Artist/Writer at Xenospora
Alison has been researching men's issues since her mother gave her "Princess at the Window" by Donna Laframboise in 1994 when she was 16. She's taken part in men's rights communities since she started posting on soc.men in 2003. Since 2011 she's run the gender apostate blog Genderratic with her pal Gingko the wonder leaf and she founded Honey Badger Brigade in 2013 with Hannah Wallen and Karen Straughan. According to Vice the pony she most resembles is Fluttershy.
Latest posts by Alison Tieman (see all)
- What will Dior’s decision regarding Johnny Depp mean for male survivors? - August 10, 2022
- Chauvin Released, Teen bullied for supporting trump, False accuser forced to apologize| HBR News 277.5 - October 13, 2020
- What Jordan Peterson checking into Rehab can teach us all - October 26, 2019
by 
Very good TB, but you should have picked a different week to release it… THIS is the video of the week, possibly the year http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLoqti0lzAw
Warning, NSFW, vicious…she’s become an internet star! 😀
Okay…. That was both hilarious and disturbing. Would have been good for Halloween.
hehe, you goth’d it up a bit, but at the core, yer a valley girl…
http://stonerwithaboner.wordpress.com/2012/11/10/typhone-blue-valley-grrrl/
Holy crap Daisy that was some scary shit.
@ Daisy
I’m not expecting to outcompete the nets’ usual round of viral bullshit. Didn’t watch it. I couldn’t get past the first few seconds of the woman’s voice.
Very funny vid TB.I like your sense of humor. 🙂
@DaisyDeadhead
When someone is wery pisst over elections.
P.S.I am talking about the woman in the vid.
Hilarious!
Damn, Im still waiting for the better booby shot. 😉
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA, can’t stop laughing, can’t stop! That lady is cracking me up.
Love it when she says the US is now officially socialist. News flash, its not the 1930’s, we’ve been socialist for a good long while now.
And TB, love the line, “Feminism helps me think about more than how to get my tits and face in the camera shot at once” hahaha, awesome.
I also have a message: For ignorant progressives and certain feminism supporters.
This is going to become a pseudo-rant so everyone hold on to your ears.
To all those progressives and feminism supporters talking about male abuse victims and survivors:
You are driving me up the fucking wall!
Seriously!
While it’s true there’s been some progress on acknowledging the plight of Male Survivors of female or male abuse, you keep throwing all that good will away by constantly lending credence to an aggravating myth that should, by now, have long been put to pasture like the maggot infested dead carcass it is.
But you just can’t resist, can you? Some kind of really dirty habit you are unaware of, accidently or purposefully.
I’m talking about the reasoning you come up with behind underreporting:
Macho pride. Basically, theorizing that every man doesn’t want his manhood questioned is just to proud to admit it.
Let me tell you something: It’s been decades now. Long years and we’re finally just scratching the surface of this issue.
Male survivors, like myself, do not appreciate the assumption that we’re too prideful to reveal it. There have been a majority trying to share their woes for years. Yet they were never believed or their pain was minimized with “Women have it worse” arguments. This still goes on today.
That’s a reason you should be addressing now: Society’s relucatance to admit they exist or even tolerate the notion of a man hurt by another man or woman. Not this tiresome “Toxic Masculanity” bullshit. It is a major insult to be told that “Macho Pride” is the reason behind hesitation to come forward.
You think I’m proud of the fact that I have to live with what happened to me with those girls and women in my formative years? Proud of having my story be the ONLY one out there compared to other stories in the media and academic studies? Proud of having busted my ass to create a serial play on the subject and still face a world where those experiences are still not acknowledged in general society? Meanwhile, we get stories like that girl who was bullied for loving star wars generating outpours of support compared to what a boy with similar interests would’ve received had he been bullied?
Progressive and feminism supporters, don’t take this the wrong way, but I would suggest you stop assuming we were too macho and prideful to talk about our hurt when we’ve been asking for acknowledgement for FUCKING DECADES!
This also goes to anyone in the mental health field: Stop stereotyping and start fucking helping. Highlight these stories when they happen, support the male survivor. Don’t assume he was some macho ape for holding in his hurt.
My two cents. Take it or leave it.
Note: The above rant is NOT directed at the people on this blog, by the way.
LOL, a remarkably effective parody.
The whole preoccupation with “objectification” is something I don’t really get. I mean… how does being the object of sexual desire necessarily mean that one is being reduced to something without any consciousness/agency/free will?
Even if we take the “objectification” thesis more modestly and say that the reason behind the complaint is people don’t like being THOUGHT OF as lacking free will/agency, then this runs into two problems; 1) how can said complainant KNOW that men are thinking of the complainant as an object? and 2) why does what someone else think matter?
Problem 1 is especially vexing… it basically alleges that women know how men’s minds work. That, plus in my experience a lot of men’s sexual fantasies about women involve the woman WANTING and LOVING the sex, i.e. exercising her agency in favor of let’s have great sex now because we want it!
As for Problem 2… well yeah.. letting yourself be reduced to an object by the immense power of someone else’s mind is just pathetic.
Tumblr feminists, most of them at least (there’s a good one that also defends Men’s Rights and is anti-misandric herself… she posted on the Men’s Rights reddit here: http://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/11ej7s/as_a_young_woman_feminist_and_mra_on_tumblr_it_is/ ), are just hilarious in their hypocrisy. I mean, they complain about objectification and rape and all of that, THEN they go onto all those kink memes on Livejournal and request slashfic with X raping/objectifying Y, Alpha-Omega universes (aka “bad het for slash fans”) and that kind of crap.
Good rant Eagle34. The sad fact is that men’s pain is taboo in this culture and men are not so stupid to go out and broadcast their abuse. Maybe like putting up a booth on a busy street and have a big sign saying “Herpes for Sale.” It’s just about that bad. You have my admiration Eagle34.
“Objectification” is just the latest incarnation of the sin of lust. Sexual desire is an instinct, it’s automatic, we can’t help it. The church found centuries ago that stigmatising that instinct as a sin was a very good tool for controlling people. Feminists have turned it into a political thought crime for exactly the same reason, only they’ve made it apply to men only. The theory of objectification is misandrist, and it’s fundamental to every kind of feminism I’m aware of, so I am satisfied that all feminists are misandrist to some degree.
If you read erotic stories aimed at (straight) men and women, there is an interesting parallel. The women in male sexual fantasies don’t need to be asked, they’re enthusiastically up for whatever you’re up for. The men in female sexual fantasies don’t need to ask, they know exactly what you want. Essentially the same idea, filtered through the norm that men do the initiating.
Objectification is the most ludicrous concept to have come out of feminism, and it’s been fucking with women’s minds ever since. It’s a really paranoid, psychotic framing of a woman’s insecurities in intimate relationships. It is a way of projecting women’s own insecurities about themselves men, over reading men’s actions and emotional cues in order to justify women’s own fears. It is, at the very least, a product of what we have been discussing as hypo-agency – that women do not do enough, do not bring enough to the bargaining table, do not take an active role in fostering romance, that they don’t feel that they have anything more to offer to a relationship beyond their own reproductive organs. Relying solely on their sexuality, they then see other women’s sexualities as a grave threat, especially when displayed on magazine covers in airbrushed perfection.
Objectification, then, is the shaming of men for women’s own refusal to take responsibility and for the threat they feel from other members of their own sex when they solely rely on sexuality to get by. It is, fundamentally, an expression of jealousy and insecurity. And it makes for comic fodder, as the loudest feminists who cry foul on being seen as sexual objects are so often the very women who crave being seen as sexual objects the most. So it shares a trait with homophobia – just as so many homophobes exhibit repressed homosexual desires, these feminists often exhibit repressed heterosexual lust. Objectification theory is, ultimately, the embodiement of a type of heterophpbia common among females.
I’ve got another insulting term for you, Dungone:
“Male Gaze”.
Ugh!
@YAC
As a comic book/science fiction geek, I like to call that phenomenon (kink memes, slash fiction, etc.), “It doesn’t count if its Batman and Robin.”
IME, it works like this: if it’s a depiction of sexual behaviour between copyrighted characters, it isn’t and shouldn’t be considered objectionable. So, Harry Potter as Professor Snape’s rape and fisting slave, starting a few days after the 12 year old character arrives as Hogwarts? No big deal. Naruto and the Fourth Hokage (11 and 60+ years old, respectively) as the One True Couple? No big deal. Dragon rape in Game of Thrones? Hand drawn pictures of Doctor Who having bondage-heavy nonconsentual sex with Agent Coulson (but using near-photorealistic tracing of the current actors?) Photoshopping a picture of a father and son in Batman and Robin costumes, to appear as if they’re having sex? No big deal. A 25 year old woman who puts on a cheerleader outfit and makes porn? *That’s* a big deal! In fact, it should be banned because it encourages paedophilia! And God forbid that someone write a story about non-copywrited characters having taboo sex…
Sorry, but I visit Scans Daily. If I had a dollar for every female poster on that site who could recite feminist boilerplate without issue, but admitted to masturbating to solicited pictures of decidedly non-feminist boilerplate friendly sex, I could pay for a meal at Peter Luger’s.
Besides, this is even more messed up than the feature video. Always remember, someone used tuition money to make this. If you happen to live in a section of the US that is medical care deficient, remember that someone was given money to go to school to learn how to think like this…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDzlM8tpyXQ
“Naruto and the Fourth Hokage (11 and 60+ years old, respectively) as the One True Couple?”
Third Hokage. The Fourth Hokage (Yondaime Hokage) we rarely see until towards the end of the current series. And he’s Naruto’s father.
I think that might be poes law at work, MaMu.
Eagle: I’ve got another insulting term for you, Dungone:
“Male Gaze”.
Ugh!
Eagle, the term “the Gaze” comes from psychoanalysis (specifically by Jacques Lacan), and was originally intended as an equal-opportunity thing (like psychoanalysis itself).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaze
I first remember the essay “Is the Gaze male?” by E Ann Kaplan in 1983, the first time I heard it regarded as a male thing– but notice she is *asking* whether it is, not *announcing” that it is for sure.
Wikipedia informs me the first use of “male gaze” was by Laura Mulvey in 1975, but I first heard it from Kaplan, as a question, not as a given:
Mulvey’s essay also states that the female gaze is the same as the male gaze. This means that women look at themselves through the eyes of men.[7] The male gaze may be seen by a feminist either as a manifestation of unequal power between gazer and gazed, or as a conscious or subconscious attempt to develop that inequality. From this perspective, a woman who welcomes an objectifying gaze may be simply conforming to norms established to benefit men, thereby reinforcing the power of the gaze to reduce a recipient to an object. Welcoming such objectification may be viewed as akin to exhibitionism.
I never liked that idea, since I can gaze as well as any man can… the concept is that women only see ourselves/other women as men do… and I find that a sexist idea, interestingly enough. It totally negates women’s agency.
In other words, women don’t have OUR OWN gaze.. but that is not how Lacan originally described it.
Since some people are claiming objectification doesn’t exist, I’ll put this out there:
http://news.yahoo.com/east-coast-rape-suspect-women-were-objects-172941109.html
@ Clarence
Objectification is a mental disorder caused by brain damage. Normal people do not objectify and the thought processes of a rapist do not say anything about the thought processes of psychologically healthy people or society in general.
Typhon:
If by “objectify” you mean reduce people only down to a singular type of object you are correct , for the most part.
Most people reduce people into several component object types that give them value as a friend, lover, mother, etc.
The problem isn’t objectification per-se: EVERYONE objectifies. The problem is when you reduce people to a singular object or utility and nothing else because then that enables one to abuse them without compunction.
To put it bluntly:
The average man might see many women as “sex objects” and, at times, even think of them ONLY in sexual terms. That is objectification. Women even do the same thing.
The average man, however, gives his objects some agency and also usually imagines other attributes besides the sexual.
Let me use you as an example. Though it has been rare, I have occasionally noted to myself that you have sexual charms. However mostly I objectify you as your mind, because you rarely bring in your emotions into your writing. Your videos “humanize” you farther and I begin to get an idea of your larger personality. Certainly Typhonblue is more than the sum of her writing, or her large breasts for that matter. You are a PERSON to me.
However, if all I ever wanted to know about you or see from you was your breasts and what size they were and etc, then I would be guilty of the bad type of objectification as I’d literally see you as existing as but ONE of your attributes and what’s worse -an attribute that is useful to me. And thus if your usefulness ended…
I hope I’m being a bit more clear.
@ Clarence
How does it impact my life if you do reduce my value to yourself down to my breasts? Valuing people along certain axis is not reducing them down to objects; reducing a person down to an object requires treating them as one.
When I worked in a call center for a major multinational corporation, we discovered that most all of us females had talked to the same pervert freak on the phone. He had a very particular, peculiar narrative (it started with his stamp collection, segued into horoscopes and vacuum cleaners… seriously) and was always the same exact script. We were in a team meeting when someone mentioned the call, and we all started reciting it together–most of us actually got the call several times. I talked to him at least 6-7 times over a year. After they developed the “press 1, press 2” system, the calls slacked off, but I still got one several years later… he was still at it! Talk about dedication.
In that sense, he was “using” a female on the phone (the men never got the calls, so I guess he hung up immediately when he got the name of a male customer service rep?) as an object, somebody to listen to his fantasy. It didn’t matter which one of us it was. We were being *used* in a very basic way.
When I think of being objectified, I think of this guy. It certainly felt like that. That would be an example of what Clarence is saying.
Daisy:
Precisely.
Where feminists go wrong with this sort of thing is in 3 ways:
A. They imagine only men do it
B. They imagine all sexual fantasies (at least by men) to be of exactly the same type as your harrassing caller there – any woman will do and her personality, wants, desires, don’t matter according to the standard feminist narrative. Of course this isn’t true: most men dream of women in very “enthusiastic consent” terms. She wants ME. She’s happy to be with ME. She is enjoying what I am doing to her. And of course if we have a crush on a particular woman then she becomes even more humanized in our sexual fantasies. Indeed, the real danger of *most* (yes, I bet most guys have the occasional “gang bang ” fantasy – which is usually more like the ‘objectification’ fantasies feminists complain about – and a kinkster like me has other fantasies of the “topping” and “bottoming” varieties but I’m talking normal guys) normal male sexual fantasies isn’t reducing women to garbage bags it’s instead inflating their value as sex objects up to Goddess like levels and imagining their personalities and ethics are also at that level.
3. They imagine all objectification leads to abuse. If that was the case then the average woman and average man should probably just stay at home in bed as hardly a day goes by when one doesn’t at least partly objectify someone.
Typhon:
It doesn’t affect your life, I agree.
But what if I had some power or presence in the world and I thought of ALL women that way? Let’s say I was in charge of advertising at a company or I was in charge of hiring or that I had my own popular Talk Show.
Do you see how such attitudes if given widespread non-discriminating propogation or pushed into law or social custom can be harmful? The same way women were to shame men into fighting the so-called “Great War”. I’m not saying the harms are necessarily the same, but I’m saying there is a chance for harm and that the reason is the same in both cases: men were to be “protection objects” AND ONLY protection objects, in World War 1, my secretary is to be a “sex object” in my hypothetical world.
“The problem is when you reduce people to a singular object or utility and nothing else because then that enables one to abuse them without compunction.”
Yes. Kant’s 2nd Formulation comes to mind. It’s an important principle, but if we seek to follow it consistently, we ought to pay more attention to economic objectification, and exploitation, and pay appropriate attention to sexual objectification, and exploitation, but recognize that not everything is sexual objectification.
Objectification and the Male Gaze are two different things.
Daisy:
If you have a hard time stomaching Mulvey, I suggest you stay as far away from film criticism as you possibly can, because just about everything expanding on her work is much, much worse (I actually like some of Mulvey’s papers, but I’ve been assigned to read later pieces of feminist film criticism for class that left me an emotional wreck for days), and there is quite a lot of it (the terminology of ‘male gaze’ is almost omnipresent in academic pieces, and fairly common even among a lot of people who just review movies on Youtube).
Clarence:
I certainly would not deny the existence of objectification. I would, however, say that I now find the attitudes and words of most self-identified feminists I have heard or read on the subject to be far more objectifying than the behaviors to which they most often applied that label. As I am sure you have experienced yourself, they would, and do, assert a knowledge of what all men think and feel and reason greater than that which men themselves do or can possess. Such a belief utterly denies both agency and individuality, so I must now conclude that it is objectification. In retrospect, the term certainly fits how I felt hearing and reading those ideas. You are certainly correct that it can be quite harmful: Such beliefs comprised the dominant narrative on sexuality I was exposed to throughout my childhood, adolescence and into early adulthood (most of my life, as I am now only just 23), and as a result it was only two years ago that I began to admit to myself that I had a sexuality at all and to attempt to convince myself that that is not a bad thing, while I still cannot lay claim to any positive gender identity to speak of.
I also notice that you seem to have discovered a system of numerals which proceeds “A, B, 3,…”. You must tell me where you found it and how it continues.
@ Clarence
“Do you see how such attitudes if given widespread non-discriminating propogation or pushed into law or social custom can be harmful?”
Unfortunately criminalizing someone’s thoughts is neither rational nor moral, so what’s the option here?
The truth is that feminists propagating the “woman as victim” meme likely does more to create and maintain a glass ceiling then any proverbial “objectifying” male. Do I get to make damselling a thought crime?
Who’s the ultimate arbiter of acceptable thought?
Feminists are welcome to make their argument that men’s desires are somehow damaging to women and I’m going to make my counter argument that objectification as they posit it doesn’t exist except as a rare mental disability… and that’s that. Let them do battle in the theatre of the mind.
Agreed, Clarence, very good analysis. Joanna Russ took issue with Dworkin’s porn theories, basically riffing on your point B. She thought men used porn as a starting point, placing their ideal woman WITHIN it; as women might use romance novels/stories as a starting point, placing their ideal man WITHIN it. These are like fables or role-playing, she argued, not objectification (on both sides).
You might like Russ’s book, which I have mentioned here before: “Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts”… (her analysis of the feminist movement, she thought we all fit into one of these archetypal categories! I guess the trembling sisters have taken over?)
Hiding, thanks for the heads up! I had no idea Mulvey was so influential. Ugh, as I often say on the radio: No wonder we’re in trouble.
😉
Daisy:
Yeah, Mulvey is one of the first people they make you read when you study film.
By the way, that book you recommended Clarence can be quite expensive, even used, because it hasn’t been printed since 1985. I know this because I’ve been looking for an affordable copy in decent condition since I got back to the states (you recommended it to me last winter, but there was no way I could have gotten a copy in Japan). Maybe I could convince the Women’s Studies Center to buy a copy for the school libraries (it would certainly be a better use of their time and resources than organizing dancing flash mobs just for the hell of it, which is what they were doing last time I spoke to anyone over there).
To be entirely fair to Mulvey, some of her ideas genuinely are very useful for analyzing film, even if I don’t always like her application of them. She also comes off as being much better when the paper you had to read before hers took two entire pages in the middle of an analysis of Rashomon to say that female sexuality is creative and universal while male sexuality is destructive and “limited by the penis” and the paper you had to read after hers spends half its length expounding on the horrible plight of women in modern Western society and how it is all men’s fault despite supposedly being about a movie which is set in Japan sometime in the 1300s (a time and place in which I can assure you everyone, women included, was much worse off).
My Dearest Beloveds,
You know, as a successful older man, I am often dismayed that I am treated as a wallet object by the unruly hypergamous hottie women I encounter on a daily basis. In elevators, especially.
Oh sure, some might see me as hot myself because I carry 4 wallets in my pants, on slow days, like all guys, but only because these supple and well stuffed moneybags make me feel better about myself as a beautiful, empowered, Real Man who has grown into adulthood knowing that I am valuable as a powerful agent in seeking gender justice for all the poor men like me.
Whom I will gladly betray when it suits me. Whatever.
And although I am under constant assault from indolent women who would rape me of my manpower walletdough for their own sordid, lazy gratification, I still feel empowered by my patriarchal brotherhood to say, ladies – get your filthy grubbing bitch fingers off of my bodycash!
Because I respect you ladies as sober, rational girls who need no condescension, let me suggest ways that you can avoid the pain you cause from hurting and exploiting the men around you.
If you see a man’s money exposed, take your toxic cashgaze off of it. Seriously. Don’t do that. We wear our bling for ourselves, not for you. Fucking. Whores.
If you find a man’s wallet seemingly abandoned, don’t drain it of his funds, but rather, seek out the manowner and return the wallet to him, fully intact. If he finds you worthy, he might even reward your gentle maiding with true love, babies, and bonbons.
Chocolate And Vanilla bobbons.
If you see a man busting his ass and endangering his life to earn a living, don’t try to kill him to either take over his job, or steal his resources. Even if you are successful in deposing him, you won’t like the result. Trust me on that.
As speaking of trust = Trust in a man to make his own choices about his own money without your interference, and he will happily respect you to make your own decisions about, um, whatever you might want. I promise. Because, of course, such trust on your part will make you a rare and precious woman amongst the angry, ugly, lesser pretenders that are your galpals.
And, if declining to acknowledge the struggles of men in this brutal world, and thereby, being treated like a vapid twit makes you wet, then in deed and in fact, when it comes to taking on a man’s understandings and responsibilities, you will still suck donkey.
Men understand all of this, because it has been going on for quite some time now, and although all men are idiots, we still somehow created the Patriarchy, bitches.
And that is what the Bibo Sez.
Bless you!
I’ve never really understood the feminist concept of objectification as it applied to womyn and pr0n….
don’t we “objectify” people every day—
at the counter at Subway-
“Ah, fellow human being with hopes, dreams and agency. I see that you have entered into the free market as a free agent and are exchanging time and labor for a prevailing wage by entering into a contract with your benevolent employer. I too have entered into a contract with a benevolent employer and am parting with money I’ve earned through an act of agency to trade my labor and time for a prevailing wage. I use my agency to purchase a good and service….”
nah, it’s more like “make me a sammich.”
People are objectified every second, however, I guess the femmies were trying to lay a puritanical guilt trip on the guys who jack it to porn. I read some stuff by Roger Jensen, and man, that was seriously a weirdo parallel universe. Aren’t the guys in porno’s also “objectified” to nothing more than a spewing cock? Oh, that’s right patriarchy and men have fewer nerve cells ™ so they feel less pain. So of course it’s justified that male porno actors make way less than female actors in that industry. It’s only sexism when womyn make less.
I “get” why many people-both feminists and non-feminists think why porn is degrading. It takes an intensely personal experience and commodifies it. But that’s really more of an asthetic objection than an ethical objection.
Typhon:
In no case did I ever advocate criminalizing thoughts or speech, and I hope you were just expounding on what some of those idiotic feminists have suggested. But while I am not in favor of criminalizing bad thoughts or speech, I have no problem CRITICIZING it.
Hiding:
It’s called the Clarence is Tired system.
Unfortunately it can only be explained after a series of 30 lessons, each of which will cost 50 dollars. I know this can be a strain on one’s budget…
MaMu1977,
Thanks for your response 🙂
I think “Its Okay If Its Batman And Robin” is a very good way to put it, although “Its Okay If Its Slash” seems more accurate. You’re right… there’s a scary amount of orthodox feminists that can recite all the usual “Evil Cis Het White Male Privilege” slogans, and yet get off on slash fic containing completely backward gender politics (and, not uncommonly, blatantly misandrist depictions of men and male sexuality).
But those gender politics are okay, because they’re both men! Apparently.
One area where this is so obvious is in those awful BDSM fanfics… 90% of the time, they follow the exact same formula as 50 Shades Of Grey (the first novel only)… but by making the audience surrogate submissive pathetic spineless wimp novice into a male, they get their fix without feeling guilty over enjoying it.
That, and they totally destroy the characterization of every single canonical character they touch (yes, there are some exceptions, but they’re few and far between). But hey… Its Okay If Its Slash, apparently.
What’s even funnier? They then go on wank-filled flamewars about how the lack of female characters is proof of systemic misogyny… as opposed to systemically-generated-fear-of-being-called-a-misogynist-because-someone-out-there-is-going-to-accuse-your-depiction-of-this-female-character-as-being-sexist-no-matter-what-you-do.
I reject the concept of objectification entirely. Even when someone unequivocally uses another person, they’re still using them to do something for them. It’s pretty difficult for an inanimate object, say a cardbord box, to make me a sammich. The weird guy who kept ringing Daisy’s call centre probably wanted someone to listen to his weird fantasies, and possibly wanted them to be disgusted by them. The guy on the building site who catcalls passing women wants to annoy someone he believes thinks she’s too good for him.
Even if I’m thinking of a particular woman entirely in terms of her sexual attractiveness, I’m still thinking of her as an independent, active human being. Sex is physical intimacy with another person, whose other-person-ness is a necessary part of the equation. Sex and sexual desire are completely, vitally, actively human and do not dehumanise anyone. The body is not an object, it is part of the self. “Objectification” is nothing but a way of manipulating people by inspiring guilt.
Patrick Brown,
I absolutely agree with the second paragraph you wrote, at least to an extent. Male sexuality being cast as subhuman, bestial, violent and predatory is an absolute guilt-trip shaming tactic. It worked for Christianity for centuries, and now it is working for Feminism.
Those feminists that go on about “objectification” and the “male gaze” are really just trying to impute a new version of Original Sin to all men.
I reject it as well, for the reasons you stated as well as a few others. Part of the criteria that feminists use to determine if “objectification” is taking place is if a man is paying particular attention to physical traits which set females apart from other females. When women do this to men, it involves looking at features such as the man’s height and his musculature, but somehow this doesn’t count as objectification. In fact, when the tables are turned, feminists use the same thought process that they accuse men of when they concoct stereotypes about men such as Schrodinger’s Rapist. They plead with men to cross to the other side of the street and walk on eggshells because women want to be able to demonize men by their physical attributes alone.
I don’t reject the notion of objectification. Not at all. The White Feather campaign was objectifications at its worst.
What I reject is the notion of sexual objectification, especially when it is a disingenuous cover-up of prostitution behaviors.
Hiding, my favorite film critic was Pauline Kael; I have read all of her books… is that not the kind of film criticism you mean? I also like J. Hoberman, and I was fond of the late Andrew Sarris and Molly Haskell (who were married, which I didn’t even know for a long time) .. as well as the late Judith Crist.
I hope you know that you can “study film” without necessarily studying it in an institution. 🙂
Daisy:
I suppose there is some crossover when it comes to a person that influential, but I was thinking more of the type of film criticism that gets published in academic journals and places like that (less ‘was it any good’ and more ‘what does it mean in a cultural context’), although it certainly wouldn’t be difficult to find references to Mulvey in contemporary film reviews. There’s always a terrible confusion with the words ‘film criticism’ because they describe two mostly separate types of work and no one can think of a better term to replace them in either case.
I am fully aware that one can study film without taking classes in it (although I suppose I’ve gotten in the habit of using the word in that context). In fact, it’s one of the reasons I no longer take classes in film (the other was that I discovered I dislike the majority of academic film criticism and of the people who produce it) and now devote my time to the translation of important literature that most academics don’t talk about. I would certainly say that someone like, for example, the RZA is probably better ‘studied’ in film than a lot of people who have degrees in it.
Ginkgo:
I disagree. You can’t shame an object, and you don’t need to. The White Feather campaign abused men’s desire for acceptance and approval. It depends on men having a point of view to work. It’s cruelty, which is based on empathy without sympathy.
Patrick Brown:
I think your confusion is because you conflate “object” with the adjective “inanimate”.
However the two terms do not have to go together.
A car, for instance, is an animate object.
Arguably the physical body of a person is as well. Animals can be objects.
How come you think it was so easy to do experiments on animals for so long for many researchers? Well, they were considered “mere clockwork”, without intelligence, perception, a soul, or ability to feel pain, even.
And this is how the men in World War 1 were treated: as protection objects who only had the following attributes: fear, courage, duty. Press the right button-“shame” and the “useful” ones would do their duty and go to the battlefield, where they would show courage. It was “numbers” to the front, and mindless patriotism, and male disposibility all ruled up into one.
And by the way – one does NOT empathize with a mere object.
You complain there was no empathy? Well, that’s because the men involved were seen as human or useful only insofar as they “did their duty”. I cannot imagine a clearer example of objectification.
I should have said this better:
One does not empathize or sympathize with a mere object.
I think the point is made.
I’m also agreeing that OF COURSE as concerns mainstream feminist use and discourse on “objectification” it is a misuse and misapplication of the term, often selectively.
Of course the whole goal is to impute a type of “original sin” to male sexuality and ONLY male sexuality.
This is a very politically useful tool for feminists to have: it enables them to combine with certain types of traditionalists (mostly religious types) to get legislation crafted, it ensures a never ending fight (imagine the amount of time that will be needed to totally revamp male sexual preferences [to the extent its possible without genetic engineering]esp. when feminists themselves can’t always agree on just what aspects of the “male gaze” are bad) against the evil “patriarchy”, and it provides for rather simple and seemingly clear cut public service campaigns and other types of propaganda.
The way to fight this isn’t to pretend objectification doesn’t exist (though its fine to point out when feminists misuse the term) but instead to point out that everyone does it, that it has uses, and that its not always harmful because its usually not complete.
Clarence, a car is not animate. It has no volition. You operate it, and it moves, just as you operate a telephone, and it enables you to speak to people remotely. And animals are experimented on precisely because they are animate, and are therefore the best available substitute for experimenting on humans. Animals are not objects, they are beings whose animate attributes we may find useful (and wgen we do, we must train them with rewards and punishments – we don’t just operate them the way we do a car or a telephone) but whose lives and well-being we ultimately don’t value as much as those of humans. And that’s a far better analogy to the White Feather campaign than a car or any other kind of object.
Many people are opposed to needless cruelty towards animals, which is a condescending position based on a position of superiority. And there are commenters who contribute to this site who consider men to be morally inferior and have less “utility” than women, and are lauded by the bloggers for opposing cruelty towards us.
As for empathy, the White Feather campaign depends on empathy. Empathy is an awareness of the feelings of others, and is not, by itself, a virtue, no matter how much women congratulate themselves on being the more empathetic sex. To be cruel, to know how best to hurt someone or how to use their feelings to manipulate them, requires empathy.
I don’t seem to have come to a conclusion in my last comment. The conclusion should be: I don’t think the White Feather campaign was an example of objectification, I think it was an example of cruelty.
Patrick,
I think you make a very good point about empathy. Psychopaths lack empathy, but not necessarily sympathy, while histrionics/narcissists lack sympathy, but not empathy. In fact, a hallmark of histrionics/narcissists is the use of emotions of others as a tool to manipulate, which, without a deep understanding of the emotions of others (empathy) is impossible.
@ Patrick
“And there are commenters who contribute to this site who consider men to be morally inferior and have less “utility” than women, and are lauded by the bloggers for opposing cruelty towards us.”
“The Bloggers?”
Anyway, I think most sympathetic positions come from a sense of superiority. We don’t have concern for those we see as greater then ourselves and we seem to have this issue with seeing people as equals.
Typhon:
Well, Ginkgo. On reflection, and a bit of archive searching, you and Xakudo are inncocent. apologies.
@ Patrick
In regards to Valerie, even if she does view men as “inferior”, that is her opinion. As long as she promotes compassion for men and equal rights, she is entitled to her opinions regarding the relative merits of men versus women.
Men don’t exist to please Valerie; but Valerie doesn’t have to like them.
@Patrick, there is this extremely vague notion from all corners of the interwebs that we must praise the 1 redeeming quality in a sea of wrongs when dealing with feminists, or theists, or any other group of dogmatic individuals who we are trying to enlighten. Everyone is pressured to do it, and if they don’t, they get accused of being mean. There is this notion that if we don’t bend over backwards to make the people we are criticizing nice and comfortable, then we’re doing it all wrong. The difference between one blogger and the next is that in some cases, one blogger will lend their credibility and shelter the feminist, while the other won’t. So one blogger will write piece after piece that starts out with, “I don’t agree with a lot of what this feminist says, but the other day he had a good point…” and in the meantime they will use their mod powers to work themselves into a pretzel trying to shut up anybody who attempts to criticize that feminist. But another blogger will basically just give people the benefit of a doubt and encourage them to express themselves and defend their ideas. I generally don’t take an issue with the ladder. The former, however, gets to be obnoxious after a while.
@typhonblue, Valerie can be extremely vexing. It mainly stems from her misconstruing every single letter of every single word as an attack on transsexuals while at the same time she tends to express views that come across as if she thinks that all men are inherently inferior and damaged. I have some sympathy for where she’s coming form, but she has to seriously get over it. Save it for the radfems.
Typhonblue, Valerie’s opinions are her opinions and she’s entitled to them. It’s the apparent indulgence of some of those opinions by others I sometimes find troubling.
I have to say, I was pretty alarmed by Valerie bringing up her “transsexual lesbian utopia” on here. She had earlier claimed that she uses it mostly as teaching tool to instruct feminists on their ‘cissexism’. But it seemed pretty clear to me that what it really boiled down to was a masturbatory fantasy wherein the entire male race is chemically erased, in utero. Then she got really weird, arguing from a psuedo-economics position regarding utility, and moral judgments thereon, less coherently than usual. And when I tried to get her to argue her point a little more by providing a counterexample, she just left it hanging, which raised some flags for me.
I hope that she is in an emotionally ok place, I kind of wonder if she wasn’t going through something in her life.
I agree that Ginkgo seems to have a soft spot for her, but to tell the truth, when she critiques “uni-directionalists”, she makes very good points (despite constantly approaching the situation from the perspective of, “how does this erase trans people and how can I make you feel shitty for that?”).
Full disclosure, I was cowardly/smart enough that I didn’t call her out when she started talking about giving male fetuses sprionolactone because obviously that would create a utopia, right?
I kind of wish I had, at the time, but I just didn’t want to deal with CISSEXISM! shitstorm.
@ Patrick
It’s not indulgence on my part but simple indifference. I’ve noticed she switchbacks like mad but I’m not inclined to put forth the effort to stop her or attempt to untangle why.
I don’t have the time or inclination.
To be clear, I am troubled by the fact that a couple of posts have been made singling Valerie out for praise for things she’s said on other sites, without what I would consider due acknowledgement of the disturbing things she’s said here. Apologies for the derail, I didn’t mean to turn this into a discussion of Valerie. It was an ill-advised aside which has left me having to explain what I meant and giving my concerns more airtime than I intended to.