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Major Nikon
(36,818 posts)Objectification "theory" is little more than a mental masturbation exercise that not even all feminists take seriously. Sex-positive and 3rd wave feminists don't even consider it worth their time worrying about.
I think a better discussion would be to look at where and how objectification theory even came about. The whole idea originated from a religion apologist who thought sex outside of marriage was objectifying to women.
rrneck
(17,671 posts)Images of Christ were verboten in early Christianity as I recall. First only the characters Chi-Rho were allowed. After that came the codification of images of a shepherd as Christ, to be followed by the addition of a purple (royal) robe. And of course, as the symbols were codified the human barbeques became pretty popular as well.
If you control the imagery, you control how people are perceived in it. So, generally speaking, large chunks of feminist ideology are little more than exercises in perception management with the objective of control. Not great for actual results, but fantastic for generating revenue, much like religion and the Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover.
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)It is a massively powerful tool our brains have, it is the underpinning of language, among other things.. But it also can blind people to a certain extent when they confuse the abstraction of the thing for the thing itself.
"Don't confuse the map for the territory, the menu for the meal"-- good, Zen advice which unfortunately gets garbled, telephone-style (in another example of the same phenomenon in action) into religious prohibitions on graven images and eventually people get fatwas for drawing cartoons.
frankly, I find myself CONSTANTLY banging my head here against arguments which are far too attached to particular labels or categories or symbolic representations, acting as if they have some inherent objective reality. If people want to deal with overly abstract thought-creations, maybe they should work on their own over-attachment to labels and the like, for starts.
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)Not least of which is people complaining about "unscientific" evo-psych ideas while simultaneously going on about supposedly iron-clad concepts such as objectification (as detailed extensively in that thread, and the 'scientific' study which prompted it) which, as near as I can tell, basically is wide-open to all sorts of definitions but can generally be boiled down to person A being physically attracted to person B for reasons person C doesn't like.
The rest of it, the turning people into tools, the idea that people are humping magazine covers instead of human beings, the idea that no one would have found Nina Agdal attractive before being programmed by mass media and photoshop... it's just gibberish, and that's putting it kindly.
It's also pretty funny when people whose main hobby seems to be inventing elaborate arguments no one has ever made, and then ascribing them to the folks they're ostensibly having a debate with, go on about others supposedly being excessively involved with the creations of their own heads.
People are oftentimes physically attracted to other people on the basis of appearance and superficial characteristics. Big effin' deal. Moving on.