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.
