Poll for women: Drawing on the power of image of women

In My Humble Opinion
1

… the power of women specifically as objects of sexual interest.

In a fifteen-year-ago thread (of which I’m proud to have started), I asked about how women felt about fashion magazines and one of the optional responses I created as a poll-choice was:

• Wow, does she look hot! It is so cool being a woman and being able to have looks like that. Look at her, you know just how she feels being so attractive, I know that feeling. We chicks rock. Go us! It’s so good to be women looking so dynamite and identifying with that!
Essentially, no one picked that. I was a bit surprised. I honestly thought it would be something that women in general would feel some sense of positive empowerment from.

Maybe that’s an artifact of being outside looking in and there’s just very little joy or any sense of power or pride on the inside of that experience?

Would you mind elaborating and explaining? In case you’re missing the implicit subtext, there are a lot of us who were born male who think that it would be a powerful experience to be lustworthy, to be desired, to be able to evoke the appetites of the verysame folks (well, at least the folks of the same morphological construction)
that we were attracted to ourselves. Subtext II, in case it isn’t obvious, is the notion that (culturally created or biologically innnate, who knows?) heterosexual males desire female people on the basis of visual appearance to a degree far and away beyond the degree to which female heterosexual people desire male people on the basis of our visual presentation. And the whole notion that being female makes one a sexual commodity, desired more than you desire in return and all that. Without saying that any of this is “just how it is”, as opposed to being a social construct etc, I’m saying that we, in general, tend to think that it must be a position of power to be more desired than to desire in return, and we tend to think you must enjoy that, rejoice in it, find the situation pleasurable in and of itself (even despite things like the perennial presence of rape, sexual molestation, sexual harassment, sexual objectification, etc).

Are we entirely wrong? Do all the negatives that come attached to it ruin it to the point that you don’t experience it as a delicious situation at all? Or for that matter, negatives of that sort aside, is it just not anywhere near as fun as we tend to think it is?

Do you think us demented and weird for thinking you must enjoy this dynamic?

Umm, also: do you by any remote chance feel like if, for the sake of argument, you say “yeah that part of it all is kinda nice”, that’s immediately going to be used to discredit the notion that society is and has historically been a patriarchy and that, as female people, you’ve been socially disempowered and that society has been unfair to women, etc? And, if so, do you think there is a way to open a dialog that lets an acknowledgment of that exist without it being used as a weapon against you in discussions of the need for female empowerment within a patriarchal context?

2

By “on the inside of that experience” if you mean, what the model feels? Probably happy to have a job that pays pretty well, but having worked as a model I can tell you that it’s a performance. I didn’t do high fashion but I knew people who did. It’s just a job, and it’s not usually a comfortable job either. You’re not going to get a sense of power because people are shouting directions and orders at you. I did sort of admire the people who could make a career out of it, because while it’s competive and uncomfortable, so is everything else, and at least it pays well.

If by “on the inside of that experience” you mean as a woman looking at the spread, if I’m looking at it I’m looking at the clothes. I sure wouldn’t think “Oh my gosh that model must feel so powerful and great looking the way she does,” because…artifice, makeup, carefully concealed pins, lighting. She only looks that way in the picture. She’s doing that pose because a (very likely gay or female) director is coaching her to do it.

I literally cannot imagine why I would feel empowerment from looking at a magazine spread. But then I actively hate the word “empowerment” and the idea that “empowerment” is necessary so it’s not likely something I would even want to feel.

I think the closest thing might be if I saw something that I owned. Like once I saw Uma Thurman wearing a pair of shoes that I also own. And what I thought was that my feet looked a lot better than Uma Thurman’s in those shoes. At least I hoped they did. But I was still like, “Ooh, I have the same pair of shoes as Uma Thurman!”

3

I can tell you the precise day, what I was wearing and the context the very first time an adult man looked upon me with ‘that’ look. It wasn’t empowering or ‘delicious’( your word). It was a sick feeling in the pit of my gut. I was embarrassed and I shouldn’t have had to be. I was a young teen. My Mother had died the year before and I didn’t have the words to explain to my older sister what was bothering me. So, no it’s not a thing I used as a weapon. I eventually quit being embarrassed and stopped noticing, or tried to. It’s not a pleasant feeling until your intended partner likes you. You hope the partner likes you for other things other than beauty, though. Beauty is fleeting, someone said.

4

Okay, this just reminded me of back in the day when I read Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, which I thought was very dated even when I read it but it was one of those you-must-read-this books at the time. There was a scene where the martian gave special mind-reading powers to a stripper so she’d know what all the men watching her felt like, and the experience just knocked her out. I read this and thought, what, has this writer dude ever met a woman? Even back in those innocent days–I think I was a senior in high school–I figured that yeah, strippers knew the effect they had on men and exploited it and it was not gonna be any big revelation, how the men in the audience felt. And I also thought it was weird that she found it a positive experience.

But then I got a little more mature and realized that I don’t necessarily think the way that every woman in the world thinks. There might be some ladies who like this. And even some women who like it some part of the time, or even most of the time. And I can’t imagine sitting around feeling smug because I inspired lust in every heterosexual male I ran into on a given day, that idea is frankly kind of disgusting. I’m not interested in inspiring lust unless I want him too.

5

If we had the power to turn it on and off, the ability to make heterosexual men lust after us would be a pretty good thing. With a very strong emphasis on the ‘turn it off’.

As it stands though, the first experience most of us had with male lust wasn’t a guy we liked (or if it was, he was an awkward kid as well, and tried desperately to hide it so he wouldn’t get laughed at) it was the creepy teacher, a friend of the family or a guy catcalling or following us on the street. The feelings it gave me were the exact opposite of powerful. Closer to ‘helpless’, especially as a teen.

It happens when you’re all dolled up for a night out, as you’d expect (not always unwelcome, but most girls go out for the night in groups for a good reason), but it also happens when you’re just running to the shop to grab some milk when you’ve been gardening and you’re wearing muddy jeans and a tatty sweater. Or when you’re at work, so you can’t even leave, but he’s not quite crossing the line, so you can’t do anything about it. Outside of relationships, inspiring lust is rarely a positive.

Do you think most women look at strippers and think ‘Wow, go her! I wish I could get a room full of half drunk guys to leer at me!’ my thought are closer to ‘If I had a body like that, could I bring myself to get ogled by that many creeps for cash? Doubt it. I don’t think I’d ever be able to have a male friend again if I dealt with that.’

Having said that, there is a bit of a culture of ‘women for women’ sexiness, like belly dance and some burlesque; I’ve been to little local shows of each that friends were involved in, which had an almost entirely female (largely hetero) audience who were getting very into it all. Most of the performers didn’t have amazing bodies, and it really wasn’t aimed at male interest; the few guys there were boyfriends dragged along, plus gay friends. The focus was the performers feeling sexy in their own eyes, and the eyes of the other women. Male lust had nothing to do with it.

6

I don’t understand why this would surprise you. Do you think the average man gets stoked at how “we” look so dynamite when he sees an attractive male model? I suspect men are not that much different than women: when we confront exceptionally beautiful people in ads and other media, we tend to see them as special. In a different class than us schmoes who are not gracing the cover of magazines. We don’t identify with them simply because they are the same gender as us.

If the feeling you’re talking was typical, media images wouldn’t make people feel insecure or inadequate.

7

Obviously, women like to be pretty, or cosmetics wouldn’t sell as well as they do. But empowering? Glad to be an object of lust? Fuck no! This is what the MeToo Movement is about.

8

Quoted for truth. X1000

It’s not a power position when you factor in the risk to person that accompanies it. Especially since it will abso-f***ing- lutely will be used against her when she is assaulted.

It doesn’t empower women so much as justify every creeper to take a shot!

9

Wow, so much to unpack here … and all coming down to not only would I not think or feel like that, it kind of hurts my brain to imagine the thought process that go in to someone thinking that I might feel like that.

To start with, the concept of having power over men … I despise people whose aspiration is ‘have power over other people.’ I’d run a million miles to get away from that - no, let’s have you having power over what you do, think and feel - and in return I’ll have power over what I do, think and feel. How about that?

And then again - there’s no ‘we’ between me and a fashion model. My first thought on seeing a person with flawless makeup and high-fashion clothes is ‘oh, hey, a person I don’t have stuff in common with.’ And, you know, I’m very happy to revise that kind of opinion if I meet them in person and the first thing out of their mouth is “I was just down the second hand bookshop and I picked up a great China Mieville book and a couple of Doctor Who novelisations” but generally speaking this is unlikely. Sure fashion models look good. I’m happy to look at them. Persian cats and fuschia flowers look good too. It doesn’t mean I see myself in them, because I don’t and never will.

This doesn’t mean I don’t think I look good, by the way. I do think I look good, and I do like thinking that I look good. But I like it in the same way I like people complimenting my singing voice. I want to look aesthetically pleasant, not “fuckable”

Then there’s the whole “having men lust after you is not power, any more than tweety-bird at the alley cats convention is power” aspect, ably covered above.

Oh, and @Hilarity … you know, the Heinlein thing is actually EVEN WORSE than you remember it - she’s not a random stripper, she’s the love interest of the main character, and it’s due to the need to support him that she’s stripping in the first place. But … luckily it Just So Happens that gosh-diddly-darn it, turns out she really gets off on it! Phew! Dodged a bullet there. Otherwise, you know, we might end up glorifying and idolising a guy who’s blatantly exploiting a woman in his life for his own convenience!

By the way, I’ve been ragging on the OP enough that I should point out I’m not actually offended by any of it. Just really kind of mystified. It’s all from the planet Neptune as far as I’m concerned

10

Female strippers, movie stars, models, the Kardashians and even beauty Pageant contestants are selling a product. They are cashing in on looks and body shape. The average woman is not doing that. Of course there are outliers and naturally beautiful women who don’t mean to attract catcalls and drooling men. But on the whole women just want to be treated as human beings, not pieces of meat. It’s up to Mothers of young men to teach them to treat girls and women with respect. Society does nothing but perpetuate the myth that women are second class citizens. Young ladies need to be taught not use sex and beauty as a weapon. It’s such a difficult distinction to draw. You want to be clean, well groomed and attractive, but NOT an object of leering and possibly sexual harassment. Fine line, that.

11

I haven’t been any other male, so I have no more direct access to what goes on in “the male mind” than you folks do, but from a combo of hearing what they say and extrapolating from my own experience, it’s an extremely attenuated comparing of (what we tend to think would be) the Experience Female with our own Experience Male and thinking to ourselves “wow, that must be nice”. I’ll repeat, immediately: extremely attenuated. In other words, not imagining the overall Experience Female at all, just this one isolated element of it. Completely out of context.

Now, I tend to think of myself as a person inclined to have spent a lot of time and thought trying to comprehend the Experience Female in a holistic non-attenuated way. Behavioral patterns and expressed sentiments and opinions and whatnot of other people who are in situations different from your own become self-explanatory when you do that, and I like understanding.

I suspect the cognitive disconnect on this specific point of understanding comes from vastly underestimating the ubiquity of being stared upon and drooled at as a constant backdrop. I’m still doing too much of the extremely attenuated thing, of thinking about what it would be like as an incident and not getting it bone-deep what it would be like as a never-ending phenomenon.

12

But I DON’T LOOK LIKE THAT!

I will never look like that. I have short legs, I have an ass which according to Levi’s is “too curvy for a black woman” (Jesus fucking Christ, I’m a white woman but apparently according to those fellows I’m a pinto mare!), I’m guitar-shaped, I’ve got cellulite…

Any actress who looks like me better do comedy. We can be the frumpy friend, or the frumpy mom, or the frumpy mother in law, but we’re never, ever, ever, the object of desire. Occasionally a better-looking version gets to be the girl next door, but not one who gets laid; the one who gets used as an exposition device.

Thank God for truck drivers and construction workers. Because if my only source for information on which women are attractive had been the media, I would have spent my whole life thinking I was at some number below zero.

13

See, I don’t even necessarily disagree with the cited poll option as stated, well… the first half of it. The whole rambly bit after with “go us!” and identifying with them goes way too far. Anyway, Our society has a disturbing tendency to devalue and treat traditionally feminine interests as “lesser” or dig deep to find things in order to problematize them. While on a completely different topic (romance lit) Lindsay Ellis’ video essay on Twilight points this out rather well. Even women who want to distance themselves from “other girls” participate in it.

However, this subtext is… wrong IMO. I’m sex positive, and sex worker positive, but reading fashion and looks and cosmetics and traditional femininity through the lens of male lust is incredibly gross. It entirely contextualize’s women’s interests in terms of men, which devalues us as our own agents. I’m absolutely happy for the large number of women I know of that adore cosplay, even the ones that do sexy cosplays. Hell, Naomi Wu is a great creator and also advocate for women in technology, but she loves dressing in crop tops and sexy-leaning fashion in general. I’m happy for worker owned porn collectives and independent women (and men!) who release porn, because a lot of them really love what they’re doing. (Not to say more prominent corporate-managed ones can’t, but that whole industry gets sticky). I’m happy for strippers and prostitutes who legitimately like aspects of their jobs.

Now, those last few are sticky because of the corrupting influence of capitalism and having to make money off of it, and also because the last two can be dangerous, but owning your femininity, sexiness, and sexuality is legitimately great.

But these people do it for themselves (and other women who share their passions). They want to look hot, they find value in learning about fashion and cosmetics, or they like having sex on camera or artistically expressing themselves via erotic dance. Power over men, and men’s lust is, perhaps, a minor goal of some women, but that is absolutely the most problematic possible lens to filter their hobbies through.

Now of course, there are wider societal issues at play here with regards to reinforcing traditional standards of beauty, putting pressure on other women to conform to certain beauty standards, issues with victim blaming in rape, and problems with women not being taken seriously because they’re seen as objects of desire instead of competent workers. This is what a lot of others are getting at. And yes, even if women truly feel happy and good doing these things we can go back and forth on whether, in the current social climate it’s “right”. And, of course, women who intentionally drag other women’s bodies, or victim blame themselves are bad. However, I still err on the side of supporting their passions, especially when so many feminine interests are routinely looked down on, unless people are truly using their passion in an objectionable way.

I have that superpower, it’s called “intellectually intimidate the guy at the tech shop trying to impress me with techbro nonsense me by subtly dropping that I’m a PhD student in AI.” :stuck_out_tongue:

I joke, but I do this on purpose and it has a disturbingly high success rate.

14

You know that optical illusion where the same black-and-white image can be seen as a lamp or a pair of faces?

There’s an “opposite space” way of describing what I’m trying to get at. It’s a bit more awkward to put into words, but I think it might be useful to do so —

That ubiquitous experience of being stared at and of having prurient sexual interest in you expressed all the damn time, to the point of it being a perpetual annoyance? Think of its absence, not for yourself but for the people who are of the population to which you tend to be attracted when you have sexual interest.

I think that is probably a part of the Experience Female for heterosexual female folks, that in your interactions with men (including both the ones for whom you feel sexual attraction and those towards whom you do not, and anything in between), you are not dealing with people who have been on the receiving end of all that perpetual and intrusive sexual interest.

I know that reads more like a “not-an-experience” but think of it as an experience.

It’s not an experience that we male folks have. (Well, I’m generalizing on both sides, of course. I’m well aware that there are a few male people who get enough sexual attention to find it bothersome, albeit even then probably they don’t experience the same ubiquity of being seen that way that so many women do; and that there are some women who are less the target for all that, although again probably more in comparison with other women than in comparison with guys in general)

And part of our sense of “gee, that must be nice!” when looking across the gap and thinking of how things must be for you probably actually involves that. “How nice it must be to not be the annoying bothersome seeker of sexual opportunities, so that the people you encounter aren’t always so ready to bristle or wince away from anything that might be taken as an expression of sexual interest”.

I mean, it should be possible to get beyond a binary polarization into sex object and sex appetite, but in a polarized world they do sort of form each other’s inverted / negative space, so that this intermittent expression of envy from guys about how nice and fun it must be to be the target of lusts and appetites may also have to do with being tired of the appetite side and, in particular, with the annoyed-and-creeped-out level of the people for whom one has an appetite.

15

My (ignorant/possibly mansplaining) take on it…

I think an analogy may suit AHunter3’s point:

For many women, beauty is vaguely akin to wealth or fame. Celebrities will often talk about how wearying or unnerving fame can be - papparazzi photographing you without permission, getting stalked, fans throwing themselves at you, people screeching, screaming, trying to scam you, your kids possibly getting abducted, the media never going away, etc. And they are totally 100% right.

But on the other hand, you have “the masses” - ordinary people like you and me - who have never been famous and in all likelihood never will, and we think, “Man I would like to enjoy some of what it must feel like to be famous. It must be a real thrill.” And that is *also *100% totally right.

Same for wealth. A rich person can speak of how stressful wealth is, or how it makes one paranoid, or draws the gold-diggers. That is 100% correct. A poor person can also wistfully say, “Boy I wish I were rich.”

***Neither ***of those opinions is inaccurate, nor do they cancel each other out. They are both valid in their own right.

16

First off, it seems you’re using “woman” as shorthand for “attractive woman”, which sadly seems to be a extremely common mistake that men make. Believe it or not, the average woman does not move through the world feeling all of this desire you’re imagining. A great many women feel invisible or outright ugly because of feedback they get from men.

Secondly, women learn early in life that it takes very little effort to arouse male desire if you’re only talking about the lowest common denominator (LCD). Since most women aren’t attracted to the LCD, being able to turn them on amounts to a gigantic “so what?”.

Third, unless you’re in the market for romance or you’re actress, a model, or a sex worker, there is very little utility in being seen as sexually desirable by anyone except yourself and your SO. Most women just want to get through the day without a bunch of drama. You know what drama is? Having men leering at you, hounding you for your number, or asking you out on dates you don’t want to go on. Women who deal with this don’t feel powerful; in many ways, they feel powerless because they are expected to graciously put up with these bothersome and often times scary things.

17

Does any man see a male model and think:

Wow, does he look hot! It is so cool being a man and being able to have looks like that. Look at him, you know just how he feels being so attractive, I know that feeling. We dudes rock. Go us! It’s so good to be men looking so dynamite and identifying with that!

18

Regarding “being attractive” as equaling “having power over men”: I’ve found four basic behavioural groups in men who apparently found me attractive.

  1. El cordero degollado, the butchered lamb. Something I’ve said or done has terminally stunned him. The stun will last between years and… years; the cases I’ve known who eventually recovered did so after meeting the women who’d eventually become their wives. He’s so busy worshipping the floor I walk on that he can’t hear a word I say. I’d have to be some kind of psycopathic bitch to want that.

  2. The butcher. This one looks at me like I’m a cow carcass hanging from a hook, ready to be cut apart. Depending on how good they’re at it, how many people are around, my age… these leave me wanting to take a shower in concentrated bleach, clothes and all, or to kick their leering jaw into their neck bones. It’s a good thing I don’t have superpowers, I guess.

  3. The idealizer. He’s taken a look at me and decided I’m his dream gf. Sadly, his reaction when I do or say something which doesn’t match the ideal is to ignore the actual, real person in favor of the mental image. Walk away. Walk away slowly. Or run. Whichever your shoes allow for.

  4. The human being. Who happens to be male (mainly because we’re talking about “guys finding me attractive”), but otherwise he’s, you know, a person. A normal person. Interested in conversation, interested in my opinions, interested in sharing his own opinions. Interested in another human being who, in this case, happens to be female. HALLELLUJAH!

Whether we’re talking about romance or friendship, excuse me if I happen to prefer the last one. The other reactions don’t see me at all; they see an ethereal being, or a chunk of meat, or a platonic ideal who never farts. They don’t see a woman.

Quite a few recent series and movies (generally with a female producer or director, if not both) have a scene where some guy surprises the girl he likes by making her a perfect gift that she hadn’t described. Some even have the guy say “hey, I pay attention!” The first time I noticed it, I thought “a biiiit heavy-hand- oh hell no, with the amount of guys who don’t pay attention, go ahead and hit that nail a few times!”

19

In college, my gfs and I achieved that by mentioning we were engineering majors. Dudes from trade school didn’t have a problem; other engineers didn’t have a problem. The rest of the male population? Smoke.

In grad school, the same could often be achieved by mentioning that we were in grad school. Apparently a lot of guys our age were interested in 18yo girls but not in 28yo women. Scary and skeevy for our younger sisters, bullets dodged for us.

20

We might think “you go girl” or “use it if you’ve got it.” I know when I was a dumpy nerdy teenage outcast I’d sometimes look at Cosmo and wish I could look like the models or get away with wearing those kinds of clothes because beautiful and fashionable people never seemed to get picked on and everyone wanted to be around them.

But that isn’t true. Everyone makes fun of that old commercial with the woman saying “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful” but there is a bit of truth to it. the “power” of having stereoptypical female beauty comes with the “kryptonite” of jealousy and people thinking a woman is stupid because she has physical beauty. Or they assume that because a woman puts so much effort into her appearance that she wants all the male attention she gets. “Oh poor baby. How terrible to have men falling at your feet.” As a lot of other have said that gets to be annoying and sometimes frightening.

Plus I think every woman knows that that “power” has a high cost. Watching every bite you eat. Hours in the gym. Can’t be seen without makeup or hair done or being dressed to the nines down to wearing sexy underwear every day. Way too much trouble for me!

Some women obviously want to have that “power” and that’s fine for them. But it’s not what every woman wants.

And a woman who puts a lot of time into her looks or her sex appeal is liable to be labled a slut or a bimbo anyway so what power does she really have anyway.