Sexual objectification

[wokking56]

3 hours ago, jdods13 said:

Don't human beings objectify pretty much everything? We take everything and place our own labels on it to help us understand why we like/dislike it or choose to accept it or not. ... The objectification starts when the media tries to pin down a label that tells the rest of the population what is "beautiful", "acceptable" and to be "liked" or dis-liked.

Exactly first we are spoon fed ideologies of what is beautiful or what we should like and when we are sufficiently indoctrinated we lay claim to all we "love?".

So yes humans objectify everything (mostly based on it's beauty or value), hell we attempt to make our "belongings" out to be better than everyone else's.

Let's start with actual objects; "Look at MY car isn't she a beaut." or "Have you seen MY house yet?" Then we of course do the same with living thing as well; "MY dog took best in show" or "MY son is a doctor" and "MY wife could be a model". As you see we will first off emphasize that it is ours then try to explain why ours is better than yours. So it is not that far of a stretch to see why we might look at the entire world in the same light. As I mentioned in an earlier post objectification actually doesn't harm anyone. It is sadly however how we have learned to look at the world either good or bad no middle ground, our way of putting a label on things. That is unfortunately what it all boils down to. So I guess the point I am making here (strange as it may be) is that we only bother to objectify things to differentiate their value to us as individuals. We love our labels hardly a day goes by that someone I know doesn't relate some story to me that does not contain some sort of a descriptor in it. For instance: the old lady at the DMV. that fat guy at the park, my black friend said, the stupid kid at the grocery. Labels to objectify and quantify each of these peoples worth or lack there of.

Now I am not sating this is right I am just saying it doesn't hurt anyone, and sure I am aware that I am total "shit" in some peoples eyes but I don't give a damn. So they can think whatever they want.

[Guest]

Labels are not the same as objectification. When someone says "my wife" there are two different reasons for that to be phrased as such.

 

 

One is the use of "my" as possessive, in reference to ownership. This is objectification. The idea that another person is an item to be pursued and not a relationship to be lived. This is genuinely dangerous, as it promotes many men to still think of women as literal objects, not just their own partner, but other women too which devalues our cultural and societal influences keeping us a social minority.

 

And they will justify it with all numbers of reasons. Far from the least common being "men evolved to hunt and protect women so by keeping them sheltered (controlled) we are doing as nature intended/protecting them/etc.", or "men evolved to pursue women so it's not rude for me to walk around salivating on every woman I find attractive" so please excuse any hostility for the "humans evolved to do *this*" line of argument should that not be your intention to justify these sorts of actions.

 

 

The other is simply the use of "my" because it's the grammatical expectation. This is labeling. This is different from objectification.

[Jazzman]

Studies of today hunter-gatherer societies (!Kung bushmen etc) and analysis of the mitochondrial DNA of prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies show that marriage procedures with bride service as well as divorce at the instigation of men and women was common since humans left Africa and polygamy extremely low (though permitted). There's a degree of confusion among today people as to how the relationship was in fact handled, what the bride service has actually meant for the woman (purchased or leased), who had to accept the price before the deal is done (father or mother of the bride) and what marriage actually has meant in everyday life.

 

For a start, the hunter of a hunter-gatherer clan didn't explicitly protect his wife and his kids in lone ranger fashion, rather the hunters of a clan protected all clan women and their kids as a male collective, a force to be reckoned with. Protection of women and kids was quite essential for the survival of the clan. The modern idea that it's all about me, myself and I was still alien to prehistorical man. Luckily, for otherwise we wouldn't even be here to talk about it...

 

[Guest]

15 minutes ago, Jazzman said:

Studies of today hunter-gatherer societies (!Kung bushmen etc) and analysis of the mitochondrial DNA of prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies show that marriage procedures with bride service as well as divorce at the instigation of men and women was common since humans left Africa and polygamy extreme low (though permitted). There's a degree of confusion among today people as to how the relationship was in fact handled, what the bride service has actually meant for the woman (purchased or leased), who had to accept the price before the deal is done (father or mother of the bride) and what marriage actually has meant in everyday life.

 

For a start, the hunter of a hunter-gatherer clan didn't explicitly protect his wife and his kids in lone ranger fashion, rather the hunters of a clan protected all clan women and their kids as a male collective, a force to be reckoned with. Protection of women and kids was quite essential for the survival of the clan. The modern idea that it's all about me, myself and I was still alien to prehistorical man. Luckily, for otherwise we wouldn't even be here to talk about it...

 

Regardless, the issue comes in the romanticization of a medieval era understanding of how they perceived earlier cultures to have functioned, or more specifically the manner in which they then used those claims of understanding to justify their leading classes bigoted actions. These claims are what were inherited through societies into the modern era.

[GrimReaper]

3 hours ago, wokking56 said:

Exactly first we are spoon fed ideologies of what is beautiful or what we should like and when we are sufficiently indoctrinated we lay claim to all we "love?".

So yes humans objectify everything (mostly based on it's beauty or value), hell we attempt to make our "belongings" out to be better than everyone else's.

Let's start with actual objects; "Look at MY car isn't she a beaut." or "Have you seen MY house yet?" Then we of course do the same with living thing as well; "MY dog took best in show" or "MY son is a doctor" and "MY wife could be a model". As you see we will first off emphasize that it is ours then try to explain why ours is better than yours. So it is not that far of a stretch to see why we might look at the entire world in the same light. As I mentioned in an earlier post objectification actually doesn't harm anyone. It is sadly however how we have learned to look at the world either good or bad no middle ground, our way of putting a label on things. That is unfortunately what it all boils down to. So I guess the point I am making here (strange as it may be) is that we only bother to objectify things to differentiate their value to us as individuals. We love our labels hardly a day goes by that someone I know doesn't relate some story to me that does not contain some sort of a descriptor in it. For instance: the old lady at the DMV. that fat guy at the park, my black friend said, the stupid kid at the grocery. Labels to objectify and quantify each of these peoples worth or lack there of.

Now I am not sating this is right I am just saying it doesn't hurt anyone, and sure I am aware that I am total "shit" in some peoples eyes but I don't give a damn. So they can think whatever they want.

The reason you show off status symbols is because they represent what you have achieved. If you own an expensive car, you certainly had some success in life in order to do so - or you're a spoiled brat who got everything from rich parents. If you're boasting about the success of your children, you're emphasizing on, well, what they're doing and how successful they are, partly because you obviously have been a good parent because otherwise they wouldn't be the way they are now.

 

I'd like to point out again that sexual attraction is not sexual objectification, the latter occurs only if you reduce another human to nothing more than a means to an end. They're not a person, they're a tool to be used and discarded according to your needs.

 

Language is certainly an important factor here, but it's false to assume the limitations of language are rooted in objectifications. If you're talking about a certain old lady, you're obviously aware that there's much more behind the person than her age and sex. The person you're talking to however might not know said lady so it's much easier to communicate with tokens. If you're talking about someone who also knows the person you're talking about, you'd use a very different approach. You'd likely call the old lady by her name instead because a token isn't needed to convey who you're actually talking about.

[Jazzman]

1 hour ago, stargatedalek said:

Regardless, the issue comes in the romanticization of a medieval era understanding of how they perceived earlier cultures to have functioned, or more specifically the manner in which they then used those claims of understanding to justify their leading classes bigoted actions. These claims are what were inherited through societies into the modern era.

You're referring to serfdom in the era of feudalism - he who loves my hen is my rooster. The objectification of man, enforced submission under the patron, the landlord, wherever, whenever possible, I see. However, I guess this epoch saw the past hardly different from the present and that I'd not call romanticizing the bygone ages, rather a striking lack of education among the contemporary elite in those days as it was still custom in the preceding antiquity. The Medieval Age is called dark because of a general stupidification of the European culture. The contemporaries missed the dark forest for the trees.

 

What did the priests say in those days to the illiterate flock? Let us pray!

Pater noster, qui es in caelis: sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum...

 

Got him? Aye, but not in the year 1.000... when it was a kind of magic and education the privilege of the literate clergy.

[GrimReaper]

I thought that many scholars nowadays don't like the term dark age because it overgeneralizes things and paints that time period in a much more negative way than it actually was. I don't think that early medieval europe was somehow more barbaric than those that came before. There hasn't been an emphasis on education and intellectuality during that time, but I suppose that was more because the late roman empire left an enormous power vacuum leading to the rise of what might essentially considered be warlords warring for power.

 

There have always been times of instability throughout many cultures. The Dark Ages in europe, Warring States in China, the Sengoku period in Japan and many others. But that's quite off-topic so sorry for that.

[Guest]

The issue I'm referring to is the modern day romanticization of the values of those and shortly following times, rather than the politics of the times in themselves. A lot of people romanticize these times and seemingly always for the wrong reasons. It's frightening how many people truly wish to regress society after falsely believing the times were better for people like themselves.

 

And it's definitely tied very closely to objectification, at least in a modern context. I hear all the time certain kinds of people claim the world used to better or simpler back in the 50's - 30's -1800's etc. and it's nonsense.

[Guest]

just becouse a person get arousal or get sexual intrest dosnt give or permit the right to in any way downgrade anyone in such objectified/ sexual pointify view.

this goes for either gender. theres no tip a toe around this, always have this respect regardless.

[wokking56]

3 hours ago, GrimReaper said:

I'd like to point out again that sexual attraction is not sexual objectification, the latter occurs only if you reduce another human to nothing more than a means to an end.

 

Language is certainly an important factor here, but it's false to assume the limitations of language are rooted in objectifications. If you're talking about a certain old lady, you're obviously aware that there's much more behind the person than her age and sex. The person you're talking to however might not know said lady so it's much easier to communicate with tokens. If you're talking about someone who also knows the person you're talking about, you'd use a very different approach. You'd likely call the old lady by her name instead because a token isn't needed to convey who you're actually talking about.

 

While I wholeheartedly agree that attraction and objectification are two entirely different things. You and many other people however only see the objectification when thinking in terms of sexual gratification. " reduce another human to nothing more than a means to an end." The mere act of labeling another person automatically reduces them to an object whether sexually fueled or not. This makes the phrases "the old lady at the DMV" and "the big tittied girl at the bank" equally wrong. Both of them label the female based on a physical attribute. Yet when saying old lady you assumed either I or the person I was talking to did not know her name, however if I say big tittied girl it is automatically assumed that I have some lecherous intent.  The ever popular "double standard" either both terms are wrong or neither term is wrong you can't have it both ways. I truly can't make this any clearer, a label means nothing to the one being labeled since they already know their true worth. I will leave this topic for now as I don't want to say anything to offend anyone.

[Guest]

That is not a double standard, that is, sorry for the inevitable cringe, simply patriarchy.

 

You're in a position to assume those are equal things, because as a man in western society someone saying that you are "that guy with the great abs" and "an old guy" are more or less equivalent. As a woman, someone you don't know saying you are "that girl with the big tits" (especially with that phrasing) is absolutely not a compliment, it is actively derogatory, you're being reduced to your sex appeal. Being called old isn't nice either, but it's a "one and done" type statement, with no lasting repercussions.

 

But, why is abs different from breasts? It's about public perception, male sexuality is so ubiquitous in western society that it's practically meaningless. Female sexuality is not. A woman being sexualized is going to attract attention, a man isn't, and that's why reducing a girl to her sex value is so potentially bad for her. Yes being objectified is still going to be stressful for a man is taken to extremes, but it takes a lot for it to get there, not so for women.

 

The only double standard is in the way women get treated after being sexually objectified vs how men get treated.

[wokking56]

4 hours ago, stargatedalek said:

That is not a double standard, that is, sorry for the inevitable cringe, simply patriarchy.

 

The only double standard is in the way women get treated after being sexually objectified vs how men get treated.

Oh the patriarchy, I have been waiting for that term to be thrown around. I'm a male so I can't understand. What the F ever. First and foremost I never said that commenting on a woman's appearance was NOT a bad thing. My question is where's the patriarchy when a man gets abused by his wife (it does happen) no shelters for him sorry. Where's the patriarchy when a man gets raped (it also happens) he has to prove it beyond a doubt. Case in point https://nypost.com/2018/06/26/woman-forced-ex-to-have-sex-holding-machete-to-his-face-cops/ and not once even a mention of the word rape. A woman cries rape and the man now has to prove his innocence beyond any doubt. In a divorce it is nearly impossible for a man to get custody of his children. If a woman has an unwanted pregnancy she can exercise her right to get an abortion but the father has no say in it at all. Where's all that fricken patriarchy in that. Furthermore you are so wrong being called "that guy with the great abs" is in no way equivalent to being called "that old guy" or "The fat guy" or even "the bald dude". That crap hurts our feeling too you know we however for the most part don't piss and moan about it. We shake it off and get over it. If I whined and cried over every slight/rude comment/rejection (real or imagined) through out my life I would be a drooling mess in the back of my closet (hiding from the cruel world).

 

The point I have been making for the last 2 or 3 post (that you can't seem to understand) is not that it is OK to objectify but that some people only seem to see as a sexual thing. When I said "the old lady at the DMV. that fat guy at the park, my black friend said, the stupid kid at the grocery" those remarks are objectifications. Yet you fail to see it because it is not "the way women get treated after being sexually objectified" . Victim mentality that's what that is "he said something that hurt my feelings now I have to let the world know how I've been mistreated". Trust me if someone treats you like crap after saying something rude they were going to treat you like crap anyway.

[Jazzman]

13 hours ago, stargatedalek said:

The issue I'm referring to is the modern day romanticization of the values of those and shortly following times, rather than the politics of the times in themselves. A lot of people romanticize these times and seemingly always for the wrong reasons. It's frightening how many people truly wish to regress society after falsely believing the times were better for people like themselves.

Let me tell you of the days of high adventure... (Conan the Barbarian)

 

We can barely see past the dawn of our own puberty (earlier memory of the adult is always just fragmentary) and thus heavily rely on parental hearsay and written 3rd party information of uncertain objectivity. So at best we have 1st hand past knowledge of three generations, the own included. Since humans have a tendency to romanticize the own blurred youth and thus the past as such, was there ever a period in the last three generations when things were objectively better for the contemporaries than they are today? Yes, there was such a brief period. It lasted some ten years and got messed up under the coked eyes of those who benefited the most of it - the 70s of the boomers. In case you didn't know it yet, the purchasing power of the average US family of today is exactly on the 1970s level (!) of the not debt-ridden parents of those hippies that soon thereafter morphed into their own commercialized Gucci nemesis and that of their children, the today (heavily indebted) millennials. We're heading for monetary serfdom.

 

Back to the mentioned 'terrors of the year one thousand' (Ortega y Gasset), the serfdom at the dawn of feudalism and the objectification of all things as assets, man as property. You go to bed as a free man, and you wake up as a serf. That tells you everything you need to know about the patriarchal power of the patronage and its fiefdom. Objectification was and still is the manifestation of power, real exercised power in the past and just imagined in the present (as a billionaire you can try for a long time, but sooner or later God's gonna cut ya down, as Johnny Cash put it), for money aristocrats and citizens alike, from the social top down to the family level of common man.

 

Objectification (to be distinguished from attraction) is a learned for taught phenomenon, as is gender solidarity, the modern victim mentality of the perpetrator in a court case gets support by the brotherhood as well as the 'victim mentality of the victim' (see the pun?) by the sisterhood. However, since trans people play statistically no role whatsoever in a democratic society with obviously weak bladder in public and this also goes for female rapists (of whom Miss Clinton is allegedly one), we shouldn't pull them out of the hat in a defense case just to give way to political correct gender equality, a tool of control by the powers-that-be to distract us from the real, structural problems in our today society.

 

No one, no one in this world can you trust... not men, not women, not beasts... this [the sword made of steel]... you can trust! (Conan the Barbarian)

 

Have a good one!

[Faolon]

On 8/16/2018 at 11:40 AM, theposhmudcrab said:

Do you think men can be objectified(and/or treated like a sex object?) I don't think I have ever seen that men have been treated that way in the media(not in games, not in movies) or in any other way/place by anyone. I can tell when women are objectified(in the sexual way), with men I can't and I thought maybe they can't be objectified(sexually)? but surely I am wrong, maybe I don't know enough or I just can't tell(for some reason, which I probably don't know). I have heard some men talk about women in a sexually objectifying way, but I never seen or heard women talk like that about men. But there is also the whole case of both genders wanting different things(this is a whole other topic and not what I wanted to discuss in this thread).

 

 

If you've never heard women talk about men, the way men talk about women, then you've never been close enough to a woman. Women are often far worse than men are. Whereas men can view women as a prize to work towards, women view men as objects to use and discard like a tampon.

 

 

The suffering of a single woman is a tragedy. The deaths of millions of men is just another facet of life.

[KoolHndLuke]

1 hour ago, Faolon said:

 

 

If you've never heard women talk about men, the way men talk about women, then you've never been close enough to a woman. Women are often far worse than men are. Whereas men can view women as a prize to work towards, women view men as objects to use and discard like a tampon.

 

 

The suffering of a single woman is a tragedy. The deaths of millions of men is just another facet of life.

Indeed, whole societies were built around keeping women happy and safe. When men fight for dominance- mating rights are one of the main points of it whether they would admit it or not or are even aware of what drives them. Would men fight nearly as much if there had never been women? I've lost several good friends because of fighting over a woman.

 

[shencereys]

 

3 hours ago, Jazzman said:

Let me tell you of the days of high adventure... (Conan the Barbarian)

 

We can barely see past the dawn of our own puberty (earlier memory of the adult is always just fragmentary) and thus heavily rely on parental hearsay and written 3rd party information of uncertain objectivity. So at best we have 1st hand past knowledge of three generations, the own included. Since humans have a tendency to romanticize the own blurred youth and thus the past as such, was there ever a period in the last three generations when things were objectively better for the contemporaries than they are today? Yes, there was such a brief period. It lasted some ten years and got messed up under the coked eyes of those who benefited the most of it - the 70s of the boomers. In case you didn't know it yet, the purchasing power of the average US family of today is exactly on the 1970s level (!) of the not debt-ridden parents of those hippies that soon thereafter morphed into their own commercialized Gucci nemesis and that of their children, the today (heavily indebted) millennials.

 

Back to the mentioned 'terrors of the year one thousand' (Ortega y Gasset), the serfdom at the dawn of feudalism and the objectification of all things as assets, man as property. You go to bed as a free man, and you wake up as a serf. That tells you everything you need to know about the patriarchal power of the patronage and its fiefdom. Objectification was and still is the manifestation of power, real exercised power in the past and just imagined in the present (as a billionaire you can try for a long time, but sooner or later God's gonna cut ya down, as Johnny Cash put it), for money aristocrats and citizens alike, from the social top down to the family level of common man.

 

Objectification (to be distinguished from attraction) is a learned for taught phenomenon, as is gender solidarity, the modern victim mentality of the perpetrator in a court case gets support by the brotherhood as well as the 'victim mentality of the victim' (see the pun?) by the sisterhood. However, since trans people play statistically no role whatsoever in a democratic society with obviously weak bladder in public and this also goes as for female rapists (of whom Miss Clinton is allegedly one), we shouldn't pull them out of the hat in a defense case just to give way to political correct gender equality, a tool of control by the powers-that-be to distract us from the real, structural problems in our today society.

 

No one, no one in this world can you trust... not men, not women, not beasts... this [the sword made of steel]... you can trust! (Conan the Barbarian)

 

Have a good one!

 

 

Can you imagine though?  Living in a time when land wasn't owned, when you and your tribe could simply just wander everywhere?  Pick a direction and that way lies whatever you make of it.

 

I'm sure it had it's awful problems... but when I think of having the liberty to go anywhere I wanted at any time, and the wonder of the great unknown, sometimes I think maybe knowing I was going to die horribly and most likely early of tetanus or gout or some other treatable disease, I have to imagine that a shorter more painful life in those conditions would still be a fair trade.  Thats this kind of freedom the likes of us will never taste of.

 

And that's why I get nostalgic for it, personally.   A way of life that's gone never to return, at least never for me.  

 

This really has nothing to do with objectification, I guess I'm derailing again, but I can't understand how one can NOT wish for that kind of free living - safety be damned, what's a long, modern safe life worth if you're someone's serf for the entirety of it?

 

and backtracking a bit

16 hours ago, Jazzman said:

For a start, the hunter of a hunter-gatherer clan didn't explicitly protect his wife and his kids in lone ranger fashion, rather the hunters of a clan protected all clan women and their kids as a male collective, a force to be reckoned with. Protection of women and kids was quite essential for the survival of the clan. The modern idea that it's all about me, myself and I was still alien to prehistorical man. Luckily, for otherwise we wouldn't even be here to talk about it...

 

 

I like your point but (and maybe you weren't going in this direction) this "pack" and "herd" defending behavior (we defend our mates, our children - the herd's and not just our own) is not exclusive to humans (obviously you know this, but), and we're well able to successfully model it mathematically.  Although the math is above my head it's shown that the nuances of these behaviors in animals are consistent with a "selfish" explanation and not a "group" explanation - or so I was taught a few years ago.

 

So you defend your herd/pack/tribe and the mates/children within because (in terms of reproductive fecundity) it tends to benefit you to do so no matter who you are, and an animal's relative investment in this kind of behavior seems to be (as near as we're able to simulate it and examine it in the wild) only proportional to the reproductive-benefit we observe.  Now I should point out that I'm not sure anybody's applied this to humans, at least mathematically yet.

 

But I do not believe we're exempt from this.  I'm pretty sure the reason we evolved to defend the tribe is because our children/future children/children of our blood are at stake, and not so much because it's nice to cooperate. So, owing to my background, I contend that our hypothetical "average hunter-gatherer guy" wasn't explicitly defending the tribe.  While I agree that the idea of "first - me, myself, and I" wasn't really formulated in its modern incarnation yet, yet his behavior was indistinguishable from it.

but that is to say that I agree wholeheartedly overall with the tone of your argument, i'm just needling over the details, as is my habit :S

[Jazzman]

5 hours ago, shencereys said:

Can you imagine though?  Living in a time when land wasn't owned, when you and your tribe could simply just wander everywhere?  Pick a direction and that way lies whatever you make of it.

 

I like your point but (and maybe you weren't going in this direction) this "pack" and "herd" defending behavior (we defend our mates, our children - the herd's and not just our own) is not exclusive to humans (obviously you know this, but), and we're well able to successfully model it mathematically.  Although the math is above my head it's shown that the nuances of these behaviors in animals are consistent with a "selfish" explanation and not a "group" explanation - or so I was taught a few years ago.

 

I'm pretty sure the reason we evolved to defend the tribe is because our children/future children/children of our blood are at stake, and not so much because it's nice to cooperate. So, owing to my background, I contend that our hypothetical "average hunter-gatherer guy" wasn't explicitly defending the tribe.  While I agree that the idea of "first - me, myself, and I" wasn't really formulated in its modern incarnation yet, yet his behavior was indistinguishable from it.

Of course I can imagine this, I can even remember me to some extent, like any other child grown up on ranch on the plain with the border fence beyond the horizon. When you can't see the fence and the buildings anymore as a kid and there are no fuckin' adults around you, now that's freedom. A freedom one never smells again as an adult, knowing all-too well what's beyond the horizon. A priceless memory worthy to get romanticized. Doubt that my little son would ever feel inspired by this when we visit my parents again, addicted to the world on screen as he and his friends are today. Maybe he'll never smell the freedom of space in his life. Don't want to think about it now tho.

 

A hunter-gatherer fights for his clan 'cause it is mutually beneficial, a win-win, the only workable option. If we call that selfish, well, how shall we call a banished hunter that can't hunt big game anymore for days or weeks for being alone on the dangerous hunt, just small game in close proximity of the undefended camp, the vulnerable wife and the offspring, the family thus having a hard time to see the next spring alive, all of them? I for one would not follow a man with my child into exile under such suicidal conditions in prehistoric times... and looking at the child, that's not even to be called selfish either.

[shencereys]

34 minutes ago, Jazzman said:

A hunter-gatherer fights for his clan 'cause it is mutually beneficial, a win-win, the only workable option. If we call that selfish, well, how shall we call a banished hunter that can't hunt big game anymore for days or weeks for being alone on the dangerous hunt, just small game in close proximity of the undefended camp, the vulnerable wife and the offspring, the family thus having a hard time to see the next spring alive, all of them? I for one would not follow a man with my child into exile under such suicidal conditions in prehistoric times... and looking at the child, that's not even to be called selfish either.

I meant its "selfish" only in that it causes copies of one's own genes to spread, which is why desires to do anything evolved, is my point.   The fact that it helps nonrelatives is tertiary.   I didn't think that characterizing clan defense as altruism or unselfish was technically accurate, because all successful herd/social animals anywhere do it.  I'm probably just being too pedantic.

[Guest]

10 hours ago, wokking56 said:

Oh the patriarchy, I have been waiting for that term to be thrown around. I'm a male so I can't understand. What the F ever. First and foremost I never said that commenting on a woman's appearance was NOT a bad thing. My question is where's the patriarchy when a man gets abused by his wife (it does happen) no shelters for him sorry. Where's the patriarchy when a man gets raped (it also happens) he has to prove it beyond a doubt. Case in point https://nypost.com/2018/06/26/woman-forced-ex-to-have-sex-holding-machete-to-his-face-cops/ and not once even a mention of the word rape. A woman cries rape and the man now has to prove his innocence beyond any doubt. In a divorce it is nearly impossible for a man to get custody of his children. If a woman has an unwanted pregnancy she can exercise her right to get an abortion but the father has no say in it at all. Where's all that fricken patriarchy in that. Furthermore you are so wrong being called "that guy with the great abs" is in no way equivalent to being called "that old guy" or "The fat guy" or even "the bald dude". That crap hurts our feeling too you know we however for the most part don't piss and moan about it. We shake it off and get over it. If I whined and cried over every slight/rude comment/rejection (real or imagined) through out my life I would be a drooling mess in the back of my closet (hiding from the cruel world).

 

The point I have been making for the last 2 or 3 post (that you can't seem to understand) is not that it is OK to objectify but that some people only seem to see as a sexual thing. When I said "the old lady at the DMV. that fat guy at the park, my black friend said, the stupid kid at the grocery" those remarks are objectifications. Yet you fail to see it because it is not "the way women get treated after being sexually objectified" . Victim mentality that's what that is "he said something that hurt my feelings now I have to let the world know how I've been mistreated". Trust me if someone treats you like crap after saying something rude they were going to treat you like crap anyway.

Mentioning patriarchy isn't automatically calling anyone around misogynistic. Patriarchy is in reference to male dominated or male biased social norms, not some Illuminati society of men.

 

The fact that "the old guy" comment is the one that men are in a position to be offended by is pretty good evidence. It's rare (not unheard of) for men to be sexually harassed in the same way that women are, but when a man gets harassed the societal expectation (see, not always what he does) is that he can do whatever is within his means to get the woman away from him, we are not granted the luxury of that expectation. If a man gets aggressively hit on a woman he can yell at her, push her away, etc., but if a woman tries to force away a man we get ostracized, or he claims that we're playing hard to get and only continues. Heck, a lot of men actually expect women to enjoy it when they walk up to us and start touching us.

 

For a man, having someone say you have great abs is a compliment, but for a woman some stranger commenting on your breasts (especially if he calls them "tits" to your face) is terrifying, because it's done as an expression of dominance. Commenting on a mans abs is saying "congratulations" complementing a woman's breasts is saying "I want those". That is not a "victim mentality", that is just being aware of problems in our society and the risks we face from them.

 

 

 

It is indeed strange that the article doesn't use the word rape at any point, but they sure don't sugar coat anything. They explain in detail exactly what she did and really run home just how fucking bat-shit crazy she is. It's entirely possible they didn't say rape because they didn't feel it was needed after going into detail. Rape is a much broader term than people often realize, rape is any non consentual sexual contact, which includes not only forced intercourse but also groping, or intercourse with people who are not in a position to consent (drunk, minor, etc.). It's also possible this article just wasn't edited or reviewed well because it wasn't expected to get much attention. If it was an attempt at pro-female virtue signaling or bias than it was an unsuccessful attempt.

 

Actually no, a man does not have to prove his innocence, the victims lawyer has to prove his guilt. If you want to disprove that guilt, you will be better off if you can find some evidence promoting your alibi. This is how the criminal justice systems in North America work, this is nothing new. There are still rape cases in North America within the past few years where judges have ruled in favor of the woman "asking for it" because she wore a revealing outfit. Hard to see any pro-female bias in that.

 

I don't know much about divorce court cases to comment, but women are significantly more likely to make less money than their husbands, so for her to end up with full custody seems abnormal unless there was something about him that made him less suited to raise the children.

 

The father should never have a say in an abortion. All he needed to do was orgasm, the woman needs to face expensive medical bills, spend many months unable to work, and go through the painful and dangerous ordeal of child birth. If he wants the child so badly (and she doesn't) he should offer to cover all of those expenses, and even then it wouldn't be ethical for him to have any way to force this woman to risk her life in order to deliver his baby.

 

 

 

You do have a point that attacks perpetrated on men often get very little media attention, but the reasons for that aren't the ones you say they are. Men don't like to have their own masculinity challenged, so they try to ignore attacks perpetrated on other men, "I would never loose a fight like that!" or "weak men aren't relevant to me" is a typical response. It's not every man, but it's a sizeable enough amount that the media doesn't linger on these events since they don't garner as much attention.

 

Whereas for women, attacks on other women tend to elicit sympathy, or self-conscious fear. We're obligated to learn about these attacks to have a better idea of what situations to avoid ending up in. And men no longer feel challenged, so they don't avoid these headlines like a plague, even if some men largely ignore them. The media is incentivized to draw more attention to these events because of this.

 

This is not the media being female biased, this is the media covering what people pay the most attention to. Men included. Toxic masculinity is a problem that often hurts men and male representation as much as it hurts women.

 

 

5 hours ago, KoolHndLuke said:

Indeed, whole societies were built around keeping women happy and safe. When men fight for dominance- mating rights are one of the main points of it whether they would admit it or not or are even aware of what drives them. Would men fight nearly as much if there had never been women? I've lost several good friends because of fighting over a woman.

Women in societies where we were not permitted to control our own lives were not happy. Sure some played along, but no woman was truly happy about her role in society (even as recent as for example the 1960's). Men fighting and killing each other because they want(ed) to own women does not justify them owning women.

 

7 hours ago, Faolon said:

If you've never heard women talk about men, the way men talk about women, then you've never been close enough to a woman. Women are often far worse than men are. Whereas men can view women as a prize to work towards, women view men as objects to use and discard like a tampon.

 

The suffering of a single woman is a tragedy. The deaths of millions of men is just another facet of life.

And have you ever heard a woman talk that way to a mans face? I doubt it, it's very rare. But men say that sort of stuff brazenly in public and directly to women all the time. The kind of women who do think that way don't often act on it, since they expect to face repercussions that men don't if their inappropriate advances get rejected. Especially if they are not conventionally attractive.

 

I've never heard any of my straight friends talk about men that way, when they do mention them they talk about their boyfriends being cute or smothering. If anything they tend to go on about the things men do, rather than their bodies. And to some extent that's just my not associating with the kind of people who would think that way, but you seem to be basing your argument on personal experience, so even just a counter to that alone is still relevant.

 

I don't understand that second statement. Are you saying that women's equality in modern times trivializes men dying in past historical events? That is about as ridiculous a statement as I have ever heard.

 

[Jazzman]

1 hour ago, shencereys said:

I meant its "selfish" only in that it causes copies of one's own genes to spread, which is why desires to do anything evolved, is my point.   The fact that it helps nonrelatives is tertiary.   I didn't think that characterizing clan defense as altruism or unselfish was technically accurate, because all successful herd/social animals anywhere do it.  I'm probably just being too pedantic.

We should recall that the members of such a clan were genetically related, it's a family structure, except for rare guest sex by unrelated specimens to refresh the gene pool (that's why most of us have a small Neanderthal portion in our genome) and - child swapping at annual tribal meetings to optimize the gender distribution in the clans. Guess for one million years as hunter-gatherers we ignored the animal 'my genes must spread' attitude of the individual. It returned only with the coming of pastoralists (and farmers) some 8000 years ago... as male status symbol of the rich animal breeders (sic!)

 

[Faolon]

1 hour ago, stargatedalek said:

And have you ever heard a woman talk that way to a mans face? I doubt it, it's very rare. But men say that sort of stuff brazenly in public and directly to women all the time. The kind of women who do think that way don't often act on it, since they expect to face repercussions that men don't if their inappropriate advances get rejected. Especially if they are not conventionally attractive.

 

I've never heard any of my straight friends talk about men that way, when they do mention them they talk about their boyfriends being cute or smothering. If anything they tend to go on about the things men do, rather than their bodies. And to some extent that's just my not associating with the kind of people who would think that way, but you seem to be basing your argument on personal experience, so even just a counter to that alone is still relevant.

 

I don't understand that second statement. Are you saying that women's equality in modern times trivializes men dying in past historical events? That is about as ridiculous a statement as I have ever heard.

 

 

 

If a woman were to be honest with men, she would lose the ability to use them. Men, on the other hand, hit on women publicly because it works. If it never worked, they wouldn't do it.

 

I've never heard men talk about their girlfriends the way you're picturing they do. A man will not share their sexual experiences with women they care about.

 

 

Go look up the suicide rate for men. When you bring this fact up, you'll often get met with "yeah, but women attempt it more". One woman suffers and the world stops. Millions of men suffer, and you don't even bat an eye.

[shencereys]

1 hour ago, Jazzman said:

 Guess for one million years as hunter-gatherers we ignored the animal 'my genes must spread' attitude of the individual. 

Oh not at all!  it's just that by protecting the clan you're also protecting your genes because copies of these alleles reside in these relatives.  You can very well predict how helpful or altruistic one person or animal will be by degree of relatedness for this reason.  The child-swapping part I'm not sure what you're referring to, but that's an anthropological or cultural topic in any case and something I am not academically prepared to discuss in any intelligent fashion, save to say that gene mixing is desirable in selection to prevent the buildup of lethal recessives when a population is genetically stagnant for too long (i.e. the hapsburgs for example)

 

but anyway all this is such a digression to the topic anyhow, so I'll shut up and let people get back to it.  

[Guest]

8 minutes ago, Faolon said:

If a woman were to be honest with men, she would lose the ability to use them. Men, on the other hand, hit on women publicly because it works. If it never worked, they wouldn't do it.

 

I've never heard men talk about their girlfriends the way you're picturing they do. A man will not share their sexual experiences with women they care about.

 

 

Go look up the suicide rate for men. When you bring this fact up, you'll often get met with "yeah, but women attempt it more". One woman suffers and the world stops. Millions of men suffer, and you don't even bat an eye.

No, men aggressively hit on women because they know they won't face any repercussions. If a man gets rejected he can move on to the next girl in the room, because it's expected that he will act that way and some women will even ignore it on those grounds alone. If a woman goes after a man and gets rejected she's likely to get automatically rejected by every man in the room, since they feel like she is challenging them by taking on what they perceive as their role.

 

Plenty of women can be nasty, awful people, the difference is that society both expects and enables men to be horrible, to the point where they're even granted privilege over genuinely good men.

 

I never said anything about men talking to other men about their female partners. I was referring to men sexually harassing women in public.

 

You know what men are the ones at high risk of suicide? The ones who are suffering from pressures placed on them to be manly, to be sexually aggressive, etc. when they would rather be themselves, and instead they feel devalued because they're expected to live up to toxic standards of masculinity. Men are a lot more likely than women to be harassed or mistreated for having low income jobs, for mental illness, or for being homosexual. But this harassment comes almost entirely from other men.

[Jazzman]

On 8/31/2018 at 9:30 PM, shencereys said:

Oh not at all!  it's just that by protecting the clan you're also protecting your genes because copies of these alleles reside in these relatives.  You can very well predict how helpful or altruistic one person or animal will be by degree of relatedness for this reason.  The child-swapping part I'm not sure what you're referring to, but that's an anthropological or cultural topic in any case and something I am not academically prepared to discuss in any intelligent fashion.

 

but anyway all this is such a digression to the topic anyhow, so I'll shut up and let people get back to it.  

Given the fact that we define our ancestry by good reasons over the female mtDNA and not perhaps the male Y-DNA in biblical A begat B, B begat C, C begat... fashion, your shift (obviously caused by me) from the individual drive to spread the genes to the individual embedded in the related doesn't add much to the debate. Everything boils down to the question whether the species we look at has male ownership of females as genetically anchored social component or not. Those species that do, don't think about raising the offspring of the former leader and kill them instantly to get females that come into heat in no time 'cause their time as leader is utterly short. Those species that don't, kill the leader of a newly founded harem instantly 'cause he takes away the females. Such is life. We humans belong to the latter category and it takes a formidable force or religious environment to convince our men of the contrary... leaving an army of frustrated male singles behind that can't get a piece of the cake.

 

The child swapping among hunter-gatherer clans (most likely toward the end of puberty, still before the initiation rites - the passage) is a matter of necessity, it's survival strategy. A clan /w predominantly female offspring runs out of hunters soon, accordingly a clan /w predominately male offspring runs out of offspring soon. Both leads to the end of the clan and its 30 members in a max (derived from today hunter-gatherer clans). DNA analysis of bone finds suggest that clan women of marriageable age were largely matrilineal bound to the clan of their mother and raised their children, begat by whomsoever, on site and not elsewhere. Here the interesting, for almost prophetic movies Quest for Fire (France/Canada 1981) and Ao, the last Neanderthal (France 2010) seem to fail...

 

The anthropological roots of sexual objectification for starters:

 

[GrimReaper]

On 8/31/2018 at 2:57 AM, wokking56 said:

 

While I wholeheartedly agree that attraction and objectification are two entirely different things. You and many other people however only see the objectification when thinking in terms of sexual gratification. " reduce another human to nothing more than a means to an end." The mere act of labeling another person automatically reduces them to an object whether sexually fueled or not. This makes the phrases "the old lady at the DMV" and "the big tittied girl at the bank" equally wrong. Both of them label the female based on a physical attribute. Yet when saying old lady you assumed either I or the person I was talking to did not know her name, however if I say big tittied girl it is automatically assumed that I have some lecherous intent.  The ever popular "double standard" either both terms are wrong or neither term is wrong you can't have it both ways. I truly can't make this any clearer, a label means nothing to the one being labeled since they already know their true worth. I will leave this topic for now as I don't want to say anything to offend anyone.

Objectification is achieved through intention, language is a means of conveying information. As such it can be reflective of your intentions, but it doesn't have to be. Context is king - compare a thug in a dark alley calling you 'hey asshole' or a long-standing friend with whom you have a tradition of calling each other names for fun calling you that. The same words are being used, but the intention behind them is vastly different. One is a potentially life threatening one, the other one is simply affection.