RivkahChaya talks about battered women and indicates that the way this situation is discussed somehow is detrimental toward women. She agrees that husbands punishing wives is generally no longer acceptable but implies that some kind of “linguistic baggage” implies it is. Since the time I was a kid 60 years ago, the standard example of loaded question was “Have you stopped beating your wife?” Obviously this recognized beating your wife was a crime, so this has been well accepted for a long time. The concerns about whether whether the woman is the subject or object of the sentence strike me as completely unsupported either with respect to how people ordinarily speak or any psychological principle that would make it a problem, and looks like a somewhat paranoid attempt to find a problem where none exists.
I might note that even when I was a kid it was considered unmanly to hit a girl. Clearly sometimes men do and I totally agree that they are scumbags.
Whynot:
As to pretty nurses being sent to marketing events, as you say, they sell more product. Big guys get to be football players. Singers with good voices sell more songs. This may not be fair, but it doesn’t mean people, or women in particular, are treated as unfeeling objects.
gracer is rightly upset about being ignored as a filmmaker.
This situation is genuinely unfair, but calling it objectification distracts from the actual problem. The problem is that historically most filmmakers have been men so people wrongly assume the person in charge is the man. I would guess women would be as likely to assume this as men. It’s the same as in TokyoBayer’s complaint that people don’t believe a man is in charge of child care.
Slithy Tove says You could take your wife naked to buy a car and she’d still be invisible to the salesman. Of course, car salesmen are used to the man being the one who makes the decision about cars. We need to get rid of these stereotypes.
Dangerosa says people lose sales when they pull this shit. Good! This helps solve the problem.
The quote in his spoiler box doesn’t support the idea that women are thought of as inanimate objects, but it does verify the harm done by the prudishness of our culture - the idea that a woman’s status depends on her being pure and virginal. The idea that we live in a “rape culture” is a huge exaggeration made by militant feminists, but I agree that rape is handled badly much of the time and we should do what we can to improve the system.
The idea that guys might drool over a woman’s breasts doesn’t imply in any respect that women are not thinking, feeling people. This is militant paranoia.
I’ll admit most of what I know of catcalls is what I’ve seen from soldiers and sailors in WWII movies, but it’s quite clear this isn’t objectification in the sense of thinking the women are unfeeling objects.
It seems that lower class women aren’t as uptight about their purity as the higher class types that would frequent these boards. So when a lower class guy indicates he thinks a woman is sexy, she takes it as a compliment, acknowledges it with a smile and a nod and nobody is upset. Upper class women find this to be crude behavior, and may feel these low class guys have a lot of nerve to ever imagine they’d have a chance with them. So they show their contempt. The low class guys feel (perhaps rightly) that they’re being looked down on and may respond with deliberately insulting remarks. Of course these guys are pretty much showing off, and some may take perverse pleasure in pissing off women they see as uptight. Some may be like internet trolls or four-year-olds throwing tantrums in that they just want to get a reaction. Even in the cases where the guy is deliberately being obnoxious, this is certainly not “objectification”. There’s no point in taunting unfeeling objects.
Were you purposely trying to parody some of the exact problems discussed in this thread? If so, brilliant. You just discounted experiences of three actual people as no big deal because you’ve seen different in the movies.
When my husband and I go to parent-teacher conferences at school, even though he has never missed one, and some teachers have even commented on his regular attendance, they still address everything to me, and the teachers who take notes and send us summations note absolutely every word I say, but they miss things my husband says, and summarize the things they do get. I really feel bad for him when this happens, because he’s such a great dad.
Even the pediatrician does this sometimes, and he’s a man, and father himself. And my husband has never missed a well-child check-up, and even manages to make about half or the sick-care visits. He has even taken our son by himself a couple of times, when the boychik and I have both been down with something, so there’s no reason at all to think he’s an uninvolved or distant father.
That’s about the only thing I can think of where questions get addressed to me, even when it’s obvious I’m the one in the know. When we have to take a car in DH always wants me to handle it because I was an Army mechanic, so I try to work that into the conversation. There’s a notable change in the attitude of the mechanics when I say that.
I respect these women. I think they’re sincere. I’m sorry they had bad experiences. That doesn’t mean the motives they attributed to the men involved were necessarily correct, especially if they’re saying they’re being “objectified”, which doesn’t make sense.
As with the others, physical attributes contribute to their success in the job (of selling, not nursing), but while I agree there is some inappropriateness here, the real issue is whether these women are being treated as if they have no feelings any more so than any employee of any company who is chosen on the basis of whether they help make money.
I’m a feminist but I admittedly don’t have a strong grasp on feminist theory proper, and I’ve only seen tiny pieces of Sarkeesian’s stuff. However, I am a gamer, so maybe I can help with this one. ''Objectification" in an abstract sense is a little confusing to me, but not in a concrete real-world application sense. Here’s why.
A few years ago someone on The Dope strongly recommended a wicked-ass PC game called The Witcher. What makes this game special is the level of detail and nuance that goes into it. Plenty of RPGs will set you up with ‘‘good’’ choices and ‘‘bad’’ choices and you reap the consequences, but The Witcher is different. The choices aren’t so obviously good or bad. This is a game with depth. As the recommendee explained to us, you can kill a dude and come back hours later to find someone scrubbing his blood off the floor.
So I bought the game, and it was predictably awesome. I actually think it has some of the best game mechanics that I’ve ever played, and the story is rich and deep. You’re a badass dude right, so inevitably hot chicks abound, and pretty much every woman you meet along your journey, you have some option of sleeping with. I really have no problem with that in and of itself. As I understand it, there’s also a love story/theme at some point down the road, I dunno.
I never got that far because every time you sleep with a woman in the game, you get a fucking trading card.
This isn’t fucking beach volleyball, this game is not intended for cheap thrills. It is a work of art, it is a goddamn masterpiece, and the women in it are reduced to trading cards. I could not play this game because it made me feel as if I, a woman, was actively participating in the reduction of women to objects.
This is a particularly egregious example of an extensive history of gaming perceived as a means of gratifying male fantasy, and that’s just fine it and of itself, the problem is 50% of gamers are women and nobody seems interested in gratifying my fucking fantasy of one goddamn female who exists for some reason other than male gratification. I don’t get to be the hero in 90% of games that exist. My existence in the video game world is represented exclusively to make things more interesting for men.
One of the reasons I love Diablo 3 is I get to wear a suit of armor that does not exist solely to make me look hawt. It actually, you know, protects me from all the stabbing going on in my immediate vicinity. I appreciate small favors such as this.
It sounds petty and if it were just one game, it would be. What it is in reality is a rigged system that shuts me out of full participation in gaming. It makes me feel like I can drop $60 on a game, bring it home and spend the entire time feeling like a guest visiting someone else’s fantasy. I paid just as much but I don’t get the same value.
Don’t know if you can understand that.
And while we’re on the subject, the hate that has been leveled at women just for talking about this scares the everloving shit out of me.
This resonated with me, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned trying to talk about feminism on the internet it’s that nobody gives a shit about women’s self-described experiences. Especially these guys that think feminism is a hate movement, there is no fucking way they are going to listen to me because they think for some reason that I hate them. There are certainly feminists who hate men, which I know because I’ve argued with them on the internet. I’m not one of them, but it doesn’t matter because these folks have no ability to recognize the nuance of female perspective. For the record, I fucking love men, and most of the men in my life are mind-blowingly awesome individuals who deserve all the steak and blow jobs.
I’ve had a few downright traumatic experiences being a woman, not nearly as much as some women, but overall I feel like I’ve been pretty lucky. I never really let social norms hold me back from exploring the things I wanted to explore or doing the things I wanted to do. I never even felt particularly much a victim of the media or any of that, though I think all of those complaints are completely legitimate and valid. I know that sexist assholes exist but I’ve never really felt like I was under the thumb of any of them in my education or career or ability to make informed decisions about my life.
In my entire life, I have never experienced an environment so hostile, degrading, and insensitive to women as the internet. It scares the shit out of me because I can’t help but wonder how many of these people I know in real life and think are decent human beings. And there is almost zero point in speaking up about it because, as I mentioned before, nobody gives a shit. As I recently told a male friend of mine, there is no more frustrating and helpless feeling than listening to a bunch of men lob statistics back and forth about a thing that is your lived experience.
I was disowned by my family when I was 17 years old for being sexually abused and I’m supposed to give a shit about the methodology of a single shitty rape study why? When a male cop barely older than you are shows up at your door unexpectedly while you are home alone and starts asking you detailed questions about the most humiliating experience of your life even though he is clearly not equipped or comfortable with the subject matter, it gives you some fucking insight into why a rape victim might recant. When you learn how completely incompetent most people are at dealing with issues like that, when you are the one who became the social pariah, when you are the one being told to get over it, when your mother tried to get you declared mentally incompetent because she would rather have a crazy daughter than a child molesting husband, statistics mean jack shit.
These men are trying to wrap their mind intellectually around a concept that fundamentally shaped my identity as a human being. Yes, women are objectified. You know how I know? Because it happens all the damned time, to me, to my friends, it’s just a a thing we live with. Yes, women get blamed all the time when they are the victims. You know how i know? Ask me how I fucking know.
Sorry, I just really needed to get that off my chest.
If a man doesn’t take a woman’s concerns seriously, there’s nobody he’s going to listen to but another man. That’s just the reality. We need the Budget Player Cadets of the world, men who won’t only ask questions but will listen to the answers. You have no fucking idea how important you are. Women are cannon fodder. You guys are the warriors.
For whatever it’s worth, I quit The Witcher for the same reason. The first time it happened it was like a appallingly tacky joke, the videogame equivalent of Divine eating the dog turd. The second time it was just tediously gross, and there never was a third time.