I don't subscribe to thoughtless feminism, and I've been in countless flamewars confromting the hypocracy of a lot of idiots who think of themselves as feminist yet have contradictory or unabashedly narrow mindsets. I'm sociologically trained, though; so I have the vocabulary, and I use it.
Very few people actually understand what "objectification of women" actually means - male or female. In their failure to understand what it means, they fail to understand how it hurts men as well.
Your personal beliefs stem from a sort of home-brew functionalism. That is; if X is, look for the factors that cause X. Functionalism tends to conflate reasons with justifications, however. Just because biology plays a large part in men and women's sexual habits does not justify certain kinds of dehumanizing pornography. Granted, the among the first writing ever discovered, over 8000 years old, there was pretty much only pornography and receipts for trade (pretty much what you find littering the streets of Las Vegas, today); that's still an unaccountably short time for evolution to occur in. Our mating impulses explain our porn tastes, in a circuitous manner, but they do not justify it. Otherwise they would justify clubbing women over the head and dragging them back to our condo, too.
Agriculture led to fixed, large societies; which led to the social contract; which led to a society of mammals that deny their biological impulses in order to increase their numbers and capitalize on their ability to store extrasomatic information for use by future generations in social theory discussions on the internet.
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timeasmymeasure
Re: I disagree with a point..or two
Date: 2006-08-16 12:20 am (UTC)Very few people actually understand what "objectification of women" actually means - male or female. In their failure to understand what it means, they fail to understand how it hurts men as well.
Your personal beliefs stem from a sort of home-brew functionalism. That is; if X is, look for the factors that cause X. Functionalism tends to conflate reasons with justifications, however. Just because biology plays a large part in men and women's sexual habits does not justify certain kinds of dehumanizing pornography. Granted, the among the first writing ever discovered, over 8000 years old, there was pretty much only pornography and receipts for trade (pretty much what you find littering the streets of Las Vegas, today); that's still an unaccountably short time for evolution to occur in. Our mating impulses explain our porn tastes, in a circuitous manner, but they do not justify it. Otherwise they would justify clubbing women over the head and dragging them back to our condo, too.
Agriculture led to fixed, large societies; which led to the social contract; which led to a society of mammals that deny their biological impulses in order to increase their numbers and capitalize on their ability to store extrasomatic information for use by future generations in social theory discussions on the internet.