Is feminism really so very reasonable?

Oh I agree completely, you're right yeah

I'm not very bothered with this.. I just think it's important everyone keeps equality in mind on an everyday basis whatever you call yourself.

Maybe stop buying a magazine that glorifies objectification of either sex. That kind of thing.

not necessarily, I don't really know. I find it hard to understand how objectification of women isn't going against equality...

*shrug* but I don't think that what you or I think about that really matters. What matters is that in a situation where we perceive inequality, we step in, or prevent discrimination based on gender wherever we can.

and for people to believe them when they accuse a man of rape

So this idea that "feminism is just about wanting equality for men and women" isn't so simple and open after-all.

Oh I agree completely, you're right yeah

I'm not very bothered with this.. I just think it's important everyone keeps equality in mind on an everyday basis whatever you call yourself.

Maybe stop buying a magazine that glorifies objectification of either sex. That kind of thing.

Surely they should have fought for womens' right to fight?

ugh, in the nicest possible way, I don't really care. As in, none of this really matters.

You are gonna be boycotting an awful lot of things because desirable things sell products and there is nothing more innately desirable than a very attractive sexy member of the opposite sex

I think there are a lot of problems with the feminist movement, but I'd try to remember that it's a movement without a leader. I am a feminist. I don't stand behind everything Gloria Steinem or anyone else says. I simply believe that men and women should have equal rights. When you think about feminism, don't think about the books or the tumblr posts or anything else. Just think about the women around you on a daily basis who don't say anything but want equal rights. They want fair pay, better maternity leave (it's AWFUL in the US), and for people to believe them when they accuse a man of rape.I know there's innocent until proven guilty, but we tend to attack women and assume they're liars and the cases where women have lied tend to be publicized so we think it happens far more often than it does. Most of the people I know who've been sexually assaulted have never reported it, but it happened.Just think of feminism as equality and ignore the grand messages of the "movement" because we don't all stand behind a lot of what's on the internet or in books. It's a varying thing.

But you care enough to call yourself a feminist. How convenient.

PRSOM, good comment.



I'd slightly disagree on this; there are men who have been falsely accused of rape and convicted. The fact that false convictions can occur proves that women are not automatically disbelieved; in fact, they would have to be automatically believed in the absence of other evidence for there to be a false conviction in the first place

Rape is a very difficult offence for many reasons, and it poses unique challenges to the justice system, but I do not accept that women are automatically disbelieved by police as they might have been 20 or 30 years ago. Things have changed. I also do not accept that the inherent issues around proving rape mean that you should take away rights from the accused

People seem to conveniently forget, though, that the suffragettes would send white feathers, symbolising cowardice, to conscientious objectors during WW1. Not so reasonable, in my opinion.

There's something extremely vicious about women of that era using mens' underlying fear of being ridiculed by women or called a coward to shame men into fighting in the war.

bahahah yep yep, to all of y'all I'm not here for a fight, dunno how we got into this abyss of objectification but that's not the issue I'm really trying to highlight, I'm sorry my points haven't been on point (ha-ha so pun-y)

Just listen to this guy, he more-or-less said what I'm trying to convey

I'm a girl, but thanks!

So your an international socialist now?

There were many feminists who were left wing and against world war one on the grounds of internationalism.

bahahah yep yep, to all of y'all I'm not here for a fight, dunno how we got into this abyss of objectification but that's not the issue I'm really trying to highlight, I'm sorry my points haven't been on point (ha-ha so pun-y)

Just listen to this guy, he more-or-less said what I'm trying to convey

Such as? The decision to have children is not one to be discriminated against - whatever the argument about productivity.

Decent paternity laws (Sweden) would be a game changer.

No its cool! No fight!! Just saying its not to do with sexism, it is to do with what sells and capitalism. Desirable things placed with products sell said products. Scantily hot chicks next to mens razor = ooo i want hot chick so buy razor

Hunky muscular stud muffin male next to female anti antiperspirant = ooo i want Hunky muscular stud muffin male next me = buy that anti antiperspirant

Choosing career paths that don't earn as much money (arts, rather than STEM fields).

Huh?

Ok. So?

lmao true marketing (PROPAGANDA ) is ethically/morally shaky but there you go

in any case, I do want to put across the message that we should be trying to promote equality as much as we can. If this is a small decision you might be making in day-to-day shtuff that helps, then it helps. ygm

Just wanted to say that when I hear this term being used I often cringe. There's a lot of feminist buzzwords and phrases that are pretty brazen hyperbole. Sex object, "piece of meat", exploitation of women. These are all examples of hyperbole that serve to make something fairly benign sound a lot worse than it is. Of course, "sexual objectification" has been used for so long and so extensively in public and academic discourse that when you question it people dismiss you as someone who's been living under a rock. But I've questioned and researched the term for a while now and the more I've looked into it the more I've realized that it is both nebulous and little more than hyperbole.

The first problem is that no-one seems to agree on what it actually means. If you criticize it for meaning one thing then people will tell you it's the other. The most common thing people think is that it describes someone being viewed as if they are an object. This is what people generally mean when they describe someone as being portrayed as a "sex object". This doesn't make much sense because a man who is looking at a sexualized image of a woman is not gaining gratification from looking at her because she appears to be an "object" to him, but because she appears to be a human being.

As Wendy McElroy points out: 'objectification' of women means to make women into sexual objects; it is meaningless because, 'sexual objects', taken literally, means nothing because inanimate objects do not have sexuality.

Even if you make an object sexually appealing to a man, you have to make it look like a woman. The human mind registers objects and people very differently, and humans are evolved to be sexually attracted to other humans. Objects are intrinsically not sexual, however. Therefore it is the aesthetic of "humaness" we find sexual, not the contrary aesthetic of "objectness", so to say that an image of someone that displays them sexually is portraying them as an "object" is simply inane.

The other way people think of "sexual objectification" is that it relates to the word "objective", as in someone is being viewed as a sexual objective. A man masturbating over the thought of a women is only thinking about the objective of having sex with her. This is not inane, but I hardly see why -if this is what the term describes- it needs to exist. Focusing on one aspect of a person is not particularly problematic or extraordinary. We do this all the time. With a waiter in a restaurant we see them and only wish they'd bring us food on time. With the postman we only wish he'd deliver our letters. It's not a problem; although we do this, unless we're psychopathic, we're still able to comprehend that the waitress is not simply a food carrying automaton, just as much as the Playboy model is not just a sex machine. It's not problematic, it's perfectly natural. We can't be expected to try to consider the entire persona of anyone and everyone we benefit from.

Some might argue that the problem is that women are objectified more, so that leads men to think of all women as being nothing more than something for them to have sex with. If the only women a man ever saw were in images in Playboy, then this would make sense. But women make up half the population and we all have mothers, daughters, nieces, sisters and wives. As it stands, saying that sexualized images of women makes men think of them as sex objects is equivalent to saying that when you watch football you are only able to think of the players as football playing machines, and are unable to comprehend that they are actually human beings with their own lives. But not only that, it's also like saying that because their is vastly more public interest in watching men playing football than women, that means that any women who watches football must think that all men are football playing machines.So what is the actual definition of sexual objectification? In a way, it doesn't seem to matter, because so few people who use it seem to know. But the feminist philosopher Martha Nussbuam defines objectification as this:

instrumentality: the treatment of a person as a tool for the objectifier's purposes;

denial of autonomy: the treatment of a person as lacking in autonomy and self-determination;

inertness: the treatment of a person as lacking in agency, and perhaps also in activity;

fungibility: the treatment of a person as interchangeable with other objects;

violability: the treatment of a person as lacking in boundary-integrity;

ownership: the treatment of a person as something that is owned by another (can be bought or sold);

denial of subjectivity: the treatment of a person as something whose experiences and feelings (if any) need not be taken into account.

Can any of these conditions be said to be especially the case for glamour models or strippers any more than they can be said of your average profession, be it office worker, waiter, chef, or soldier? It sounds more appropriate for describing slavery. Of course, if feminists just used "sexual objectification" to describe trafficked women, it would be fine. That does seem to be an apt use for it. But the term is instead used rather similarly to how they use "exploitation".You can consider everything in life as exploitation. As Nietzsche said, all life, no matter how we idealize it, is nothing more nor less than exploitation. Generally though, when we talk about someone being exploited, we mean people are getting something out of them against their intentions. But feminists use the term to describe the treatment of highly paid models who very much enjoy working for the likes of Playboy or other men's magazines, highly paid actresses, or paid porn stars who often think of their sexual abilities as an art and have their own award shows. Some feminists, such as Ariel Levy, have even gone as far to say that women who take photos of themselves naked and post them online, or who wears revealing clothes, are "self-objectifying".

So both exploitation and sexual objectification are words that have the potential to really mean something, but are generally used by feminists in a way that is so broad that it is essentially inane. Another piece of rhetoric is "piece of meat", as in when a man fantasizes about a woman sexually, he thinks of her as a "piece of meat". This makes about as much sense as saying that a hungry person see's a burger as a woman. Nothing else needs to be said about that because it's so absurd.These terms all describe things that are essentially very mundane, but they make them sound much worse.I don't really understand what feminists envision will happen by trying to stop what they call "sexual objectification". You can stop every women from being a porn star or modelling for erotic imagery, but men are still going to masturbate. They'll just use their own thoughts, but in those thoughts they aren't going to be imagining discussion Socrates with a woman, they're going to be thinking of things probably far dirtier than anything they'd find in porn. In the end, it's a campaign against male heterosexuality.