Sometimes I feel weirdly alienated by feminist critiques of “the male gaze” and women’s sexuality that are written by straight women who frame the mere experience of finding someone attractive as an inherent desire to have power over them. I don’t find the tacked-on “oh uh let’s say gay people are exempt from ever being predatory” disclaimers they sometimes have to be meaningful—somehow they’re even more alienating.
The critiques are always about gender these days, not about objectification and empathy. The problem with the “male gaze” as originally described was that it erased the interior humanity of the women that it looked at, not that it was done by men.
Women can also remove the interior humanity of the people we look at. All humans can. Especially when it comes to sex, where other people’s bodies and hearts and minds are the instruments with which we achieve our own desires.
But it’s a lot harder to ask, “Does this artwork truly remember that everyone involved here is a real human being and treat them with the respect they deserve?” so a lot of people just ask the easier question, “Was it made for/by men?”
Objectification isn't better just because a woman does it. I'm tired of women doing the same stuff we complain about men doing and then calling it feminism. Acting like a man at all isn't feminism. Feminism is appreciating women for the unique gifts and talents they offer, individually and collectively.
Of course objectification isn’t a good thing; the problem is that no real distinctions are made between “objectification” as a disrespectful and dehumanizing denial of internality and “thinking someone is hot”.
Is it objectifying just to notice and privately admire a stranger’s beauty? Is it ‘acting like a man’ to think, ‘my god—her hands!’? Is objectification something you do, a behavior, or is it something you can commit with thought alone? If it is committed with thought, and viewing a woman’s body with sexual admiration is inherently dehumanization and treating her as an object, then shouldn’t all physical attraction be suppressed and denied? Is sex more perfect and respectful if it happens in total darkness?
I really don’t think there’s anything wrong with liking boobs. Leering at someone’s cleavage on the train is obviously wrong—it is an interaction, and it affects her, and your dynamic with her. But watching Xena is not an interaction with the real human actress, and I don’t think it is objectifying and dehumanizing to, you know. Like what you see. The showrunners may have made objectifying choices in how she is dressed or filmed at any particular moment, and there may be things that happen behind the scenes that we will never know about, but I don’t buy the idea that by simply finding her hot you are degrading her.
And that’s how so many people talk—making no distinctions between the value-neutral, largely involuntary experience of attraction and the potential negative behaviors and attitudes that can result from it. “Straight men value bodies, lesbians value personalities” isn’t fair to men, who are not all shallow uncaring perverts, or lesbians, who are not all chaste and saintly empaths above ye olde vulgarities of the flesh.
cosmokyrin