumed your mental state and accused you of not seeing women as anything other than body parts to fuck and jerk off to, then accused someone posing her a hypothetical of asking her to "concede" to a whole list of imagined uncharitable points of view that were present nowhere in the original comment. It’s nothing but flagrant bad faith.
I understand the point of having affirmative action for minority posters in order to ensure ideological diversity, but when someone pollutes the commons this consistently and has such a small (nonexistent?) roster of quality contributions they end up having a strong net negative effect on the forum. And somehow you collectively got singled out alongside her for being inflammatory in spite of the fact that you were responding to a ridiculously uncharitable and downright slanderous picture she painted of you. Incredible.
A few things:
First, this "affirmative action for minority posters" thing is taking on the character of a Motte urban legend. Being a lefty or Jewish or black or a woman doesn't give you extra latitude to break the rules. We are sometimes slower to act on people who are being reported a lot for having unpopular views, because frankly there is hardly any active poster here (with only a few exceptions) who, if everything they said was getting reported, wouldn't end up having some comments cross the line and the mods getting a sense that this person is a Problem.
Second, @HereAndGone2 has been modded and temp banned, many times, and she is aware that her previous record does not get erased when she creates a new account.
Third, yes, I scolded her and @TitaniumButterfly both because they were both getting unnecessarily personal. I am telling you the same thing. The fact that some poster really grinds your gears does not mean you should take the opportunity to write screeds about how much they annoy you.
In my defence, I'm an idiot and do things like "what the hell was my last password, I can't log in, oh well just create a new account" and "that's it, I'm done, I'm leaving and deleting my old account/damn it, somebody said something dumb, I can't let this go, oh well just create a new account". It's genuinely stupidity, not an attempt to ban evade.
EDIT: "I understand the point of having affirmative action for minority posters in order to ensure ideological diversity"
I'm a minority now? Whoo-hoo! So where do I apply for reparations, then? Favourable hiring practices? Accommodations for my various ailments (gotta give me accommodations because of neurodivergence, you know!) Ah, at long last the lap of luxury beckons! 🤣
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To clarify, I didn't mean "minority" posters as in a minority demographic, I meant minority posters in terms of holding and expressing unpopular views (hence why I referred to "ideological diversity").
This is true enough, and I do understand this principle. But there exist unpopular posters here who are capable of engaging within the rules of the forum and don't repeatedly flout it (in spite of the fact that I am sure they get reported). magicalkittycat and Goodguy are some examples who, in spite of sizeable ideological difference from many of this forum's users, I would prefer to keep around. This user's behaviour on the other hand regularly brings heat and not light, with relatively few quality contributions to show for it unlike other posters like Dase/Ilforte.
I realise moderation isn't a task that can be 100% consistent all the time, and had I ever been offered a moderator position I would probably refuse. But this kind of user criticism does not seem particularly out of pocket for this forum; it's something that happens on this forum a lot.
So just to clarify the rules for the future (and I am asking this to clarify, not as a rhetorical question): What is the definition of "personal", and does criticising the visible behaviour of a poster here without extending into their personal life count as overly personal? If not what's the criteria for moderation? Because it has been stated before that criticising people isn't against the rules, only making personal attacks, and as such before this I would have thought criticism restricted to how one's behaviour breaks the rules is fair game, especially considering that virtually every time any other user has reacted with hostility in this thread, it was in response to bad faith.
I cannot and will not give you a precise guideline as to when I or another mod will step in because people are going at each other. First, because that gets pretty close to "Tell me how I can attack someone I don't like without being modded," which we get sometimes. Second, because you are right that moderation cannot be 100% consistent all the time. I try to be consistent and principled but I'm sure looking at every single time one poster criticized another, you could find discrepancies regarding when I did or did not put on the mod hat.
General rule of thumb: if someone is grinding your gears and your post is all about how they grind your gears, it's probably not a necessary contribution. And if two people are in a slapfight because they annoy one another, we are likely to step in and say "Knock it off," and no, I'm not going to try to measure which of them typed more mean words.
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Earning income from bouncing up and down on a trampoline is an obvious and measurable benefit. It's also notable from a cursory search how many of these trampoline girls already had jobs like those before their time on The Man Show; the job histories of many of these girls include Playboy and fetish modelling as well as burlesque dancing. What you’re objecting to is called employment, and they made their free and informed choice on that front. On the topic of the costs of such a job, many other jobs (mostly male dominated ones, I might add) qualify as worse than this one and boast high occupational injury and death rates; unless you argue that all employment is exploitative a la Karl Marx there is no basis for special pleading.
Even if one doesn't necessarily want to date her (and yes, being in such professions indicates personality traits that don't always correlate well with what most people are looking for in an LTR), that doesn't imply you have to see her as Not A Human or whatever extreme point of view you were imputing onto OP. And nonetheless not thinking of a lingerie model as wife material certainly does not mean you view women in general as "a disparate collection of parts to jerk off to", if anything that contraindicates such a viewpoint since it suggests there is a difference between who you want to jerk off to and who you want to spend your life with.
In any case looking at their lives it appears that many notable “Juggies” (the trampoline girls in question) were capable of bagging a husband and having children, so I'm unconvinced the cost of taking on such a job is anywhere close to how you portray it.
'Careers' with very short times, nearly as bad as professional sports stars, and not likely to return the same high incomes. You hit forty, are you still going to be trying to bounce your saggy boobs around on a trampoline, when there is fresh new meat in the shape of new, eager, 20 year olds competing for that?
It's not a good choice, despite what the fast-talking guy who wants to be your 'manager', tells you.
There are many careers with limited shelf-lives, and I would also note that the vast majority (read: virtually all) of athletes do not earn high incomes and are nowhere near likely to do so in the future, outside of statistical outliers that represent less than a fraction of a percent of the total. For example in my country, Australia, half of elite adult athletes live below the poverty line, considering incomes from all sources including other jobs, and that sample reflects the top percentage of athletes in terms of skill level. Your chances of earning high incomes in sports is close to nothing; hell many Olympians are in dire financial straits and leave the games riddled with debt since they are responsible for their own training, travel and coaching expenses. That is, of course, assuming they even make it there. The vast majority of people in sports must work side hustles to live, and it carries a far higher possibility of bodily injury than any modelling job. To point to "professional sports stars" is like pointing to supermodels as representative of your average modelling career. They are the tip of a very large iceberg.
While I certainly do not think they're the best longterm career choices, given that I do not morally object to people being athletes, I do not see modelling as something so incredibly and uniquely distinct that I think it warrants any sort of special treatment. If you're canny it is certainly also possible to build connections while modelling and then pivot into adjacent roles such as styling or talent management, and it's certainly not unheard of for people to pursue modelling or modelling-adjacent work while obtaining education, especially given its nonstandard and flexible nature. Most people who find work in modelling or sports won't do so as their primary source of income, and this is fine - the idea that the only jobs that should exist is stuff that you can do full-time for your whole life isn't true. There is a valid place in the economy for jobs that allow people to earn some income on the side or for a temporary period, and I am certainly not about to start policing people's choices and preferences like some kind of moral busybody.
EDIT: added more
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