posts tagged "objectification"

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thehellofitall:

“GQ neatly demonstrate their differing ways of valuing men and women. Spot the odd one out in these covers.”

Of course. Of course.

(via lipstick-feminists)

Female bodies as “distracting”: Another quick thought on dress codes & sexism

jessicavalenti:

I’ve been amazed at the number of comments that just don’t get it over at my post at The Nation on the way dress codes can discriminate against women. (And the way school administrators and faculty can use said code to sexually harass young women.)

What’s been truly interesting to me is the way that commenters continue to make the same argument that Stuyvesant’s principal did: that the way some young women dress is “distracting.” That men can’t help but look at these young women and their supposedly scandalous attire - and that this overwhelming desire to ogle young women means that school work isn’t being properly paid attention to. 

This “distraction” standard for a dress code sets up a model in which the default student we are concerned about - the student whose learning we want to ensure is protected - is male. It presumes that female students are a distraction to male students’ learning, and therefore it’s young women’s actions that must be policed.

But what about the way that the young women of Stuyvesant are being “distracted” from their studies by a school that harasses and slut-shames? What’s more distracting - glancing at a girls’ legs or being pulled from class, humiliated, and made to change outfits before you’re allowed to learn?

I’m gonna show you what a girl typically working out would look like versus what you want me to look like (x)

Girls are majestic fucking creatures.

(via imperialdalek)

marxisforbros: I really like what she’s wearing, as I do with a lot of the pictures I see on my dash. But I find myself feeling more and more conflicted reblogging these headless (usually at least eyeless) women. Tumblr feels obligated to edit images so that women are faceless and the sole focus of the image is their bodies. If I was optimistic I’d hope that people are simply doing it in an effort to draw attention to the clothes, but I’m not even mildly optimistic so I don’t think that’s the case. I see these crops that are just an ass and thighs or just a torso or everything but a face, and I feel pretty safe in assuming that it’s just really lazy objectification. While the objectification and the dismemberment is clearly the biggest issue, the lesser issue of how fucking rude it is to take someone’s art and mutilate it to redraw the focus for such a shitty reason is also frustrating. You can debate the artistic quality of the images all you like, but you still have to agree that taking somebody’s work (and in the case of the model, their face) and cutting it up to suit your disengaged idea of sexy is obviously wrong. To be clear, when I say ‘disengaged’ I mean not wanting to see a woman’s eyes, and by association not wanting her to be a person. Wanting her to be a thing, merely the sum of her physical parts without the one physical part that seems so personal. Blank faces aren’t enough, they have to have no faces? You can’t look and think “she’s hot”, you have to think “that body is hot”? This went on longer than I’d planned, so I’ll just cut it off here and share her fucking face. The picture I’m reblogging is some woman’s body as edited by kinky-little-kitty for Tumblr. The picture I’ve uploaded is Lara Stone by Mario Sorrenti for Vogue Japan.

marxisforbros:

I really like what she’s wearing, as I do with a lot of the pictures I see on my dash. But I find myself feeling more and more conflicted reblogging these headless (usually at least eyeless) women. Tumblr feels obligated to edit images so that women are faceless and the sole focus of the image is their bodies. If I was optimistic I’d hope that people are simply doing it in an effort to draw attention to the clothes, but I’m not even mildly optimistic so I don’t think that’s the case. I see these crops that are just an ass and thighs or just a torso or everything but a face, and I feel pretty safe in assuming that it’s just really lazy objectification. While the objectification and the dismemberment is clearly the biggest issue, the lesser issue of how fucking rude it is to take someone’s art and mutilate it to redraw the focus for such a shitty reason is also frustrating. You can debate the artistic quality of the images all you like, but you still have to agree that taking somebody’s work (and in the case of the model, their face) and cutting it up to suit your disengaged idea of sexy is obviously wrong. To be clear, when I say ‘disengaged’ I mean not wanting to see a woman’s eyes, and by association not wanting her to be a person. Wanting her to be a thing, merely the sum of her physical parts without the one physical part that seems so personal. Blank faces aren’t enough, they have to have no faces? You can’t look and think “she’s hot”, you have to think “that body is hot”? This went on longer than I’d planned, so I’ll just cut it off here and share her fucking face.

The picture I’m reblogging is some woman’s body as edited by kinky-little-kitty for Tumblr. The picture I’ve uploaded is Lara Stone by Mario Sorrenti for Vogue Japan.

(via marxisforbros-deactivated201211)

“

The man who is horrified at a woman’s “overly exposed” breasts will likely never have to worry about wearing one shirt—one shirt out of a lifetime of shirts—that happens to accidentally set off some random person’s slut meter, because of the way his body just is. And because my breasts are smaller, less visible, less imposing than other women’s breasts—because there’s less boob there—I can feel free to wear the more revealing top without attracting claims of public obscenity. It seems that some women’s bodies are just naturally sluttier than other women’s bodies—and all women’s bodies are naturally sluttier than men’s bodies.

washingtoncitypaper.com (via ellielamothe, rawwomen) (via luminosiity) (via duexchatnoir) (via whimsyandmayhem) (via clarissa-dalloway) (via mygayshoes) (via lonelyresearcher) (via wretchedoftheearth) (via sociolab)

Exactly.

(via introspectivestardust)

(via alimarko)

(via queerandlovely)

(via yakotta)

(via takealookatyourlife)

What's wrong with sexual objectification? Hint: it's not the "sexual" bit

fuckyeahfeminists:

Check out this great post at The F Word UK

“Objectification” is not a synonym for “attraction”. It refers to treating someone as an object, less than fully human, a means to an end, rather than as a person. Suggesting that sexually objectifying men might “empower women”, or otherwise further the cause of gender equality, seems to me to (perhaps wilfully) misunderstand objectification.

…Why does confusion surround sexual objectification specifically? “What’s wrong with finding someone sexually attractive?” goes the cry. “It’s a compliment!” What this misses is context. The problem is not any given individual’s private feelings about whether they find any given woman attractive. The problem is the widespread assumption that these feelings always matter.

Click the title to read the whole post

(via takealookatyourlife)

People see sexy pictures of women as objects, not people

violentopinions:

Perfume ads, beer billboards, movie posters: everywhere you look, women’s sexualized bodies are on display. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that both men and women see images of sexy women’s bodies as objects, while they see sexy-looking men as people.Perfume ads, beer billboards, movie posters: everywhere you look, women’s sexualized bodies are on display. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that both men and women see images of sexy women’s bodies as objects, while they see sexy-looking men as people.

Sexual objectification has been well studied, but most of the research is about looking at the effects of this objectification. “What’s unclear is, we don’t actually know whether people at a basic level recognize sexualized females or sexualized males as objects,” says Philippe Bernard of Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. Bernard cowrote the new paper with Sarah Gervais, Jill Allen, Sophie Campomizzi, and Olivier Klein.

Psychological research has worked out that our brains see people and objects in different ways. For example, while we’re good at recognizing a whole face, just part of a face is a bit baffling. On the other hand, recognizing part of a chair is just as easy as recognizing a whole chair.

One way that psychologists have found to test whether something is seen as an object is by turning it upside down. Pictures of people present a recognition problem when they’re turned upside down, but pictures of objects don’t have that problem. So Bernard and his colleagues used a test where they presented pictures of men and women in sexualized poses, wearing underwear. Each participant watched the pictures appear one by one on a computer screen. Some of the pictures were right side up and some were upside down. After each picture, there was a second of black screen, then the participant was shown two images. They were supposed to choose the one that matched the one they had just seen.

People recognized right-side-up men better than upside-down men, suggesting that they were seeing the sexualized men as people. But the women in underwear weren’t any harder to recognize when they were upside down—which is consistent with the idea that people see sexy women as objects. There was no difference between male and female participants.

We see sexualized women every day on billboards, buildings, and the sides of buses and this study suggests that we think of these images as if they were objects, not people. “What is motivating this study is to understand to what extent people are perceiving these as human or not,” Bernard says. The next step, he says, is to study how seeing all these images influences how people treat real women.

(via bigfatfeminist)