[“No Homo: Two White Men Touch Each Other. Thursdays 9/8c. “So gay” — Fandom. “I can’t” –Tumblr.” Source.]
Trigger warning for discussion of sexual coercion.
1) I have a problem. I am, as a bisexual and female-presenting person, against bisexual fetishization. My sexuality is not for the consumption of straight dudes! I don’t like being a prop in someone else’s fantasy!
But also I really like watching boys kiss?
2) I see a lot of people complaining about how femmeslash and het are so much less popular than slash fic and attributing this to internal misogyny on the part of fic writers. But… most fanfic writers are straight girls. Of course straight girls are not really interested in porn starring women. It kind of comes with the “straight girl” territory. It’s like saying that straight men not wanting to watch gay porn is proof of their internal misandry.
3) One of the amazing things about watching Avatar: The Last Airbender is that I finally got to ship femmeslash.
(Note: I put off watching Avatar for years and years because people kept telling me about how amazing it was on a social justice level. I don’t watch TV for social justice points, I watch it for fun. So since I’m talking about amazing Avatar is on a social-justice level I feel duty-bound to mention that it also has astonishingly detailed and well-researched worldbuilding, fabulous characters, well-choreographed fight scenes, and clever writing, and you should go watch it.)
But like. There were female characters? More than one of them? And they talked to each other? And they had different personalities and flaws? And none of them were Strong Female Characters or damsels in distress? And holy shit Azula. You don’t get a lot of manipulative violent hypercompetent complete monster female characters who aren’t femme fatales, which is too bad because the “manipulative violent hypercompetent complete monster” characters are basically my favorite.
And suddenly all my OTPs are femmeslash, when previously I’d managed to go about a decade in fandom without the slightest femmeslashy impulse.
Which makes me wonder how much my previous slashy impulses, and the popularity of slash in general, were just because everything I watched was A Bunch of Guys and Black Widow, or A Bunch of Guys and Lieutenant Uhura, or A Bunch of Guys and We’re Not Even Bothering To Half-Ass A Female Character.
4) The first time I told a boyfriend I was bi, back when I was scared and closeted and still thought I was monogamous and a girl, his immediate response was that he didn’t like threesomes.
The second time I told a boyfriend I was bi, his immediate response was to ask me about my sexual fantasies of women.
I once dated a girl who for months only kissed me when there was a boy in the room to get off on it. I went along with it so at least I’d get to kiss her.
5) It’s one thing to consume lesbian porn. I mean, Some Of My Best Friends Like Watching Two Girls Get It On ™. I don’t care about your fondness for yuri! I really don’t! And I feel like most queer dudes probably have a similar attitude towards slash.
But at this point some asshole dude deciding that your sexuality is for his entertainment is pretty much a universal experience for those queer and read as female. (And some straight women too. Anyone get the “women are naturally more sexually fluid than men” line pulled on them?) I feel like a lot of that is because people get this sort of sexual fantasy from porn and then when they meet a queer woman they expect her to fulfill it. And shit man, it’s bad enough that we have to put up with it, I would be deeply unhappy if queer dudes had to put up with that too.
I dunno what the solution is. Maybe poll the non-asshole straight people that like watching queer people have sex and see how they manage to maintain the reality/porn distinction.
6) Maybe it’s different because fandom is mostly women and men historically have power over women. Maybe it’s different for me because I’m bisexual myself, because when I look at two boys kissing I imagine myself as one of the boys, because…
I dunno. I don’t like rules where it’s not okay to do something because you’re privileged but because you’re part of a marginalized group it’s okay. Seems to me if it’s wrong to make someone a prop in your fantasy it’s wrong no matter what group you’re part of.
7) I am deeply creeped out by dudes who are more attracted to me because I’m bi. I’m more attracted to dudes if they’re bi. And, okay, maybe some of it is shared experience of queerness, and some of it is ability to look at cute boys together, and some of it is not having to have that sneaking suspicion that the straight dude really sees me as a girl and is putting up with the whole “genderqueer” thing as one of my eccentricities. But a lot of it is “eeeeee boykissing!”
Never let it be said I’m not vastly hypocritical.
8) The accusation of queer baiting is weird. Like, yes, it would be really shitty if shows habitually hinted at characters being queer without actually making them queer as a calculated attempt to draw in slash fangirls. But I kind of feel like a lot of the accusations of queer baiting come from people who have their slash goggles permanently stuck on their foreheads and are just pissed their ships aren’t canon.
9) I think it’s awesome when straight girls make out for the hell of it. I think it’s awesome when straight girls make out to turn on guys, even, as long as they’re doing it because they want to and not because they feel like they have to to be sexy. I’ve kissed straight girls because kissing is fun and I’ll basically make out with anyone who asks. And I think that straight boys should be equally free to make out with each other and queers to make out heterosexually for the hell of it or to turn someone else on or because kissing is fun.
I’d just rather people stop assuming that when I kiss girls I’m doing it to get into his pants instead of hers. And I don’t want it to be that when some queer dude kisses a boy people assume he’s doing it to get into her pants instead of his.
Thing of Things 
Your mention of female manipulative, violent, hypercompetent complete monsters who aren’t femme fatales made me think of Blake’s 7. Servalan admittedly seems to like to dress up sexy, but her schemes almost never revolve around her sexiness, just her ruthlessness and most un-villain like ability to learn from her mistakes. If you haven’t seen it, you might like it. Admittedly, some of the rest of the show does show its age at this point.
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This is going to be a rather abstract comment that is only loosely related to the post above.
Anyway, I notice a general tension between these two thoughts:
1. “In a perfect world group A and group B would be treated equally, so I’m going to treat them totally equally myself, cuz I want be part of that perfect world.”
2. “These groups are not treated equally by others; I can plainly see that, so I’m going to treat them kinda the opposite of the way society does to mitigate the imbalance.”
I hope the applications to the stuff in the post is obvious. In fact, I think the general way we evaluate behavior has to account for the relative power involved, and how the behavior fits into the broad social context.
Like, as a goofy analogy: in superhero world, if my eyes shot bullets and your eyes shot nothing, I would have to be careful where I looked. You would not. I might call this unfair, but then, I get to shoot bullets from my eyes.
There is a way that sexual expression by men is different from sexual expression by women. Likewise, there is a way that sexual expression by queers is different from sexual expression by straight people. On and on.
In queer utopia this would not be true, and maybe we can create spaces more like queer utopia, but we cannot be in those spaces all the time so what do we do when we’re on the subway?
And when men (or straight people or cis people or whatever) say to women (or queers or trans folks), “Hey, you get to do X and I don’t. No fair!” then we say, “But you get A,B,C,D,E,F,G and I don’t, and in queer utopia we’ll all get to do the whole alphabet! Plus maybe at our own cool fetish parties we’ll pretend we’re in queer utopia already and then we can all do what we want, cuz we’re cool like that, but out here in the world we ain’t and you should respect that.”
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Well, wrt the stuff in the post, applying the second thought is more complicated. *puts on straw SJ hat*
Look, when straight men fetishize lesbians, it perpetuates the idea that women exist for men, and that we don’t get to have relationships that aren’t for the purpose of men. When straight women fetishize gay men, these dynamics aren’t present, and it’s just a bit of harmless fun
*switches to other straw SJ hat*
Look, when straight people fetishize gay people, it perpetuates the idea that queer people are exotic or that our relationships exist for the pleasure of straight people. When gay men fetishize turning straight boys, none of these implications exist.
So is the problem with straight men fetishizing lesbians mysogyny or homophobia?
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*misogyny
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Of course, to extend the metaphor, in a superhero universe, there will never be equality between supers and normals. You’d completely expect that some jobs would be naturally fulfilled by bullet-eye people and some wouldn’t be, and that any attempts to reduce the inequalities created by these social dynamics would run headlong into the fundamental truth of difference behind them. So, I’m not sure this is a particularly useful metaphor for queerness.
Plus, almost every oppressor group started as an oppressed group, and the vast, vast majority of them encoded the “We’re being persecuted; what we do to People Not Like Us (who are obviously complicit in this) is thereby justified because of A thru G!” bits into their memes then, it just seems like a bad practice to say “This is bad behavior when you do it to us, but not when we do it to you.”, given that everyone who wants to justify their own bad behavior is saying the same thing. This isn’t proof that this isn’t a special case distinct from every other case of people making this claim who later turned around and kept ahold of their justifications even after A thru G were remedied, but I consider it pretty strong circumstantial evidence.
Now, in specific circumstances, I can see the justification for special treatment. Like, in Saudi Arabia, there would definitely be different standards about gossiping about straight sex than gay sex. But I think that would fall into the general sub-heading of “Don’t do things that will hurt people, or that will predictably get them hurt.”, and I think that’s true regardless of the specific social structures in place around the people in question.
Hmm. This actually suggests a series of double-blind experiments where people are objectified and the harm done is quantified, and then cross-checked to see if it really is happening strongly along lines of gender, sexual preference, and so forth.
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@veronica d:
You know, it seems that lately, whenever I am posting the comment, it’s always to disagree with you. I just wanted to explicitly mention that this is not because I hate you or something, but in fact because you appear to be an expert on the subject who is very good at articulating her views. So, if anyone can set me straight (no pun intended), it’s you. If I did not respect your opinions, I wouldn’t reply to them.
That said, I mostly agree with Robert Liguori’s objections. In addition:
I have always had a bit of a problem with approach #2, because it reinforces the notion that some people (ones who are gay, female, trans, etc.) are different from others (straight white men) on some fundamental level; that they truly are the alien, the Other. In your bullet-eyes example, this is actually true; however, in real life, I would argue that most of the time it is not. By insisting that we take a person’s sexuality, gender, etc. into account at all times, I think that SJ activists are making it more difficult to build the world #1. I don’t think they need this kind of job security.
Naturally, sometimes people really are different on a fundamental level. For example, people with uteri who choose to conceive children need a lot of specific medical care that people without uteri do not. People whose legs are non-functional need a lot of assistance with moving around; people with fully functional legs do not. However, almost all of these problems are a). medical in nature, b). can be mitigated by technology, (and (c) are IMO not receiving enough funding across the board, but that’s a separate story).
In most other cases, however, one’s sexual orientation, gender, etc. are pretty much irrelevant — and they should be treated as such. I understand that, in our current society, that is not always the case; but if we want to build a better one, we need to start thinking of people as people, and not as vectors in multi-dimensional privilege space. Sometimes, I get the feeling that SJ people are saying, “no no, people are totally privilege vectors, you just got the magnitude wrong, you’ve got to multiply it by -10”. And I find it very difficult to square that point of view with the fact that I am friends with all kinds of people, and though all of them are different, they are nonetheless quite human.
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The problem with debates on fetishization is that fetishization is fundamentally a weasel word. In common usage it’s applied to at least three different groups of people. A. People with any non-mainstream sexual interests B. People with a non-mainstream sexual interest based on stereotypes of that given interest C. People with a sexual interests based on stereotypes of that given interest and are sexual predators. Anyone in group A is invariably lumped in with group C and B regardless of what they say or do. This rigs the debate against people who are members of group A because they must defend themselves from accusations that they are really in either group B or C. The better question to ask is why should we assume that everyone who is labeled a “fetishist” is a member of B and C. I have never seen a satisfactory justification for this other than the circular argument well they must be a B or C or else they wouldn’t have a fetish.
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You guys get you can take an analogy too far, yes? That when someone uses an analogy such as what I did, they mean to illustrate a point, not draw a literal conclusion in full detail?
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No. That is nonsense, obviously all metaphors are meant to be taken 100% literally. Mao’s revolutionaries literally swim through a sea of literal people, etc.
Or, more seriously, yes, we get that, we’re just pointing out that this particular metaphor is encoding some points which appear to be contrary to the argument you’re making, which suggests it’s a bad metaphor, or that there’s more to unpack here.
I mean, in general, should we assume that the difference between queer and…normative? is as great and real as the difference between superhuman and human? If we don’t accept it in general, why should this metaphor be persuasive? And I’m not just talking about us here; if the social differences between queer and nonqueer are not inherent and absolute, and more like one person being armed and having the ability to do harm to a degree that an unarmed person can’t, why not use that as the metaphor?
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If you think the current society is oppressive doesn’t treating people “kinda the opposite of the way society does to mitigate the imbalance” amount to being unkind to alot of people. Presumably I am just misunderstanding but the way I parse it the idea of “flipping” society’s treatment leads to terrible things.
I think the reasonable options are:
1) Treat everyone equally as would be clearly appropriate in an ideal society
2) Be extra nice to some people. But don’t excuse your own unkind behavior toward anyone. And if you are going to be treating people differently based on (mostly or probably) unchangeable characteristics understand its very easy to get this wrong and wind up doing harm. So be super careful.
I personally try to do number 2 whenever I am sufficiently sure I can do so safely. An example is that I try to be a little nicer than normal when interacting with people who are disabled or who I think are trans.* Though even this is dangerous. You have to make sure you don’t start acting like your friendship is magical or something else lame. But so many people are so mean to certain people I feel aggressively signalling that such groups are “totally 100% cool with me” is worthwhile.
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@startgirl — I’m mostly talking about your #2, and yes it can backfire.
(I recall last time I went to hear Janet Mock speak the room was like 90% white cis women, which there’s nothing wrong with that. But being a big-obvious trans woman in that space was hella awkward. I mean, I like being smiled at, but the relentless smiles seemed really phony. It was obvious I was *marked*. On the other hand, it was kinda cool these women were there to watch Janet.)
But I’m also thinking about this: folks need to acknowledge that *some lives are different* and ignoring the differences is actually unhelpful.
Another example, this showed up on my Tumblr feed the other day. It is a visual metaphor about why we need to think differently about white characters in movies versus black characters in movies. Sure, in an ideal world these things would not matter, but we do not live in an ideal world and they do matter.
(A counterpoint: when I went to see Against Me! basically no one seemed to care that I was trans. It was just, like, sure a trans women is here to see Against Me! Obviously. But folks just kinda treated me like everyone else, near as I could tell. It was nice.)
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A loosely related thought: I have seen and heard people quoting (usually without credit) Mother Jones about how one should “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted” as though it’s an obvious moral truism on numerous occasions. Curiously enough, on not a single one of those occasions was the speaker using that quote to defend, or to urge more, comforting.
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I’d second Bugmaster’s comment. The main reason I read this blog is to try and understand what I see as the Social Justice viewpoint, which I do not hold myself and find instinctively repugnant. Your viewpoint is about as far from mine as one can get, and yet you communicate it in a civil and logical manner which means attempting to understand it is at least possible. So thank you very much, and my apologies also if I communicate poorly.
”
1. “In a perfect world group A and group B would be treated equally, so I’m going to treat them totally equally myself, cuz I want be part of that perfect world.”
2. “These groups are not treated equally by others; I can plainly see that, so I’m going to treat them kinda the opposite of the way society does to mitigate the imbalance.”
”
Everyone wants Justice. It seems obvious that there’s a fundamental disagreement over what “Justice” means.
a) Person A is not allowed to do harm to person B, and if they do, we do harm to person A in retaliation. The goal is to reduce the total amount of harm.
b) We can’t stop person A from doing harm to person B, so we’ll let person C be harmed by person D to compensate. The goal is to balance the harm so neither side gets an advantage.
(note that the definition of “harm” here is very abstract. I give a sucker to my niece, my nephews are “harmed” by not getting suckers, and claim I’m being unjust.)
If you think justice is intrinsically personal, then the first definition makes sense. If you think justice applies to groups in aggregate, the second definition makes sense.
I don’t think justice can be fulfilled in aggregate. The injustice of a society is the sum of the injustices experienced by its individual members, with no remainder. If you make a rule that favors group A over group B to compensate for another rule that favors group B over group A, you have reduced justice, not increased it. You make the differences between the groups matter more, not less.
“And when men (or straight people or cis people or whatever) say to women (or queers or trans folks), “Hey, you get to do X and I don’t. No fair!” then we say, “But you get A,B,C,D,E,F,G and I don’t…”
What gives any group the right to define the relative weight of the variables? There are a million times a million variables to human life, and the values of most of them are highly subjective. What makes one system of accounting better than another?
Further, in practice this logic seems to operate as a fully general counterargument. The vast majority of the time, people using it don’t even bother to make sure that the variables in question are actually present, or mean what they claim. It would be quicker and perhaps more honest to say “you’re wrong because you’re a bad person, I’m right because I’m a good person”. Then at least we’d know where we stood.
Finally, and perhaps most practically, what this logic encourages voluntary self-segregation. If we can’t find a set of rules that treats everyone with a generally-acceptable level of fairness, then the only way to avoid destructive conflict is to put up a wall and forget the other side exists. This is one of the things that all of my interactions with social justice keep converging on. There doesn’t seem to be a way for a person like me to interact with the social justice community in a peaceful and mutually respectful manner, so the options are either fight to the death, or just wall it off and try to ignore it. I would really, really like an alternative that involves mutual niceness, plurality and civilization, but none seem apparent.
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For (a), I prefer a rights-based rather than harm-based analysis, but apart from that, I agree with this comment 100%.
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This comments condemnation is much stronger than my view so despite the like I am explicitly not agreeing. For example I find engaging with veronica pleasant, and rewarding. I am always happy to see her posts <3. However these quotes are very awesome and accurately summarize my view:
"I don’t think justice can be fulfilled in aggregate. The injustice of a society is the sum of the injustices experienced by its individual members, with no remainder. "
"What gives any group the right to define the relative weight of the variables? There are a million times a million variables to human life, and the values of most of them are highly subjective. What makes one system of accounting better than another?
Further, in practice this logic seems to operate as a fully general counterargument. The vast majority of the time, people using it don’t even bother to make sure that the variables in question are actually present, or mean what they claim. "
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I’m sorry for that. I write, and then I delete, and then I write and then I delete, to try to express an idea clearly without being offensive, and it ends up just being all muddled. I certainly don’t mean to be condemning Veronica, she is probably the person I’m most interested in listening to here.
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Het guy here. I think a lot of what determines whether or not this sort of thing is okay is whether you’re also willing to accept queer relationships apart from the sex. I think it’s hot when girls kiss, but I also realize that lesbian relationships involve more than that. I’ve known guys whose support for gay rights begins and ends at “Ah hell yeah, two chicks makin’ out!” If you’re not supportive when queer people have relationship difficulties or face discrimination, and you only care about your fantasies, then that’s where you start to get into douchey territory.
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As a cis man who really enjoys being fetishized and objectified by women, I’ve found that making out and having sex with other men is one of the best ways to achieve this. (Though of course it’s important to be careful about the emotional impact on the other man and make sure he’s okay with this being a major motivation for me.) The resulting positive associations (with some conscious help) have led to a slow increase in my position on the Kinsey scale, from around 0 to around 2, and I now find I enjoy flirting and sex with men even when no women are around.
So at least for my part the fetishization of male homosexuality by straight women has made my life better and I would not want to discourage it. Of course I can’t speak for all men and it’s quite possible that it hurts other men more than it helps men like me (in the same way that objectification of women is net-harmful at the margin even though some women like it), but the scarcity of opportunities for most men to be fetishized by women is an asymmetry from the situation with genders reversed, and so it’s at least more plausible that this fetishization of men is net-positive at the margin.
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I actually have kink for having sex while people watch. The kink does not strongly depend on the gender of the people watching or the gender of the person I am having sex with. Though of course some sex partners turn me on more than others.
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The most *obvious* answer to “I judge other people as bad for doing this but I really like to do it myself” is that maybe doing it isn’t so bad after all. It’s just that judging others gives you power over them (especially in a SJ context) and many people hate giving up power.
It doesn’t even have to be specifically about homosexuals. Women liking male slash is not only an example of fetishizing gay people, it’s also an example of women objectifying attractive people. Maybe objectification as a whole isn’t as bad as everyone says it is.
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I think the answer to this conundrum is that it’s okay to be turned on due to a particular fetish, but it’s not okay to treat someone as if they exist for the purpose of fulfilling your fetish. If you discover that someone else is fetishing you, then this naturally leads to a fear of the latter behavior.
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How often does “treating someone as if they exist for the purpose of fulfilling your fetish” actually happen? Ironically, I think this is one area where feminists tend to overestimate the difference between male and female sexuality. Men may be superficial, but we’re not monsters — we’re aware that the “objects” of our attraction are, in fact, human beings with hopes and dreams and the usual internal landscape. (PUA techniques capitalize rather heavily on it, in fact. I’m not here to defend PUAs, merely to point out that even the most manipulative men are not literally objectifying women.)
There’s something very wrong with the whole framework of “objectification”. It represents a fundamental error that doesn’t seem to have an official name, but is more or less the opposite of the typical-mind fallacy.
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Some men seem to be very firmly in the grip of the madonna/whore dichotomy (such as perhaps the man mentioned in Scott’s old post about objectification, who couldn’t imagine degrading his wife by asking for a weird sexual thing). For extreme cases of such men, viewing a woman as sexual seems almost automatically to lead to viewing her as a worthless human being (because sexual = “slut”). Some feminists seem to think most men are like this most of the time (perhaps because they’ve partly internalized the story about “sluts” themselves, so the typical mind fallacy may actually be at work), which as stillnotking notes is clearly empirically false, and that the way to fight this is to oppose anyone ever seeing women as sexual, which would seem to me like a terrible solution even if I believed the problem was as nearly universal as some feminists make it out to be. But it also seems to be a mistake to claim that no men ever think anything like this, and that pattern of thinking does seem to be very problematic.
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I assume this was one of the posts Scott referred to in “My objections to objectification”? I’m glad for the chance to finally read part of what he was responding to. Scott’s post always stuck out at me as one of only a couple of his feminism-related posts whose overall conclusions I had significant disagreement with, but it was hard to evaluate his arguments properly without seeing what he was arguing against.
I guess “objectification” is a tricky term, and there are multiple conceptions of it in play here. I’ll see if I can get to posting my thoughts on it a little later under here.
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I hope you do post your thoughts, because from what I’ve seen, all that the term “objectification” means is, “hetero male sexuality in general is toxic and should be discouraged and/or suppressed”. And if someone believes that, then fine, we can have a conversation on the topic, and I could even be persuaded to agree (really, I could). But we can’t have that conversation if one side is always obfuscating their arguments with words like “objectification”, and when you ask them, “ok, so did I objectify the male clerk at the drive-through window today, by treating him as merely a machine that dispenses hamburgers ?”, they backpedal into some sort of a semantic rabbit-hole.
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There are not entirely implausible Marxist arguments that the clerk at the drive-through window is essentially being objectified (though I’m not sure it’s the customer objectifying him). In fact, they’re more plausible than most of the ways the concept of objectification is actually used; I’m quite convinced that most of the time, people are unable to separate their discomfort with sexuality from any kind of objective (hah!) appraisal of what’s going on, and that accusations of objectification say a lot more about what the accuser’s issues are than about anything that’s really going on. Which should really not be surprising; the concept obviously derives from Kant, and people creatively distorting Kantian principles in implausible ways to reinforce their own pre-existing prejudices about sex is a practice which originated with Kant himself and seems to have infected the majority of subsequent Kantians.
Probably my favorite academic on these topics is Simone de Beauvoir, who is almost unique in having things to say about this issue which aren’t so hopelessly oversimplified as to be completely misleading and useless. She also has a rare and admirable tendency to refrain from drawing conclusions when she thinks her evidence is too murky to justify them (which is also one of Ozy’s strong points, I’ve always thought).
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I think “objectification” more or less means to view something as means to a particular end. I think we can probably agree that this is a reasonable definition which can be applied to the contexts we’re dealing with here. Now “fetishization” may be considered as a certain case of this, where the end is sexual gratification — at least, that is one way to think of fetishization which I think is at least compatible with most people’s definitions in these contexts. Okay, the concept of “fetishization” also assumes that the particular characteristics which trigger sexual arousal are not those few which are considered mainstream, but I think that’s secondary to our discussion.
It’s fine to objectify material goods because they’re, well, objects. It’s pretty clear that it’s also okay to objectify people in the context of certain roles they are choosing to play. For instance, the job of the drive-through guy at the fast food place is to dispense hamburgers (see Bugmaster’s example above), so it’s generally appropriate to treat him as a hamburger-dispensing object while you are his customer. The job of the porn actor/actress is to put on a show to be viewed for the purpose of sexual gratification, so it’s generally appropriate while watching porn to treat them as merely a means to that end.
Objectification of other people becomes a problem when you are in a context that ethically requires you to take the full scope of their humanity into account. I believe this is the case for most social contexts, including dating relationships. Therefore, it makes sense to be wary of those you meet in real life, in a social context, who appear to be using you for one particular characteristic which gets them off. I don’t blame Ozy for feeling “creeped out” by this. At the same time, someone with a certain fetish usually can’t help feeling turned on by the corresponding characteristic in a social context. So I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, as long as they don’t let that result in treating the other person as merely a means to turning them on. There is no hypocrisy or inconsistency here, as long as one is able to feel turned on by some aspect of some person while making sure not to treat that person as solely an embodiment of that aspect.
I think part of the reason why there is so much trouble with the use of the word “objectification” is that a lot of feminists seem to be conflating it with a (het) man’s feeling of sexual desire for a woman which influences how he treats that woman. See, for example, Rebecca Watson’s use of “objectify” in her fateful vlog upload*. This sort of usage gradually led me to cringe whenever I saw feminists bring up objectification. I expect Bugmaster’s comment above was inspired by it, and maybe it influenced Scott as well. But there is a difference between “to objectify = to have sexual desire for someone which influences how you treat them” and “to objectify = to have sexual desire due to a particular aspect of someone which determines the entirety of how you treat them”. Ozy usage seems more in accordance with the latter rather than the former.
* For the record, that one word is really my only objection to Watson’s video; I otherwise thought she sounded perfectly reasonable.
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You know, I really *don’t* think it’s okay to objectify the person serving you burgers at the drive-through, despite the fact that several people have already presented this as a weird fringe opinion that shows how the concept of objectification is flawed. I’ve worked retail, and being treated as a product-dispensing object is actually quite unpleasant. I think that when people are willing to drop even the most basic rituals that show that you understand that you’re talking to another human being (“Hi! How are you?” “Have a nice day!”), that the result is ultimately harmful.
The same goes for the porn actress. Now, I don’t have a problem with enjoying whatever is going on in the porn video on a level that’s purely about sexual gratification, but deciding that therefore the actress herself is an object for sexual gratification, as opposed to a person who provides sexual gratification because it is her job, seems to lead to bad things, such as not caring whether the people in your porn were coerced into filming it, not caring if they were fairly compensated, not caring if the filming conditions were safe, and the general indifference that a lot of people seem to feel when sex workers are the victims of crimes.
I think that a large number of people who talk about objectification are not very good at differentiating between “feeling sexually attracted to someone, especially if you are a het man” and “objectification,” but the solution to this problem is not say that objectification is fine in some contexts, as long as you don’t go overboard. The solution is to point out the many ways that sexual attraction can be *not* objectifying.
Anyway, that is the end of my apparently very weird fringe opinion.
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Bem, that’s a good point. Here’s my shot at synthesis.
You are likely to get broad agreement when you treat the McDonald’s clerk as being ONLY a hamburger dispensing object, as opposed to a person whose functions in that case include dispensing hamburger.
The argument comes when person A accuses person B of objectifing the clerk for treating her as if her functions INCLUDE hamburger dispensing at all, or even primarily hamburger dispensing.
B says “Of course I know the clerk is a person. Even if I were a sociopath, which I believe I am not, I would recognize the difference between people and hamburger kiosks, because they have different reactions to stimuli, so it takes different activities to get a fresh, un-spat-upon hamburger. In addition, I have a conscience, and want everyone to be happy as long as it doesn’t cost me too much, so the fact that my primary interactions with the McDonalds window clerk involve hamburger exchange doesn’t mean that I objectified her. It’s perfectly appropriate not to have the same level of human interaction with her as a I might have with someone I was visiting in the hospital.”
Then you get into evidence, and it turns out that B did say “thank you,” but didn’t say “how is it going,” or doesn’t support a mimimum wage law, or didn’t make eye contact and stayed on his phone when the clerk was talking to her.
And in this context, I think a “continuum of objectiifcation” (where 1 is sociopathically ignoring the clerk’s agency, and 5 is treating her with the same respect you’d extend to a favorite child who was working at the same window) would be a valid model, but if you accentially slip into binary obectification/not objectification, then you spend a lot of time on definitions, as reflected by this wall of text.
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I think this thread has pretty much nailed it, but I’ll give it my own gloss.
Objectification is bad not because of what the objectifier feels about the object but because of what they don’t. If you learn your partner is bi and that turns you on, you aren’t necessarily a bad person, but if you think your arousal is the most important consequence of this news, you’re pretty shitty. That’s the difference between Ozy and the partners they describe in the post, and with apologies for speculating, I bet they wouldn’t be nearly as upset by actual reciprocation of their own attitude, except insofar as it triggered thoughts of those previous experiences.
Going even further into conjecture, since objectification is more of an absence than a presence, it should be fought with positive rather than negative approaches. E.g. Instead of railing against girl-on-girl porn, push for other media to actively humanize lesbians. Instead of insisting that being turned on by a group is WRONG, show that that group has an existence outside of sex fantasies.
Anyone know any studies confirming or disproving this? This has to have been studied.
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@bem: I’m always a little confused by this. I’ve worked retail, and while active rudeness (hostile tone, an assumption of incompetence, etc.) bothered me, a merely mechanical approach never did. For the customer’s purposes, I was a machine that provided furniture and information about furniture in exchange for money. For my purposes, the customer was a machine that provided money in exchange for furniture and information about furniture. Why should either of us* be bothered by a lack of pretense.
Regarding caring about whether porn stars are coerced: It seems to me that treating other people as “a useful object plus human rights” is crucially different from treating them as “a useful object, which has no rights.”
*On the other hand, customers who expect warmth and friendliness from retail workers, especially if they don’t provide it themselves, are assholes.
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I guess it depends on what you mean by mechanical (or else we just have rather different preferences). A lot of salesperson/client interactions repeat basically the same script, but I wouldn’t say that this is necessarily objectification just because it’s a bit rote. I’m talking much more about the people in your last paragraph, who feel free to be rude while still expecting the salesperson to go mechanically about providing services with an air of politeness, or who, say, get disproportionately upset at the salesperson for things that are not under the salesperson’s control (“Sorry, I cannot sell you that thing because we are out it,” etc). We might have slightly different standards of what counts as rude, though–like, I always felt like “customer who spends the entire interaction buried deeply in their phone and occasionally grunting something in my direction” was absolutely excruciating, but maybe this sort of thing doesn’t bother you.
And I guess I fail to understand why you should care about the rights of a “useful object,” if you’re really sorting people into that category. It seems like an awful lot of double-think to go through when you could simply treat people as, “a person, who is also sexy.”
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Wow, it seems like we’ve found yet another Typical Mind divide. To me, an irrationally angry customer is annoying, while a compulsive phone user is perfect (as long as they perform the substantial parts of their role correctly).
On the other hand, I find the chattiness with strangers which seems to be considered polite in the Southern US deeply unsettling — it seems to render genuine, heartfelt expressions of interest and affection mechanical and empty in the long term.
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@bem: When I say “treating others as a useful object plus human rights,” I don’t quite mean actually having that as one’s conceptualization of them, but rather having that as one’s functional approximation. Like “what I want out of this person matches what I would want out a useful object, and the ethical limitations on my interactions with them are fully satisfied by respecting their human rights.”
I also suppose that “human rights” is a bit narrow, in that I don’t think there’s really a human right not to be yelled at*, but I still think one shouldn’t yell at retail staff without a damn good reason. But that’s still a negative constraint, not a positive one, so it’s similar.
I sometimes vent to salespeople about corporate policy (never about things being out of stock), which is perhaps suboptimal, but I don’t think I ever really vent at them, if that’s a meaningful distinction, i.e. I’ll say things like “I know you don’t set policy for X, and I’m not blaming you, but it’s really fucking bullshit that this store Y!” but not “what the fuck do you mean you Y!? What the hell is wrong with you fuckers!?”
I have no sense of guilt about multitasking with a phone though (I also do this in actual social interactions, but there I do feel bad), unless it materially makes the salesperson’s life harder in some way, nor would I be bothered if others did the same to me**. I’m curious: Why does this bother you?
*There are human rights violations of which yelling at someone is a relevant aspect; I just don’t think that yelling itself rises to that level.
**I’m pretty sure the last time I worked retail was before smartphones were widely available, although my memory could be off
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I feel like the examples given here of “women fetishizing queer men” and “men fetishizing queer women” aren’t really commensurate. I mean, the thing about enjoying slash or watching porn where boys kiss is that, while it might qualify as fetishization, it’s directed at people who are fictional and/or actors, whereas the people who are going around talking about how Women Are Just More Sexually Fluid and You’re Bi, Want to Have a Threesome? are directing their fetishization at people who are actually real.
Of course, you can argue that fetishization in general is a bad thing, but I feel like I personally would be much less upset about bisexual fetishization if it usually took the form of straight dudes on the internet discussing how much they want the female leads of their favorite TV show to make out, as opposed to straight dudes treating actual living bi women as if their job is to provide free porn?
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Why is directing fetishization at real people bad? If a woman came up to me and said “Omigod, your beard is so hot, I have such a thing for guys with big beards! Wanna make out?” my reaction would be far from displeased. Frankly, for that matter, a guy saying the same wouldn’t offer the same practical benefits, but it would still be a nice ego boost.
Like, if people are seeing you exclusively* sexually who would otherwise see you as a complex human being, I can see how that’s bad. But if people are seeing you exclusively sexually who would otherwise not be paying any attention to you at all, how is that a bad thing?
*Apart from acknowledging that you have human rights, of course.
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A little illustration for your comment: youtube video, 2:18.
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“…if people are seeing you exclusively sexually who would otherwise not be paying any attention to you at all, how is that a bad thing?”
I think we’re coming from very different places on this issue. You mention that you’d like it if strangers came up to you and complemented you on things about your appearance that they found sexy. I actually *get* this exact kind of attention regularly, and I hate it.
And, maybe this is just a case of you and I having different preferences. That would be fine, although in that case I would like to have a clear way to opt out of invasive sexual attention from strangers, instead of having to grin and bear it because some people think it’s nice. But your comment suggests that this also doesn’t usually happen to you, and I think you may be missing a piece of what it means for people to really see you “exclusively sexually.”
So, if someone is seeing you exclusively as a sexual object, they tend not to care about your preferences. Are you late for work and running to catch your bus? Now would be a great time to stand directly in front of you and tell you about how nice your legs look when you sprint like that, while you try to change trajectories enough to avoid a head-on collision! Did you think it would be nice to eat lunch in the park on your break? Well, that nice lady across from you wants to sit next to you, and she’s going to inch closer and closer as you eat your sandwich, asking questions about your personal life and where, exactly, do you live, and, gosh, she’s just trying to make conversation, do you have to be so unfriendly? Also, in a minute or two, she’s going to start trying to stroke your beard. It doesn’t matter if you don’t want her to stroke your beard. The point of you is to be sexy, how could you possibly object?
The issue that I have with objectification is not that strangers find me sexy (how horrible!) but that they don’t treat me like a person because of it. If someone is a sex object, it’s fine to follow them for blocks harassing them for their number, or sit across from them on the bus and mime oral sex, or touch them without asking for consent or even meeting their eyes. And you don’t get to opt out if you don’t like it. If you tell people to stop and leave you alone, they will either ignore you, laugh, or escalate into complete fury (because how dare you go off script! The point of you is to be sexy!).
Anyway, sorry if this comes across as sarcastic. I just really, really dislike being told that I should like it when strangers treat me as a sex object. If you really do like this, that’s fine, but I also want people to take my preferences seriously.
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Hmmm, I think my language may have been insufficiently precise (although it seems to me to be largely similar in extension to how at least some feminists use the same language—which may be part of the problem!). When I think about viewing someone exlcusively sexually, I’m thinking of that relative to a baseline of how one thinks about Random Human on the Sidewalk #1663—assuming one is not clinically sociopathic, one recognizes that RHS1663 is another human being with agency, goals, etc.
And one takes this into account in a negative sense: One doesn’t plant oneself direct in RHS1663’s path as it runs frantically toward some destination that it is presumably late in getting to, one doesn’t shoulder-check it out of the way in order to save a few seconds, etc. But one doesn’t actively respond to this knowledge (e.g. by inquiring about how RHS1663’s day is going, or making sure to remember what RHS1663’s field of employment is, if one happens somehow to learn that), because one doesn’t care.
So take that baseline and add a sexual interest. How is that worse than the baseline alone? It might not be any better (I’m not going to tell anyone that they should like it if that’s not their natural inclination), but how is it worse?
So most of your examples don’t really address the question I’m thinking of (although they do address the question as I actually phrased it): Planting oneself aggressively in someone’s path, violating someone’s personal space, continuing to harrass someone who has asked to be left alone, and touching someone without consent are all not okay even if that someone is just RHS1663, and one is doing those things out of mere boredom. I’m not sure a see the problem with the oral mime though—I tend to take a very broad attitude of “if you don’t enjoy seeing it, don’t look at it” on purely visual stimuli. I suppose that if you’re worried that turning away will leave you open to physical attack, that’s a bit of another matter, but it seems like there the issue is whatever he’s doing (if anything) to make you worry about being physically attacked, not the fact that he is miming obscenely.
A related question: What exactly do you mean by “invasive sexual attention?” Are you referring to the sort of not-okay things listed above, or do you mean that uninvited sexual solicitations as such strike you as intrusive. If the latter, I’m a bit curious as to why—are you really approached by so many men in a day that saying “not interested; reading” to each of them would take up a non-trivial portion of your time, if they were willing to leave it at that?
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Okay, I’m going to try to clarify. Based on your reply further on, I think it’s still possible we’re going to end up talking somewhat at cross-purposes re: intrusiveness and ickiness, but here it goes.
I’m going to start with the end of your comment:
“Are you really approached by so many men in a day that saying “not interested; reading” to each of them would take up a non-trivial portion of your time, if they were willing to leave it at that?”
This is much more of a hypothetical question than you realize, because I can think of, like, maybe three dudes* ever who *were* willing to leave it at “Not interested; reading.” If every dude who hit on me left me alone when I asked him to, instead of following me or arguing with me or calling me a bitch, it’s entirely possible that I would be way more okay with people straight up soliciting sex in public. Unfortunately, the dudes who leave me alone just because I’m not interested are a tiny, tiny minority.
This colors the way I perceive people who jump straight to sexual propositions to an enormous extent. Every time a (strange) dude approaches me and asks for something sexual, I have to assume that if I say no, he is going to either ignore what I said or have a fit about what a bitch I am. In the vast majority of cases, I have been right about this. Telling people, “Sorry, not interested” does not take up much of my time. Arguing dudes down until they decide I’m too much trouble to bother with? Pretty time-consuming, and also not great for my overall mood.
But let’s talk about the masturbation example, because this is where I think we really disagree with each other. So, masturbation-miming dude is not technically asking for anything. He’s not even talking! Surely this harms no one, people who do not like watching simulated masturbation ought to just look away!
So: would you be okay with someone actually masturbating across from you in this situation? Because it seems like all the same arguments apply. If you don’t like it, you can look away. My answer to this question is that these things aren’t okay, because you’re forcing people to participate in your sex life even if they have no interest in doing so. Yes, I can look away from the dude who’s miming masturbation at me. I can also run around the dude who’s blocking my path to the bus, and I can shove off the dude who grabs my ass as I try to get on it. But this doesn’t mean that it’s okay for either of them to touch me without asking. Harassment doesn’t become okay just because you can get away if you really want to.
*Just want to note that I am very much talking about strangers here. I feel none of this discomfort with people I actually know and am friends with, because I can usually trust them to act nicely.
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Your experiences sound really shitty, and wrong. Insofar as that’s what people are talking about when they say “objectification is bad,” I agree. But it seems to me that, for many people (I am not making any assertions about you in particular), those sorts of experiences are the motte corresponding to a bailey of “awareness of a man’s sexual interest in the absence of an awareness of any other interest from him” at best, and far more ridiculous things at worse. After all, one can hardly give a comic book or video game character an undesired awareness (and one does not in general give the subject of a pinup photo an undesired awareness), and yet . . . plenty of feminists will rail about objectification over T&A in comics, in video games, or in a pinup posted on a cubicle wall. (Or on the shirt of a man who landed a probe on a motherfucking comet!)
And that doesn’t negate the shittiness of your experiences, or the fact that most or all of the dudes involved should be punished for harassment! I feel like I need to state this explicitly because a lot of feminist women seem to (with empirical justification or otherwise—I’m honestly don’t know) regard the statement “your experiences are unacceptable, but don’t justify your/someone else’s positon” as a euphemism for “your experiences aren’t really a big deal.”
I regard directing one’s gaze in response to various sights very differently from larger physical actions in response to other stimuli, absent a compelling reason why one must direct one’s gaze to a particular location. I think this a combination of the scale of actions and the sense of necessity—sight just doesn’t strike me, bar a few rare edge cases, as being as imposing a sense as any of the others.
“So: would you be okay with someone actually masturbating across from you in this situation?”
If it is clear that his semen is not going to get on me or another unwilling individual, directly or indirectly, then sure, why not? I’m riding and reading; he’s riding and jacking off. We’re each riding and doing our own thing. And if for some reason I couldn’t or wouldn’t avert my gaze, so what? Why should the sight of someone masturbating bother me?
“My answer to this question is that these things aren’t okay, because you’re forcing people to participate in your sex life even if they have no interest in doing so.”
What is being forced? No one’s physical autonomy is threatened, as no one is touched, nor is anyone’s freedom of movement restrained.
“But this doesn’t mean that it’s okay for either of them to touch me without asking. “
Exactly. Touching other people without their permission is not okay. Touching oneself is.
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The hypocrisy you’re talking about is one of my rage buttons. When my ex and I first got together (she’s a trans woman but wasn’t out then) one of the first things an acquaintance said when she saw us sitting together was, “Aw yeah, free yaoi!” (Which, incidentally, was how my high school friends treated me when I tried coming out as a trans man to them.)
You could reach the moon on a stack of the stupid things yaoi fangirls have written about gay men, and jerk off for a lifetime on all the material fetishizing hurt/comfort and rape by the seme. The anatomical absurdity, the insistence on the seme/uke dynamic, the vileness spewed at the real life partners of actors the shippers have decided belong together…holy FUCK.
And yet, I really don’t give a shit about any of it except for the hate directed at real life people – it’s the double standard that has me, a bisexual trans man, flipping my shit. Women are not any better behaved than men. Pleading a power disparity is a lazy way of ignoring that every demographic gets its rocks off to stupid, stupid material, and the vast majority of it never hurts anyone. Masturbate to whatever you want to – including me – and I’m happy.
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Replying to second this: “Masturbate to whatever you want to – including me – and I’m happy.”
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Second seconding of this.
As a (mostly) retired male dancer who has worked at clubs with both male and female performers, the female audiences are orders of magnitude worse in behaviour towards the people on stage. Them going home and flicking off to the thought of me in any context they can imagine doesn’t even make my top ten of “Things I worry about the audience doing”.
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I hypothesise part of the reason straight men are more likely to fetishise women in real life than women are men is because of relative attractiveness. Women tend to put more effort into looking attractive, and some of that works on straight men specifically. While, of course, actors of any gender tend to be good looking. A gynephilic person will be happy to see random women make out but an androphilic person wouldn’t be that interested in two random men.
Or maybe it’s boobs.
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The problem with debates on fetishization is that fetishization is fundamentally a weasel word. In common usage it’s applied to at least three different groups of people. A. People with any non-mainstream sexual interests B. People with a non-mainstream sexual interest based on stereotypes of that given interest C. People with a sexual interests based on stereotypes of that given interest and are sexual predators. Anyone in group A is invariably lumped in with group C and B regardless of what they say or do. This rigs the debate against people who are members of group A because they must defend themselves from accusations that they are really in either group B or C. The better question to ask is why should we assume that everyone who is labeled a “fetishist” is a member of B and C. I have never seen a satisfactory justification for this other than the circular argument well they must be a B or C or else they wouldn’t have a fetish.
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Related to something Ozy brought up above, which bothers me: feminists complaining that Strong Female Characters are ballbusters or are not well-rounded. My reaction to that is “it’s your movement’s own damned fault”, for several reasons.
1) People complaining about the lack of strong female characters generally say “we have lots of strong male characters, so we need more strong female characters”. Well, most of those strong male characters don’t qualify as well-rounded. If you want female characters to match them, wouldn’t you expect the same?
2) Because “too weak” is vague, even a character with a normal level of weakness is vulnerable to feminists pointing to it and saying “look, another weak female character”. The only way to be immune to this accusation is to give the character no weakness at all, not merely to give the character a normal level of weakness.
Related to this is that if you give a character a weakness associated with women, feminists will complain “you’d never do that to a guy, so you’re treating your female characters worse than your male ones”. For that matter, it doesn’t even have to be a weakness; if your character does *anything* stereotypically female, you are vulnerable to complaints about the character being sexist. The only way to be immune is to essentially make the character a man in drag.
3) The people creating the Strong Female Character hear feminist messages about empowerment and take them to heart, and needless to say, those messages are all about how women are capable of anything.
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I had better clarify: Ozy’s link is not exactly what I’m talking about. If anything, it’s more the cause of what I’m talking about–for instance, it complains that strong female characters fall for weak men. Falling for strong men, of course, can result in a complaint that the strong character really isn’t so strong, so the only way to be immune to this accusation is to not have the character fall for anyone.
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I think what it actually complains about is that the “strong female characters” are blatant wish-fulfilment devices, rather than (imaginary) persons.
This is evident in their ass-first portrayal (here’s some eye candy, just for you!), embodiment of various stereotypes (wow, it turns out all your beliefs are true!), and their falling for the character the audience actually identifies with (you deserve the best woman ever!).
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In other words, the complaint is not that they’re not strong enough within the story, but that they’re poor, badly-made characters. Similarly, I wouldn’t call Edward Cullen (the glittery vampire guy) a strong male character who makes “Twilight” a great story for boys.
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“I think what it actually complains about is that the “strong female characters” are blatant wish-fulfilment devices, rather than (imaginary) persons.”
It amounts to the same thing–“this character is a wish-fulfillment device” is subjective enough that the only way to be safe from to the accusation is to not have the character be involved with anyone. True, there are some extreme cases which are obviously wish-fulfillment for men, just like Edward Cullen is for women, but the accusation is not just levied at those extreme cases.
(Also, it is possible for a character to have some wish-fulfillment elements without being predominately for wish fulfillment.)
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Isn’t that true of most strong male characters, as well ? For example, any character played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, or Bruce Willis, or, well, pretty much any male lead in any Hollywood blockbuster…
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@Jiro
I agree that the criticism is often applied too broadly, but we were talking about the linked comic in particular.
@Bugmaster
Absolutely not. Bruce Willis’ character in Die Hard is very much a person — a loyal father and husband, a good guy who visibly struggles and applies every ounce of willpower to push his body to the limit, because that’s what it takes to do the right thing (amidst general incompetence). He’s not anyone’s prize. Instead, he gets the prize — his wife comes back to him, after being so heroically saved.
Meanwhile, one of the central themes in Terminator 2 is the surprising humanity that develops in the robot’s behaviour, leading up to his heroic self-sacrifice. Unlike McClane, he’s a tragic character, so he doesn’t get the girl. But he does get the glory. And he’s no one’s prize.
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As a (mostly) straight lady who tries not to be an asshole, my thoughts:
-I’m not actually into slash. I have a few slash ships I’m fond of (Tony/Bruce, Margery/Sansa), but it’s much more a squee thing than a rawr thing. That said… pretty people kissing each other is just aesthetically pleasant.
HOWEVER, r/e porn vs. real life: I mean…. I like A LOT of things in porn that don’t work irl (unhealthy power dynamics is literally my kink). Surely others can apply my kind of compartmentalization: “Yes, this is sexy to look at, but it’s not how queer people really work. Tarantino films are fun to watch, but that’s not how blood really works, either.”
Also, ATLA is amazing on a worldbuilding/characterization level! Holy consistent character development, Batman!
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Thanks – that’s an eye-opening post.
Here’s my offered thought – take it for what it’s worth.
1) Attraction is a weird thing. Some people are attracted to bald guys, or guys with hairy backs, or whatever. So if someone goes home and fantasizes about my hairy back, it doesn’t really hurt me, even if I’m sensitive about it and there’s a bucket of hurt feelings over the course of my life to unpack about it. (Not saying it’s comparable to anyone else’s pain – take it for whatever you think it’s worth.) And h-ll, if someone sees me in the pool and tells me they think my back is hot, it probably does us both some good if I can get to a place where I can take it as a compliment.
2) At the same token, it’s always a good idea not to be an a-hole. If somebody has reason to believe that someone else will take offense at something, it’s reasonable to avoid giving offense. So unless you know they’re into it, it’s probably a bad idea to write “Please keep posting the pics of you and your wife at the beach – it’s a delight to fap to them!” on their facebook page, or tell the person next to you on the bus that it’s a delight to see a BBM like him around.
I guess I’m offering this as a “Measure for measure” standard that you can apply without getting out the relative privilege chart. If you think your erotic imagination about another person might offend them, don’t share it. If you learn that your expressed erotic feelings about another person offended that person, try to make it right.
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@Jos — That seems about right. But it runs against the fact that *most people don’t act this way* so a lesbian couple has to carry baggage that other people don’t. And saying, “Well, in an ideal world they don’t have to carry baggage so I’m going to ignore the fact they’re carrying baggage…”
[This is a bit rambly. Too busy to edit.]
Which isn’t exactly what you are saying, but the fact is some people get fetishized all the time and they get sensitive to it, while other folks don’t. And some folks are regarded as “conventionally attractive” and maybe folks fetishize them in a way — look how many dudes “fetishize” skinny white blond girls, ‘cept we don’t call it that cuz obviously. But if they do get fetishized it plays out with a different dynamic.
And maybe some folks are in such a weird attraction space that they are neither fetishized nor targets of conventional attraction and that has it’s own struggle. Maybe hairy backs are in this space. I don’t know.
[Note: I don’t think being a target of a fetish is actually any different from “attraction”. Which is to say, these things *should not* be different and the social processes that make them different suck. But Still! They exist and we have to deal with them.]
Well, some of us do.
For example, lots of people find liking *me* a shameful secret. They feel dirty for liking me. That shame is part of the dynamic. Which is fucked up and taints what could be simple attraction. So for me it’s seedy bars few people go to and really tacky hookup sites that feel not so different from porn sites — these sites make OkCupid and Tinder seem classy — and *I get to hate that*. And given that the men are coming at me from a place of shame, it cannot easily just be an *attraction*.
[Full disclosure: I’m bisexual, but I find this whole scene so off-putting, and given that this scene is the only straightforward way for gals-like-me to meet men I basically live as a dyke. Which is it’s own fucked up story, but another post for another time maybe.]
So saying, “Well personally I’m just not going be part of that” is a step in the right direction, if you totally succeed, but succeeding is hard and requires unpacking, and the people serious about unpacking are seldom the same people who say “Well, I just won’t act that way. Easy peasy, conversation done.”
And even if you succeed you need to be aware that you are rare, and (for example) that lesbian couple you see on the train might be *done* with straight guys, and you ain’t part of their life and they ain’t gonna invest in you and if you try chatting them up they may shut you down hard and *don’t blame them for this*.
If you’ve done your unpacking right you’ll see why.
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Ok, so in strictly practical terms, how do you think straight men should treat that lesbian couple on the train ? For example, when I see a straight couple kissing on the train, I usually tend to avert my eyes (even if they are really hot) — because otherwise, I end up feeling like a voyeuristic intruder (though some other people might openly stare, I suppose).
If I treated everyone the same, I would let my gaze slide away from that lesbian couple in exactly the same way; but now the SJ movement is telling me that I should treat them differently, so what do they want me to do ? Should I stand up and shout, “As a privileged straight white man, I completely endorse your relationship ! Vote for gay marriage !”, or something ? That seems somewhat… counterproductive, but I could be wrong.
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[Prefatory note: I have a propensity to go on mad commenting binges, as you may have noticed. If this is not cool, just let me know, and ideally give me some idea of what a reasonable rate of commenting is. Relatedly, when I ask questions as direct comments to a post, I’m generally hoping for answers, but not necessarily expecting them.]
I find parts of this perfectly logical, and parts rather odd (though very common). My thoughts on the latter:
1. What exactly do you mean by “mak[ing] someone a prop in your fantasy?” To me that reads like either (a) “observing (something about) someone and turning that in masturbation fodder” or (b) “approaching someone who has traits that turn your crank and inquiring about their interest in doing various things with/in front of you,” and neither of these strikes me as a bad thing. Do you mean something stronger, or is this a fundamental difference in reaction to stimuli?
2. The first boyfriend’s response is kinda douchey*, but what was wrong with the second. Usually having someone respond to a revelation of an interest with “ooh, tell me more about the parts of that that excite you!” is a good thing, even what it isn’t an opportunity to get mutually turned on with someone you (I presume) are interested in getting mutually turned on with.
3. To my mind, as someone who might or might not qualify as a “non-asshole straight person” in your book, the relevant line is not between porn and reality, but between desire and entitlement. I’ll freely admit, I fantasize about real-life lesbian couples (and probably more than a few non-lesbian-but-affectionate pairs of women) that I happen to see. I just don’t think that obligates them to give me a private show. And I fantasize about threesomes with women I know to be bi (and women I don’t, for that matter), but I don’t see my having those fantasies as compelling them to participate in making them a reality. And if other people, including ones I’m not interested in, want to fantasize about me, that’s fine. And if they want to ask me to fulfill those fantasies, that’s fine too, as long as they’re cool with me saying no.
*Depending a bit on cognitive wiring.
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Re: 1. I think I kind of broached this subject further up the thread, but thought I’d give my take here (with a little bit less “Can you tell you hit a nerve!?” rhetorical gesturing). Obviously, I am not Ozy, so I don’t know exactly how zie would articulate this, but I have a fairly clear idea of how I would.
I would say that the difference between “having a fantasy about someone” and “making them a prop in your fantasy” is kind of like the difference between masturbating about someone in private and actually telling that person that you masturbated to them.
Now, there are situations where it’s appropriate to tell people that you masturbated to them! If you tell your girlfriend that you’re so excited for her to get back from her business trip, you have such good plans, you’re touching yourself thinking about it, chances are she’s probably going to take that as a compliment! But if you do this to someone who you *don’t* have that kind of relationship with, you’re making them play a role in your fantasy without giving them a choice about whether they want to. It turns you on to have them know that you masturbated to them, so whether it makes them feel icky is irrelevant.
To put this in the context of bisexual fetishization: so, maybe you like to watch girls kiss each other. Great! Suppose you are at a party and, lo, when you step into the kitchen, there are two girls kissing each other. The kitchen is semi-private: they are alone. What do you do? Do you step outside and leave them to it, privately reflecting that that was super hot? Do you stand and watch them until one of them notices you? Do you stand in the kitchen door and shout, “Hot girls making out! Everybody come look!”?
My take is that the first option is fine, and the last two are varying degrees of making people participate in your fantasies regardless of whether they want to.
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Sorry about hitting a nerve. Perhaps my clarifications upthread improve matters. And perhaps not.
I think there may be a crucial gap on ickiness. Like . . . I don’t really understand why X would feel icky as a response to being told that Y masturbated about them, unless (a) X actively dislikes Y, and is therefore bothered by being a source of pleasure for Y, (b) Y described the details of their fantasy, and the acts involved were in themselves disturbing to X, or (c) Y described the details of their masturbatory technique, and the acts involved were in themselves disturbing to X. Even then, I’m not that I’d feel icky per se if I were X in any of those.
I think we may also have some sort of a gap on ickiness itself. Either you mean the same things that I would by that term (hard to discuss, given that we’re now in the realm of qualia), in which case that seems to me like an inadequate basis for constructing a social norm limiting what people can acceptably say. or (probably more likely) you mean something stronger, in which case the first gap gets even wider.
At the party, I’m not really sure what I’d do. I’m gonna go with not option 3 (not least because it has a very high probability of being actively counterproductive), but option 2 is a real possibility. If I did option 1, it would only be out of concern for social consequences.
To my mind, option 2 is not making them do anything: I am in a place where it is permissible for me to be*, and I am not compelling their actions. I am observing them, but that is (in an area that’s at least semi-public) purely a change in me, and not in them.
Perhaps this gets back to the ickiness issue: I have a hard time thinking of anyone I would be actively bothered by watching me making out, and a similarly hard time grasping why** anyone else would.
*I am assuming this, for the sake of argument—if the two women live here and guests are not really supposed to be venturing outside the main party area, that changes things a bit.
**Apart from a careless conflation of that action with other, seriously different actions, which strikes me as largely irrelevant: I am not obligated by others’ irrationalities, nor are they obligated by mine.
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@osberend
People usually expect you not to observe them for more than a few seconds, no matter if they’re working or eating, or talking to someone else. The only exception is if they’re directly interacting with you — e.g., talking to you or demonstrating something. This norm is even stronger for intimate events like kissing or crying.
Since staring is considered impolite, from the outside (2) would look like you’re disregarding their right to be treated politely in favour of satisfying your sexual craving.
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I don’t believe that anyone has a “right” to have someone else fulfill social conventions that they never agreed to. And after all . . . what harm do they suffer? Are they ashamed of their behavior? Then they should not do it (or, if they feel compelled to do so, should go somewhere actually private). Are they unashamed? Then they should not be bothered by observation.
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You’re not alone in your frustration with social conventions. But:
1. Social interaction is a lot like a language. You cannot choose how other people interpret your words or actions, so you have to take their accepted meaning into account.
For example, suppose I privately decide that “cunt” is a lovely and positive word (after all, it denotes the lovely female genitals), and say to an acquaintance, “Hey, you cunt! I haven’t seen you in ages!”. Should I be surprised and upset if she doesn’t interpret it as a friendly greeting?
Similarly, while you can privately decide that staring is neutral, that won’t change the way your staring will be interpreted.
2. Although social conventions can be arbitrary, they serve an important role as a buffer zone of interaction. If someone ignores the boundaries suggested by convention, that person is also more likely to ignore the boundaries imposed by law or requested by you.
The alternative you’re suggesting — that masturbating in public transport shouldn’t be judged more harshly than reading — would leave people too vulnerable to attacks. When someone twice your size has already grabbed or cornered you, you might be unable to escape undamaged. On the other hand, if we have a buffer zone of forbidden-yet-harmless actions, the potential victim has time to leave, or other people can intervene.
As I said, I have also struggled with accepting the norms of “polite” behaviour. Here’s a perspective I found helpful: the other person doesn’t know your attitude or your intentions. To tell the difference between you and someone who hates them or plans to harm them, they need your cooperation.
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I feel like your comment makes a pair of (related) good points that suddenly veer left just short of missing the mark. I also feel this veering is very common, and is a source of major frustration to me:
1. I think it’s worth distinguishing between connotations and denotations here. Broadly speaking, I tend to think that it’s reasonable for other people to expect me to use words consistent with their normal denotations (unless I preface with my statement with a qualification explaining how I’m using them), because, as you noted, that’s what makes language work at all. I don’t think it’s reasonable for people to expect me to use words consistent with common connotations, particularly (but not exclusively) when this negatively affects my ability to communicate the denotational content I want to communicate.
So I think it’s reasonable for an acquintaince to react negatively to being called a cunt, because part of the generally accepted denotation of that word when applied to a human being is [imprecise pejoration]. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s reasonable for an acquaintance to react negatively if to my mentioning that so-and-so has an amazing cunt, on the basis of an claim that choosing that particular term for female genitalia connotes “objectification”* or misogyny.
Actions are not quite the same as language, but I think there’s a similarity of levels of meaning. If I’m staring, what am I doing? Staring. Why? Slightly harder to say, but in the absence of an angry facial expression or other signs of hostility, I think it’s safe to say it’s because I’m enjoying what I’m seeing. What does my decision to pursue this enjoyment say about my attitudes or character? Who knows, that’s all connotation. I suppose if the kissers really want, they could even ask.
2. I think that you’re conflating two common ideas here, one of which is clearly correct, the other of which is more dubious.
One is the existence of a socially (or legally) imposed set of material buffers guarding people from attack, i.e. restrictions on actions that are not themselves harmful or rights-violating, but that make it easier to engage in actions that are. Walking closely behind people at night, taking a seat next to a woman despite there being plenty of empty seats on the other side of the bus, and similar actions don’t actually hurt anyone, but they make it a lot easier to. I still tend to be leary of legal restrictions in these matters, but I think that social restrictions are broadly reasonable.
The other idea is that there is a socially (or, again, legally) imposed set of mandated signals of self-restraint, compliance with which is supposed to indicate . . . well, compliance. And so it’s considered unacceptable to masturbate on the bus not because it makes it materially easier to sexually assault people (how frequently do would be assailants find getting their penises out to be the hard part?), but because refraining from masturbating on the bus signals submission to the same social order that bans sexually assaulting people. I am 100% against the legal imposition of such signals, and fairly strong against their social imposition for a couple reasons.
First, the entire system is both disgusting and dangerous in its implications: “Perform this act of submission, purely to demonstrate that you submit!” is how one addresses a slave, not a fellow free human. Moreover, the submission being signalled is not actually to morality, but to the whims of society. And if society should develop other, darker whims . . .
Second, I think this system actually does a very bad job of sorting the real threats. I may have some typical-mind bias going here (or rather, binary “own mind + crude single approximation of dissimilar minds” bias), but it seems to me that, given that someone is aroused by my body, I have a better idea where things stand if his actions fairly closely mirror his intent: He propositions, I say no, he accepts gracefully? Cool. Same scenario, but he gets hostile and argues? I need to keep an eye on him. He’s sitting across the bus, masturbating, but making no attempt to physically involve me in his pleasures? Alright. He’s coming toward me, dick in hand? It’s probably fight or flight time.
But the guy who is attracted to me but doesn’t do anything socially disapproved, here on a half-full bus? That’s a lot harder to say. Maybe he’s actually a decent sort. Maybe he’s “well-socialized,” and therefore wouldn’t dream of attacking me even if he had no real moral compass of his own. And maybe he’s making plans for a moment when I’m less aware, and there are fewer witnesses around.
*Assuming a genuinely objectionable meaning of that term, to avoid this thread swallowing its own tail.
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