Objectification, Visual Aspects of Sexuality, and the "What % of Women Beautiful" Thread

Great Debates
1

From the concurrent Men - What Percent of Women are Beautiful? thread:

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I have quoted myself to acknowledge myself as a participant, a person who replied to the question as originally posed.

I don’t dismiss the concerns voiced by the other people I’ve quoted here, but I don’t 100% agree that it is always bad to speak about people’s sexual attractiveness, or even—in the politically loaded situation we’re in where women, specifically and historically, have been valued as sex objects and their worth strongly attached or assigned to that value—to speak about women’s sexual attractiveness.

This is neither a pitting nor a mea culpa. I suppose it could end up being nothing more than a rehash of points that have been made over and over, and that I will have added nothing to the discussion… but I would like to have a discussion.

I’m quite willing to entertain the notion that it was inappropriate for me and the others to speak of what percent of women in general we find attractive, and to take the matter seriously. Whether I do or don’t end up agreeing with that, I thought it would be useful to talk about several hypothetical discussions and when it becomes hurtful or objectifying to have the discussion itself.

  • In 2004 I started a thread, Running thru minds of women browsing fashion mags: a poll for het females, asking women about their modern-as-of-then reaction to how women are depicted in magazines like the above-mentioned Vogue. I assume this wasn’t a disempowering discussion.

  • I think we learn a lot about social issues and situations by speaking from our personal experience and listening to each other. Now, it is certainly true that women’s perceptions and women’s experiences have received less social airplay than those of men, but even so, it seems to me that we come to understand social issues and situations better when males also speak from our personal experiences, at least if we’re doing so honestly and not just chiming in with the socially expected manly masculinity-affirming pat answers. Would it have been a disempowering discussion if I had posed a question to men asking them what they thought and felt when browsing women’s fashiong magazines? Would it make a difference if the participants thought about and analyzed their situation as viewers in light of feminist theories about the visual commodification of women? Would it make a difference if the participants talked about how they personally felt about the use of women’s images to appeal to their sexual appetites, as opposed to just a lot of “yeah man that’s hot”?

  • Would it make a difference if such a question were posed generically to anyone inclined to answer, and the participants were a mixture of male and female respondents? What if that mixture tended to be 70% male? 85% male? Are there things that male participants should or could do in threads discussing potentially loaded gendered questions if it occurs to them that the thread itself might be becoming part of the problem and not a discussion of it? Something less absolute than “we should not be having this discussion, this is sexist”, I mean?

  • Presumably, many people within most of the possible sexes and genders, orientations and preferences etc, feel a sexual attraction to folks of the generic variety of people that they find attractive. As opposed to only feeling sexual attraction to people on the basis of how much they like them as people, I mean. And that some of this is indeed visual, a response to the visual appearance of folks of that permutation. When does discussing, commenting, or dwelling on that get creepy and dehumanizing? How much of it is strictly contextual (specifically: with women as the discussed objects, within the context of ongoing female sexual objectification by men, with the implication that it is problematic because of that context)? Sorry if that reads like mud… what i mean is, compare to gay men describing male bodies as sexy and hot in appearance, or lesbian women commenting on the hotness of women they notice in the audience, or for that matter straight women looking out the window and commenting on the cute shirtless male construction worker etc. Are the latter examples non-problematic because the political context is different? And if they’re automatically not so non-problematic, at what point does it veer into inappropriate objectification to talk about such things?

2

No. Commenting on an aspect or a trait is not intrinsically objectification. Crapping all over a thread as part of a pseudo-organized brigade desiring to use nagging, social pressure, etc. instead of letting mods run the board is intrinsically thread-crapping.

We are biological and highly visual creatures with billions of years of evolution selecting for mating characteristics. Of course most folks are going to have some sort of filter and ranking that their mind will generate. Is it taboo to now discuss this aspect of basic biology?

3

I think the question would have been odd if out of the blue, but made sense in the context of the other thread asking about a poll that found that only 4% of women considered themselves “beautiful.”

If 4% of women think they are beautiful, but men think 50% (or 5%, 25% or 75%) of women are beautiful, that’s an interesting data point for discussion.

4

There are SO MANY aspects of basic biology we don’t discuss in polite company.

5

But we do on the SDMB. See “pan fried semen”, “putting your wedding ring up your nose”, A friend, my wife, and her panties, vagina, lack of sex in marriage, dead celebrities, and kitty pictures.

Regards,
Shodan

6

I read the thread as a whole up the point where I commented about how gross it was. Then I went back and read your OP.

It wasn’t actually that bad (in my opinion, which is subject to change :slight_smile: ). But some of the responses were.

Talking about who you perceive as beautiful or attractive? That’s probably fine, especially when it’s not butting into another conversation.

Talking about women as not human, or assigning numbers to them, or talking about beauty as though it’s in the body of the beholdee? That’s where it runs into problems.

The other problem is when folks decide that the solution to women not feeling beautiful is for men to give them a ranking. If a woman is feeling worthless because she doesn’t see herself as beautiful, the solution for that is not in reinforcing social norms wherein men have the power to tell women whether they’re beautiful (and by extension whether they’re valuable).

Again, not saying those things were inherent in your OP. But they were absolutely present in a lot of the responses.

7

Objectifying women is when you reduce them to one of their attributes. It’s possible to mention that they have an attribute without stating or implying that’s all that matters about them.

Of course it’s also possible to totally imply that their appearance is all that matters, so a topic like this is a great way to fish for objectifying comments.

8

I’m not usually into Grammar as Ideology, but when someone is described as a number, that definitely reduces women to one attribute. For example:

Or there’s this:

As I said, the OP wasn’t so bad, but some of the responses were.

9

Pfft. We have all kinds of threads. But… not all of them are the target of an ever scope-expanding shaming campaign. Who says the slippery slope is imaginary when we can see it in action currently?

10

Thanks for your response, and for reading the thread.

The purpose of the poll was in response to the Dove survey where only 4% of women thought they were beautiful. I make no pretense that my poll has any scientific value. It did, however, reflect something that I have experienced.

IME it is much more common for a man to think a woman is beautiful, than for that same woman to think that she is beautiful. No doubt men devalue women if they are not beautiful, that’s certainly true in many instances. But there is, I think, something more going on. Because ISTM that there are women who men think are beautiful, who nonetheless have internalized a sense of lesser value. And that part doesn’t seem to me to be due to men. Because the men don’t devalue them for not being beautiful - they think they are beautiful. But the women don’t.

Maybe it is superficial to value women for their beauty. I don’t necessarily think so - I don’t see a lot of difference for valuing someone for any of their desirable qualities, beauty or intelligence or being good at something or whatever. Certainly that shouldn’t be the only thing, but it is a thing.

This is, of course, based on some interactions I have had with the Lovely and Talented Mrs. Shodan. For some reason, it is difficult to convince her that I think she is beautiful. No, I am not “just saying that”, and I am not saying it because I should. I do, really, honestly, and sincerely, think she is beautiful. And even, in an odd way, I am not saying it because I love her. I do, in fact, love her. But that’s not why I say it. I thought she was beautiful before I fell in love with her. And that’s also not “the” reason I love her. It’s one of them, but not “the” reason.

But she won’t buy it. Even when people hit on her at the gym, or my daughter points out that someone is admiring her from afar, and no matter how many times I tell her - she won’t go for it. And I’ve been real clear about it for the last forty years or so.

So I was wondering if it was just me and her, or what else was going on. And the Dove survey pushed me to start the poll.

Is there a difference between objectifying someone, and admiring them? Maybe, maybe not. But FWIW the poll was meant to be more about the latter.

Regards,
Shodan

11

At the risk of being an irritating jerk, I’ma cross-post something from the first thread on the topic:

This isn’t to say that there’s no social pressure on women both to be beautiful and to consider themselves ugly. There is. But Dove is monetizing those concerns in a way I find pretty dishonest.

As for whether folks should value being beautiful–I’ve mixed feelings about that. The social pressure women face to be considered beautiful, coupled with the social messages women get about how ugly they are, is pretty fucked up. Solving it by having men tell women that they’re beautiful doesn’t seem like a good solution.

That doesn’t mean a het man can’t tell his partner that she’s beautiful. I just don’t like the idea that that’s a solution to whatever problem there is.

12

FWIW I agree that “you are beautiful” is not a solution either to “you have to be beautiful” or “women who aren’t beautiful are worthless”.

Maybe it’s not possible to treat “you are beautiful” in the same way we would treat “you are smart” or “you are brave” or “you know how to mix the perfect martini”, but I wish it were.

Regards,
Shodan

13

There is nothing wrong with saying “you are beautiful” to someone whom you’re in a romantic relationship with, or someone you want to be in a romantic relationship with. (Though you might need to be careful in the latter case.) Some people, like casting directors, have jobs where they have to judge attractiveness.
But random people on the street? No.
Just consider - men don’t go around staring at woman and shouting “you must have an IQ of 140, baby!”, do they?
I think most men do make objectifying assessments of women. But we can maybe shut up about it.

14

The patriarchy hurts us all, man :).

Yup. There are plenty of thoughts in my brain that don’t need to come out my mouth. At the risk of projecting, I figure that’s true for most folks.

15

Dove’s niche now is the company which uses non-traditional models in its ads - models who look like real people. I think presenting data that almost all women feel down on themselves so their customers who feel down on themselves shouldn’t worry about it is reasonable. They’re obviously trying to sell soap, but there are worse ways.

16

Dude. The part of my post you didn’t quote straight up said it’s easy to draw the objectifiers out of the woodwork with a topic like this. Why are you acting like this should be news to me? Did you just stop reading my post after the second sentence?

The problem with that particular comment wasn’t the comment - it was the responses. It was essentially saying “such woman are too good to be real” and the responses uniformly took the obvious, obvious hyperbole as being completely literal. :confused::dubious: It was a cavalcade of confusion and misplaced ire.

17

:confused: I was agreeing with you.

18

The internet sucks at delivering tone.

19

In a thread specifically labeled and specifically about a specific subject no one is under any compulsion to read much less participate. Funny how group complaints have spontaneously meandered from surprise graphic sexual violent threads to this.

20

Just checking here - an objectifying assessment is one where you not only take note of the person’s appearance, but also decide that nothing else about the woman matters, right? So it’s okay for me to look at a woman and notice that she’s got stunningly beautiful earlobes and her nostrils are okay too, so long as I don’t decide that that’s all I need to know about her?

Because I gotta say, I’m pretty sure I can’t stop my eyes from observing the fact that when a female is in front of me, that she is interacting with light in such a way that an image of her is being presented to my eyeballs. Despite the fact that I’m not a casting director. Obviously saying anything about one’s first impression is a terrible idea, but merely having an opinion that the woman is, in fact, dissimilar in appearance from a golden eagle is okay. Isn’t it?