<\/p>\n
Objectification 101:\u00a0 How Can So Much Misunderstanding Derive from a Simple Double Entendre?<\/b><\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been wanting to spin some thoughts on “The Sexual Objectification of Women” for a while now, so I guess I\u2019m glad that Layne\u2019s last column gives me an appropriate excuse.\u00a0 As Spectator<\/em>\u2019s Rational Editor knows very well, and the rest of you need to know also, aside from being my editor Layne is also my good friend.\u00a0 He is a man with a warm heart, an inquiring mind, an unrelenting class consciousness, and a keen, twinkling eye for the quirks and nuances of human nature and behavior.\u00a0 Layne and I come from somewhat different perspectives around such things as feminism and gender issues, and the sparks we have generated pushing off against our differences have delighted both of us across many a beer or a decaf latt\u00e9.\u00a0 So it\u2019s in this spirit that I say that his last column left me feeling vaguely exasperated, like I had just come through a time warp (1958) or a culture warp (men from Mars; women from Venus; me from where?).\u00a0 What\u2019s a smart guy like you doing in an attitude like this?\u00a0 I wondered.\u00a0 And I also sighed for the thousandth time about how hard it is for women and men to understand to each other about these super-charged sex and sex role issues.<\/p>\n To be fair, I need to take the weight of this issue off of Layne and put it back on the shoulders of my fellow feminists where it belongs.\u00a0 If the feminists who first raised the issue of sexual objectification can\u2019t stay clear on what they\u2019re talking about, how can anyone else be clear, especially those supposedly strange creatures with dicks between their thighs?<\/p>\n At the risk of immersing myself in one of those forever quagmires (like the Bosnia-Herzegovina, Israeli-Arab, or Mars-Venus Wars), here\u2019s a not-so-humble shot at clarification:<\/p>\n Once upon a time, when feminism was young, innovative, and almost unbearable brilliant, sexual objectification of women (not the fun kind) meant, quite simply, the absence of female subjectivity in sex.\u00a0 Women were sexually objectified when sex was defined essentially in male terms — where sex focused on male pleasure and energy so strongly that women\u2019s desires, wants and needs were rendered irrelevant.\u00a0 Sexual objectification of women meant reducing women to sexual non-beings, to receptacles for male sexuality, body parts, or fluids.<\/p>\n Maybe this sounds absurdly grim and caricatured as a vision of sexual reality, but I dare say that even now, 25 years into the new feminism and the so-called sexual revolution, this is only a slightly simplified description of what a great deal of sex is all about.\u00a0 The man wants; the woman gives<\/em> the man what he<\/em> wants.\u00a0 Many, many men are still ridiculously ignorant about what women want or like in sex, what turns them on, what gives them pleasure, physically or emotionally.\u00a0 Maybe men just haven\u2019t been reading all the information women have generated on this subject in the last 25 years.\u00a0 Maybe they just don\u2019t want to share sexual center stage with anyone else.\u00a0 But the male-centered attitude is still pervasive, and needless to say upsetting to any woman with a clear sense of her own sexuality and a reluctance to give herself up in the name of being accommodating.<\/p>\n Now this kind of sexual discounting needs to be distinguished from what also gets called sexual objectification, which is women as objects of male sexual desire.\u00a0 Being the object of desire<\/em> (male or female) — whether that be around nice tits, nice hair, nice belief systems, nice attitude, nice Mercedes, nice batting eyelashes, nice razor-sharp tongue, or nice form with a whip — need have nothing to do with sexual objectification<\/em> in its original sense.\u00a0 Sometimes the two go together; sometimes not at all.\u00a0 The issue is not whether it\u2019s ok to be turned on about this or that about a woman or her body, but whether women stop being entitled to full subject status in the sexual connection.\u00a0 We talking two people here, or a man and a thing?\u00a0 Two-way energy flow, or all him to her?<\/p>\n Unfortunately, with the progressive fuzzification of feminist thinking and rhetoric, this double-take on the word object<\/em> has taken all the anger women feel at being ignored as sexual subjects and directed it toward the very idea of women as objects of male sexual desire.\u00a0 The result is that men like Layne, in the process of defending their right to their desire, and to including women\u2019s bodies as enjoyable aspects of that desire, dismiss the issue of sexual objectification as a silly, or boring, pre-occupation of a bunch of up-tight asexual political authoritarians.<\/p>\n The experience of being sexually objectified (in its original, dehumanizing sense) is so foreign to men that men have a hard time understanding what that experience is like.\u00a0 I remember a television ad from several years ago– I think it was for Arrow shirts.\u00a0 It showed a young executive type — suit, tie, Arrow shirt — being interviewed, ogled and admired by a bevy of panting women reporters.\u00a0 The camera angle points up at the man from about knee height and down from over the heads of the women in the audience.\u00a0 The guy is beaming from all the adulation and attention — smiling, squaring his shoulders, strutting a little.\u00a0 Finally one of the reporters asks how it feels to be sexually objectified.\u00a0 “Great!” he answers, supposedly sending us all out to buy Arrow shirts in order to get in on the joy of objectification.<\/p>\n This kind of objectification — being the object of desire — is indeed something that most men would like to have a whole lot more of in their lives.\u00a0 This is a big part of why we are so attracted to pornography —\u00a0 because it lets us imagine ourselves being lusted after by the very sorts of women we most lust for ourselves.<\/p>\n The experience of being sexually objectified in the original feminist sense of the term, however, has none of this sales (or sex) appeal.\u00a0 How many men would want to be with partners who just used their cocks to get off with, not just occasionally but most all the time?\u00a0 How many men would want sexual partners who rarely thought or cared about what they<\/em> wanted, who assumed that they were interested, most of all, in their partners\u2019 pleasure?\u00a0 “Did I come?\u00a0 Well, no, but just knowing that I turn you on makes me so happy that I don\u2019t really care.”\u00a0 Or:\u00a0 “Just watching you get excited makes me so excited that I come whether you pay attention to me or not.”\u00a0 Not too likely.<\/p>\n Now if a woman enjoys giving pleasure to her partner, enjoys being emotionally or physically dominated, enjoys being submissive, or passive, or coy, or teasy, or wearing red lipstick and five-inch heels — and if her partner also gets off on that scene — then everybody\u2019s happy and it doesn\u2019t matter whether Andrea Dworkin or John Stoltenberg of Layne or I understand or share their inclinations.\u00a0 Our bodies, ourselves — right?\u00a0 A woman\u2019s right to choose.\u00a0 I\u2019m not trying to say that one form of turn-on is good while another is bad.\u00a0 The feminists went off course when they shifted from advocating women\u2019s right to their own desires, pleasure, and satisfaction, to dictating the correct and incorrect things for women to want in sex.\u00a0 \u00a0 The heart of feminism — my feminism, the early feminism, before feminism became confused with know-nothing anger toward men — is about women having control over their lives (= power), having choices — not about substituting one system of sexual orthodoxy for another.<\/p>\n But Layne, the question of “making women into objects, focusing on body parts while completely leaving out personalities, intelligence and individual feelings” is a different issue, and not so easily dismissed as “boring.”\u00a0 If “the record is stuck in a groove” on this one it\u2019s because there has been so little movement on this issue over the years.<\/p>\n Nice tits?\u00a0 Sure.\u00a0 We all like nice tits.\u00a0 Maybe we even have some individuality in what we think of as “nice tits.”\u00a0 But being pleased with someone\u2019s tits and reducing them to nice tits on legs are two different things.<\/p>\n Again, let\u2019s turn the issue around, genderwise.\u00a0 Some people tell me (I hope I can say this without seeming weird) that I have a nice ass.\u00a0 That\u2019s fine with me.\u00a0 That\u2019s more than fine with me.\u00a0 But if all anyone could think of or look at while they were talking to me was my ass, that would get very old in a hurry.<\/p>\n And it\u2019s not just a question of whether a guy is so retrograde that he drools out loud over someone\u2019s tits or has the smarts to keep his drooling to himself.\u00a0 The fuck-up, if you want to call it that, is not a question of strategy, but of attitude toward the person you find sexually attractive.\u00a0 We all need to learn more about how to be attracted to someone and keep them present as sexual subjects<\/em>, as independent sexual beings.\u00a0 It\u2019s one thing to be attracted to a person with nice tits; it\u2019s something else again to just be attracted to tits.\u00a0 And I dare say that the guy who\u2019s pretending to carry on a conversation with a person while his brain\u2019s just going “tits, tits, tits” isn\u2019t going to be interesting or attractive to the woman behind the tits for very long.<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n Objectification 201:\u00a0 Subtlety and Nuance<\/b><\/p>\n There\u2019s also a second level in the objectification issue, more subtle and more difficult.\u00a0 Let\u2019s agree that it\u2019s fine for women to be objects of sexual desire, and fine for part of that magnetism to be how they look.\u00a0 But if being objects of (male) desire is all<\/em> that women are supposed to be, or the one available way for women to get attention, positive energy, appreciation, or power, that raises other questions.\u00a0 I\u2019d be the last to go neo-feminist simple-minded and say that the overwhelming emphasis on women\u2019s sexual desirability and appearance reduces all male-to-female sexual attraction to the patriarchal subordination of women.\u00a0 But the empowerment of women by fulfilling male images of desirable sex objects is definitely a double-edged sword.<\/p>\n There is real basis for a thoughtful feminist critique of Madonna, for example.\u00a0 Yes, Madonna is being revolutionary by operating in the arena of male-directed sexual desirability on her own terms<\/em>, but at the same time she confirms the traditional notion that women must exploit (and manipulate) their sexual desirability to get what they want from men.\u00a0 I say half a revolutionary is better than none, but I sympathize with those who would like to see Madonna challenge aspects of the sexual status quo that she seems happy to leave intact.<\/p>\n So, dear Layne, god yes, admire nice tits all you want.\u00a0 You\u2019re right:\u00a0 there\u2019s no way, given who we are, not to notice nice tits (not to mention nice cunts, asses, legs, mouths, eyes, hair, backs, bellies, and faces).\u00a0 Let\u2019s be up front and honest about this, rather than sweeping these feelings under some supposedly politically correct, polite, or proper rug.\u00a0 I wouldn\u2019t dream of taking away anyone\u2019s<\/em> fantasies, not even the blood and guts you review in Redeemer<\/em> magazine.<\/p>\n Suck \u2018em, bite \u2018em, touch \u2018em, squeeze \u2018em, dream about \u2018em, whatever you want.\u00a0 Get into it, but get beyond it too.\u00a0 Tunnel-vision tit-focus isn\u2019t necessarily degrading, but it does have a way of getting simply boring.\u00a0 And if it\u2019s not shallow, it\u2019s definitely narrow.\u00a0 I mean, do the sexiest women you know all have nice tits?\u00a0 Do the most interesting women you know all have nice tits?\u00a0 Do the most sexually interesting women you know all have nice tits?\u00a0 If so, I dare say you\u2019re missing some amazing people and experiences.<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n Objectification 301:\u00a0 Field Study and Thesis<\/b><\/p>\n Let me second Carol Queen\u2019s enthusiasm about Linda Serbu\u2019s performance piece, So You Want to Be a Stripper<\/em>.\u00a0 It\u2019s inspiring to see people who do stigmatized sexual work speaking more and more in their own voices about their lives and their experiences.\u00a0 I was reminded of Catherine Harrison\u2019s recent play, Permission<\/em>, which was a similar insider\u2019s look at sex work — in that case, the world of the professional dominatrix.<\/p>\n Serbu\u2019s collage of backstage vignettes and on-stage performance pieces is effective in presenting her somewhat grim perspective on the world\u00a0 of stripping and lap dancing.\u00a0 She has a broad sympathy for the dilemmas of various dancer “types” as they work through their feelings about themselves and their work.\u00a0 She also has an apparently universal disdain for the men who attend the theaters, all of whom were portrayed as one form or another of losers or jerks.\u00a0 By the end of the play I found myself wondering if the dancers I know are simply oddballs in that world — women who see both their work and the men in the audience in essentially positive terms.<\/p>\n Whatever helps us see sex workers — strippers, lap dancers, prostitutes, dominatrices — in real rather than stereotypical terms is a great step forward.\u00a0 Tim Keefe\u2019s book, Some of My Best Friends Are Naked<\/em>, hot off the press with intelligent, in-depth interviews with dancers from the Lusty Lady, and some older books like A Vindication of the Rights of Whores<\/em> (Gail Pheterson), Good Girls, Bad Girls<\/em> (Laurie Bell), and Sex Work<\/em> (Fr\u00e9d\u00e9rique Delacoste and Priscilla Alexander), also offer real understanding about\u00a0 both the people involved in sex work and the nature of the work itself.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n March 5, 1993<\/p>\n Copyright \u00a9 1993 David Steinberg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" <\/p>\n Objectification 101: How Can So Much Misunderstanding Derive from a Simple Double Entendre?<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been wanting to spin some thoughts on “The Sexual Objectification of Women” for a while now, so I guess I\u2019m glad that Layne\u2019s last column gives me an appropriate excuse. As Spectator\u2019s Rational Editor knows very well, and the rest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comes-naturally","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}