Objectification
Mar. 29th, 2004 07:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jere7myHaving described my Rocky Horror ogling in my last post, I thought I'd talk a little about the objectification of women, and why I think it's not such a bad thing.
The sad secret is, we objectify people all the time. We no longer live in small, close-knit communities in which everyone knows everyone's names ("Norm!"); most of us live in population centers of thousands or millions, and members of a world-girdling community are piped into our homes via TV and radio and the net. When we watch baseball, we think of the players as ball-hitting objects and ball-catching objects, and don't generally care to get to know them as full persons with individual goals and terrors. The cashier at the bank is a money-dispensing object; the mailman is a mail-delivery object; the yahoo who dents our fender is an obstruction. If we're particularly outgoing and friendly, or if we're having a bright and chipper day, we might learn the names of a few of the people we interact with on a weekly basis -- maybe you ask your mailman about his dogs, or discuss the latest episode of Alias with a checker at the supermarket -- but I don't think it's possible to impute a complete internal life to that many people. (Is there anyone out there who knows the names of everyone they interacted with in the past week? Hermits and people on certain insular campuses in SE Pennsylvania need not reply.) We categorize them, in our minds, in terms of the services they provide us, or the effects they have on our lives. The same is true of attractive people we pass on the street: we appreciate what we can visually, then, usually, discard the rest of their personality without another thought. (I call this the "boobs with legs" reaction.) There's nothing wrong with that, in my eyes. There's nothing in sexual objectification that makes it any worse than, say, athletic objectification.
What reveals our character is our response to continued interaction. Once you've had ten minutes of conversation with someone (maybe more, maybe less), you shift them, probably permanently, from the "object" category into the "person" category. If you get out of the car to talk to the guy who dents your fender, oftentimes (if your anger doesn't get the better of you) you'll find yourself faced with an actual person rather than an object, and the hard words you've saved up will drain away. If you've had a gardener working for you for five years and haven't yet made an effort to learn her name and a little of her life story, if you're unable to shift her into the "person" category, your objectification starts to become offensive. Similarly, if you spend an entire date with an attractive woman, or interview her for a job, and still think of her as nothing more than boobs with legs, that's a problem.
That can be a result of conditioning -- if you were raised to see servants as less than full persons, or if your only real interaction with women comes from Jugs and Maxim, you might have trouble seeing these people as more than objects. But that's a personal slippery slope we all have to monitor for ourselves; I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with objectification, as long as we don't lose the ability to ensoul someone when it becomes necessary.
Last night I was considering the difference between erotica and porn. (I don't buy the "liteary" vs. "trash" argument, since "porn" and "erotica" are simply genre markers; I think it's possible to be literary -- or not -- within any genre. Compare comic books c. 50 years ago to those today.) It struck me that erotica generally attempts to avoid objectification. Porn is perfectly willing to describe a pair of [pert, heaving] breasts and trust that the reader will be aroused by their mere presence, whether or not a person ever enters the picture; erotica may describe breasts, but the focus will be on the fact that they're attached to a night-shift waitress who's just come from her first trip to the tattoo parlor and is feeling a little vulnerable, though the double Scotch on the table in front of her reveals a hardness to her character, something stony beneath the Velveteen sadness of her eyes...etcetera. (Straight erotica, I should say; gay-male "erotica" is full of throbbing cocks and so on, and I think we'd classify a lot of it as porn if it weren't so hip right now. Many books of "erotica" have a jarring disconnect in tone between the straight or lesbian stories and the gay male ones.)
Porn, sure, is much more interesting when it's about actual people in actual situations; see Phil Foglio's XXXenophile comic for some of the best. But erotica, for me at least, is a lot sexier when it's willing to objectify people from time to time. Erotica sometimes seems to lose sight of the fact that we do have hindbrains; we're aroused by simple markers as well as by complex personalities. If you're writing erotica intended to arouse, or intended to arouse me anyway, please don't be afraid to describe crass, sexy things, even if they're not necessary for character-building or scene-setting. Dangle boobs in front of your readers from time to time; don't worry that you'll objectify the woman attached to them. (And if you're writing porn, please give me a story along with the sex.)
Postscript: I thought of an analogy to the porn/erotica thing. Simple triggers in erotica are like rhythms in music. It's possible to write great, beautiful music without a strong beat, but if you want people to get up and dance it's a lot easier for them to do so if there's something there that makes their feet move. I'm delighted when the lyrics and the chord changes are complex and hifalutin', but the beat is what decides whether or not I tap my feet.
The sad secret is, we objectify people all the time. We no longer live in small, close-knit communities in which everyone knows everyone's names ("Norm!"); most of us live in population centers of thousands or millions, and members of a world-girdling community are piped into our homes via TV and radio and the net. When we watch baseball, we think of the players as ball-hitting objects and ball-catching objects, and don't generally care to get to know them as full persons with individual goals and terrors. The cashier at the bank is a money-dispensing object; the mailman is a mail-delivery object; the yahoo who dents our fender is an obstruction. If we're particularly outgoing and friendly, or if we're having a bright and chipper day, we might learn the names of a few of the people we interact with on a weekly basis -- maybe you ask your mailman about his dogs, or discuss the latest episode of Alias with a checker at the supermarket -- but I don't think it's possible to impute a complete internal life to that many people. (Is there anyone out there who knows the names of everyone they interacted with in the past week? Hermits and people on certain insular campuses in SE Pennsylvania need not reply.) We categorize them, in our minds, in terms of the services they provide us, or the effects they have on our lives. The same is true of attractive people we pass on the street: we appreciate what we can visually, then, usually, discard the rest of their personality without another thought. (I call this the "boobs with legs" reaction.) There's nothing wrong with that, in my eyes. There's nothing in sexual objectification that makes it any worse than, say, athletic objectification.
What reveals our character is our response to continued interaction. Once you've had ten minutes of conversation with someone (maybe more, maybe less), you shift them, probably permanently, from the "object" category into the "person" category. If you get out of the car to talk to the guy who dents your fender, oftentimes (if your anger doesn't get the better of you) you'll find yourself faced with an actual person rather than an object, and the hard words you've saved up will drain away. If you've had a gardener working for you for five years and haven't yet made an effort to learn her name and a little of her life story, if you're unable to shift her into the "person" category, your objectification starts to become offensive. Similarly, if you spend an entire date with an attractive woman, or interview her for a job, and still think of her as nothing more than boobs with legs, that's a problem.
That can be a result of conditioning -- if you were raised to see servants as less than full persons, or if your only real interaction with women comes from Jugs and Maxim, you might have trouble seeing these people as more than objects. But that's a personal slippery slope we all have to monitor for ourselves; I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with objectification, as long as we don't lose the ability to ensoul someone when it becomes necessary.
Last night I was considering the difference between erotica and porn. (I don't buy the "liteary" vs. "trash" argument, since "porn" and "erotica" are simply genre markers; I think it's possible to be literary -- or not -- within any genre. Compare comic books c. 50 years ago to those today.) It struck me that erotica generally attempts to avoid objectification. Porn is perfectly willing to describe a pair of [pert, heaving] breasts and trust that the reader will be aroused by their mere presence, whether or not a person ever enters the picture; erotica may describe breasts, but the focus will be on the fact that they're attached to a night-shift waitress who's just come from her first trip to the tattoo parlor and is feeling a little vulnerable, though the double Scotch on the table in front of her reveals a hardness to her character, something stony beneath the Velveteen sadness of her eyes...etcetera. (Straight erotica, I should say; gay-male "erotica" is full of throbbing cocks and so on, and I think we'd classify a lot of it as porn if it weren't so hip right now. Many books of "erotica" have a jarring disconnect in tone between the straight or lesbian stories and the gay male ones.)
Porn, sure, is much more interesting when it's about actual people in actual situations; see Phil Foglio's XXXenophile comic for some of the best. But erotica, for me at least, is a lot sexier when it's willing to objectify people from time to time. Erotica sometimes seems to lose sight of the fact that we do have hindbrains; we're aroused by simple markers as well as by complex personalities. If you're writing erotica intended to arouse, or intended to arouse me anyway, please don't be afraid to describe crass, sexy things, even if they're not necessary for character-building or scene-setting. Dangle boobs in front of your readers from time to time; don't worry that you'll objectify the woman attached to them. (And if you're writing porn, please give me a story along with the sex.)
Postscript: I thought of an analogy to the porn/erotica thing. Simple triggers in erotica are like rhythms in music. It's possible to write great, beautiful music without a strong beat, but if you want people to get up and dance it's a lot easier for them to do so if there's something there that makes their feet move. I'm delighted when the lyrics and the chord changes are complex and hifalutin', but the beat is what decides whether or not I tap my feet.
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no subject
Date: 2004-03-29 06:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-29 09:55 pm (UTC)PORN EROTICA
tits creamy mounds
nipple rosey peak
cunt core
juices nectar
clit bundle of nerves
come release
fuck come together
ass hole ring of muscle
(this particular list posted by gizzie to alt.tv.xfiles.creative, I think, during one of the eruptions of the porn/erotica debate) I think I also remember claims that it's always erotica if there are ILYs, it's always porn if there is any discussion of ejaculate (location, quantity, consistency etc thereof)... and the world ends if your story features both, I guess. I think the popularity of the terms "smut" and "lemon" in fandom has something to do with avoiding the p/e debate, as does the back-construction of PWP to mean "plot what plot" instead of "porn without plot".
And, sorry, that was a rant, but, just, oy. The allure of genre debate, I do not understand it.
I have another whole comment but perhaps I will post that separately as long posts in lynx are a bit of a pain.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-30 01:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-30 02:34 pm (UTC)"Lemon" is a term from anime fandom referring to sexually-explicit fic; "lime" is milder, like it's sexually suggestive, or it doesn't go "all the way". I've occasionally seen "orange" to mean kissy of a PG romance type or "citrus" to mean very mildly suggestive, but "citrus" can also be a catch-all for lemon and lime. And apparently there is some usage of "grapefruit" to mean noncon (er, non-consensual) but I don't think I've ever actually seen that outside a glossary.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-30 02:26 pm (UTC)Um... What's that?
no subject
Date: 2004-03-30 02:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-29 10:35 pm (UTC)actual situations; see Phil Foglio's XXXenophile comic for some of
the best.
Haha, how funny, and here I like XXXenophile for the wacky inventiveness of the situations, and the cheerful implausibility with which the characters invariably respond to all of them by having sex. Delightfully cartoony in a totally-unconcerned-with-reality kind of way. Unless you just mean that it bothers to have characters with names as opposed to just pictures of bodies - I guess that doesn't seem unusual to me as almost all written porn I've encountered has some kind of framing story around the sex to explain how the sex happens to be happening, unless it's a deliberate BDSM anonymity thing coming directly in on a scene in progress with nameless, faceless participants. Er, which is to say, the "having a scenario" thing doesn't seem unusual in itself.
On another topic entirely, now I'm not even sure I know what is meant by "objectification of women". To how I would think about it, ogling girls at Rocky Horror isn't "objectification of women", because, like, part of the whole point of dressing up for Rocky is inviting ogling. At least from personal experience, I mean, I would not put on fishnets because they're so warm and comfy. So that seems different than getting leered at while walking down the street in normal clothes. That's what I would call objectification - people reading you as a body despite a lack of signals to do so, instead of by invitation.
I also disagree with your opinion that there's nothing inherently worse about sexual objectification. I really, really hate to pull out the "women as victims" thing, but, like, there was a certain population at my high school much prone to the shouting of appreciative/rude/obscene comments at girls in certain halls, and it wasn't just an annoyance, it could be quite intimidating. Especially as they were generally not in English and so one could never be quite sure what intentions/threats might be being expressed. I never got groped (except like once getting on the bus) but it was really a relief when my locker was in a different building the next year. Now, obviously, you, as a well-mannered adult instead of a sixteen-year-old jackass, are not going to go creeping out young women by yelling to them about how you're objectifying them. But there's still something kind of threatening about the whole habit of "objectify first, personify later", because maybe there is that one guy in 1000, or whatever,
who is going to act on his impulses before reaching the "personify" stage. I guess that's unfair to let that lead to any unease about harmless and fun objectification by the other 999 guys. (On the other hand, I have no problem with the objectification of women in porn, because that seems like a specific context in which the objectification is invited, like Rocky. Just in case I was starting to sound like one of those anti-porn feminists.)
no subject
Date: 2004-03-30 04:55 am (UTC)I think the oh-my-god-it's-objectification panic had it's place in the women's lib movement, but that we don't need it anymore. Basically, I agree with most of what you've said.
I do think there's a very fine line between icky ogling, and okay ogling, but if one is thinking about it, one is on the right side. And the only real problem with the icky ogling is that it pisses people off, and is unlikely to get you any girls. (Hee, that reminds me of something a high-school friend, who I just got back in touch with, did once. He was one of those people who cheerfully hit on just about every girl, and no-one (or almost no-one) minded. We were sitting around one night, and someone mentions an utter slease that creeped us all out. So our friend first verifies that he doesn't creep us out. Then he (with his arms still around two of the girls sitting there), changes his posture infinitesimally. Every girl in the room suddenly recoils. It was really odd -- same person, just slightly different posture.)
no subject
Date: 2004-03-30 07:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-30 09:22 am (UTC)I will, with amusement, add that the entire story also took place at family church camp. But I'm a Unitarian Universalist, so that's not terribly surprising...
no subject
Date: 2004-03-30 05:05 am (UTC)This is what some people call "crushing" or "infatuation", but there are definitely forms of crushing that involve starting with the interesting personality characteristic and building up everything around that (even canceling out initial antipathy to physical attraction), and while I think all crushing is ultimately pretty dumb I prefer that kind to the all-too-obvious because-she's-hot kind.
We all know the stereotype of the, say, celebrity stalker who does it, but it's definitely something that ordinary guys in ordinary life do, and it's kind of tiresome even when it isn't verging on scary. People need to learn to either disguise their trains of thought better, or else allow themselves to worship bodies without letting it entirely distort their ability to judge character.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-30 06:21 am (UTC)straight white alcoholic chimney sweepconfirmed ogler myself, I agree with much of what you say. I don't think there's much harm, when I walk through the grocery store, in noticing the attractiveness of all the women nearby. I find, in fact, that for each woman I tend to notice that woman's particular attractiveness (nice eyes … nice tits … nice hair … nice tits … oh my LORD … nice neck), while for each man I tend to notice something unattractive or unpleasant (horrible haircut … oh, a combover, great … this guy's a yobbo … have another beer, boy … is that your nose, or are you eating a banana … it's called a razor, moron).The problem, or disagreement, or whatnot, is that I objectify women even when I know them well. That is, I am always aware of a woman's attractiveness, well after the first conversation or the thirtieth. Not that I don't think of the woman in question as a person, I just also think of the woman as an attractive woman. And since all women are beautiful (except an extremely rare yugg-ugg), that is a part of all my experience with women. I can have, and often have, conversations with men I know well without the slightest thought of what they look like, but pretty much never with women.
Is this a problem? Yes, probably, but not so terribly much of one. I'm sure I make lots of women uncomfortable, and those women likely avoid me, so I'm missing a bunch of friendships I might otherwise enjoy. But I didn't, for instance, hire the babysitter based remotely on looks. I have been able to work with and for women without incident or discomfort (at least without discomfort on my part, and without being aware of discomfort on the woman's part). In fact, women I do become friends with have occasionally mentioned that I am very obviously safe--that is, I suppose, that I am extremely married and extremely monogamous, and extremely unlikely to turn my appreciation of a woman's attractiveness into a pass.
So I'm muddled about the whole idea, and have taken to wearing sunglasses whenever possible.
Oh, and I don't read erotica.
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian (http://www.kith.org/vardibidian/journal/).
no subject
Date: 2004-03-30 08:05 am (UTC)Personally, I am not that visually oriented, so I only objectify men if I am actively put in such a situation (like Antonio Banderas in "Mask of Zorro"), not if I am just meandering through life. But I certainly know women who notice the attractiveness of men, and have no qualms about that.
Is it still objectification if women do it?
no subject
Date: 2004-03-30 02:01 pm (UTC)Since then, I've also heard straight women make such comments about men, though I think less often.