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Perhaps you can explain to me what "objectification of women" means? Does it mean being attracted to their bodies? So what would be an OK thing to be attracted

Perhaps you can explain to me what "objectification of women" means? Does it mean being attracted to their bodies? So what would be an OK thing to be attracted to - their ability to recite the digits of PI perhaps? To me it seems that the "anti-objectification" campaign only seeks to replace one attractor with another. So maybe less pretty women would prefer to be measured by their IQ? Why is one better than the other? Or is it generally not OK to be attracted to somebody - or only once you are married and officially in love? I'm not saying that I like everything that is done in porn, just that I don't understand what "objectification" is supposed to mean? And it seems ridiculous to me to presume men should not be attracted to the female body. So we should just as likely want to have sex with a horse or a hedgehog as with a woman? "American Pie" was just fiction - at least I personally was never tempted by an apple pie, because the looks of "the object" matter.

jholman 11y ago
I'll start by acknowledging that "objectification of women" has become a buzzphrase, and it means whatever the speaker/writer wants it to mean, and the following discursion is (mostly) not intended as a prescriptivist scold. As such, the following is (mostly) a tangent from your comment, and entirely a tangent from GP's comment, since clearly GP was not using "objectifies" in this way. But anyway, here goes. My understanding is that originally, in feminist studies of pornography, "objectification" meant to be made into an object, in the syntactic sense, as contrasted with the syntactic subject. In this sense, to objectify something is to have it be the recipient of verbs. In the context of feminist critique, the verb in particular is "desire", and the complaint is that pornography is (allegedly) interested in women as objects of desire, not as subjects. That is, the wishes and desires of the women are, allegedly, less valued than the wishes and desires of the men. I personally suspect that this critique is overwrought and largely missing the point, although not without any truth at all. Perhaps irrelevant to the feminist point, speaking as a male, I'm pretty fond of being an object, although I wouldn't like to be only an object.
elorant 11y ago
It means having sex for a half hour without one kissing the other even once. It also means that women must have at least a dozen plastic surgeries to be considered acceptable by the industry.
- facepalm 11y ago
  The plastic surgery part certainly isn't true. The porn industry caters to all sorts of tastes, including imperfect bodies. A single visit to a popular porn site will demonstrate that. As for kissing - OK, so that is one understandable definition, thank you for that. I think sex is simply weird - if you think rationally about sex it is not really appealing. It only works in a state of arousal. That plays into the hands of feminists who frame sex as something disgusting being done to women - it works because people are rarely aroused while reading feminist pamphlets...

jholman 11y ago

I'll start by acknowledging that "objectification of women" has become a buzzphrase, and it means whatever the speaker/writer wants it to mean, and the following discursion is (mostly) not intended as a prescriptivist scold. As such, the following is (mostly) a tangent from your comment, and entirely a tangent from GP's comment, since clearly GP was not using "objectifies" in this way. But anyway, here goes. My understanding is that originally, in feminist studies of pornography, "objectification" meant to be made into an object, in the syntactic sense, as contrasted with the syntactic subject. In this sense, to objectify something is to have it be the recipient of verbs. In the context of feminist critique, the verb in particular is "desire", and the complaint is that pornography is (allegedly) interested in women as objects of desire, not as subjects. That is, the wishes and desires of the women are, allegedly, less valued than the wishes and desires of the men. I personally suspect that this critique is overwrought and largely missing the point, although not without any truth at all. Perhaps irrelevant to the feminist point, speaking as a male, I'm pretty fond of being an object, although I wouldn't like to be only an object.

elorant 11y ago

It means having sex for a half hour without one kissing the other even once. It also means that women must have at least a dozen plastic surgeries to be considered acceptable by the industry.

facepalm 11y ago
The plastic surgery part certainly isn't true. The porn industry caters to all sorts of tastes, including imperfect bodies. A single visit to a popular porn site will demonstrate that. As for kissing - OK, so that is one understandable definition, thank you for that. I think sex is simply weird - if you think rationally about sex it is not really appealing. It only works in a state of arousal. That plays into the hands of feminists who frame sex as something disgusting being done to women - it works because people are rarely aroused while reading feminist pamphlets...