Objectification of women

OrangeAppled

I don't think it is a decision that many women make consciously.

Most cultures tie up a woman's looks with her value. The better looking, the more valuable she is. Male value is determined more by things like wealth, power, status, etc. At least those things can be earned...beauty is further out of your control, although I realize that there are many ways to enhance it.

Objectification, IMO, can occur when the physical aspect is seen as the most important or is the only aspect considered in an individual woman or women as a whole. Basically, the whole or main value of Woman is dependent on her appearance. This is a very common view in people (not just men, women buy into it also), even if unconscious or denied. That's why women use their bodies and looks to gain the success they desire.

Objectification also occurs when women are seen as receptacles for men to ejaculate into, which is a detached attitude that pornography promotes, but that may be another topic....

In a related thought, objectification also occurs when the person is dehumanized and seen as some means to an end. Companies can objectify their employees, and often do. They're seen as assets, not individual human beings.

Ungweliante

Fortunately, there is an answer:

SeekJess

I notice a lot more ugly girls than pretty ones.

Moon Pix

Its just aesthetics and how that relates to biology. You are a sexual being wether you want to admit it or not and some things turn you on and some things don't. Its just a fact that you're not going to be able to get to know all of the people you find attractive on a personal level due to circumstances that are basically beyond your contro and its best just to accept it and not worry about it.

Promethea

The problem I find in it, is that human beings are not landscape and art- there is more to them than a physical body. You are assigning the meaning of desire to a shell. It confuses the heart and mind to do this.

Secondly, what are you finding attractive? Beauty standards are different through out culture, and time. Our media defines it for us.

Very thin women were always chosen to be runway models because the clothing designers didn't have to alter their clothing to fit around the unique curves of a more womanly shape. Then, just like everything else in our culture, the female body became an object of fashion itself to be bought, and sold. In this case, because it was so closely related to fashion. Trends in body type changed just like trends in clothing. Sick, really, that the woman has been dehumanized and turned into a fashionable object by trend-mongers who don't realize/wouldn't give a f**k anyway what it does to the female mind, and body (as they cut and starve it into submission).

I'm not going to use the stupid cliché "sex sells" here, because that isn't what I think happened at all. First, this ridiculous image was created, then it was help up like a flash card with the label "sex" attached to it, then it was sold to everyone (women included). All you have to do it show the idiot american masses anything enough, and they will passively absorb it as gospel. All their lives, I think males are basically fed all this bulls*it about being "successful" basically just to get chicks. Chicks who look like models. Why models? Because those are the images in the media.

Disturbing to me, that if there's one thing that americans can all agree on, it's that a "hot chick" is a "hot chick." It's the one thing they can all believe in. They examine absolutely nothing, and that's dangerous, but failure to examine this, is literally killing women. Mentally, because they are forced to obsess over their weight, and physically, as they must go to extreme and unhealthy measures to look acceptable, spiritually, DOA. The image of what a woman is supposed to look like is distorted, then sold to us. From the time we are little girls playing with our mothers makeup, we are sent one very clear message: "If you aren't thin, and pretty, then no one will love you." Only 8 percent of women naturally have the very thin lanky model body.. the rest will struggle all of their lives and never attain it. And it isn't that they all worship the anorexic goddess, for most of them, it's simply that they ..realize everyone else does. They just want to be loved, but are certain that if they don't conform to certain standards, they are unlovable. There's no more damned creature in this society than.. "the fat chick."

People won't realize what they are supporting, and banish it, because the ugly thing has grown roots in the very things that make us human. "Love" is the anorexic starlet wearing the little black dress and the absurdly expensive diamond earrings her lover bought for her. Sex, many times apart from love, is the swimsuit model with her orange tan and water balloon breasts that defy the laws of physics. All image, of course, because that is the easiest of our senses to appeal to.

So many things make me feel completely alienated from people, but nothing like this. I feel it all day. Self-appointed beauty pageant judges rating me just like they do everything female, on a scale of one to ten. It's the favorite american male past-time. "Look at that one over there.. nice ass, too bad about the face, nice face, too bad about the bod." They play visual cut and paste with women's body parts. There are much more subtle ways in which they communicate this toxic disease of mind as well. Walk by a group of guys, and you may notice one of them simply pointing out to the other who the "hot chick" in the crowd is - typical. The message is clear, again.. if you aren't the "hot chick" then you are invisible to the opposite sex.

Time to go buy that bottle of ephedra, perhaps? Spend all of our money and effort on either trying to look like a model, or owning things that will attract them. And of course thats the point. Easy to take our money when they are promising to sell the only cure for loneliness. Infuriating that they contributed to the market themselves making us fear and hate our own, and each others bodies for being natural.

These days, the jerks who sell diet pills realize that they have a new market: average, healthy women who want to look like models. What the fuck ever happened to just being healthy? Also, now, actual women aren't even needed to model. They can create a face, and body digitally, rather than use an "imperfect" female, who even after all her cosmetic surgery efforts, is still going to need hours of hair and makeup before a shoot (including body makeup as they can airbrush on a tan to hide skin "imperfections."

I'm not saying that american culture isn't tough on guys as well. That's another Pandora's box of ridiculous rules and expectations. I used to spend so much time trying to make people realize that they are just damaging each other with these seemingly harmless ideals. Later, I realized that the only thing they truly give a f**k about, most of them, is having their entertainment taken away. If they can't live to check out a "nice set of ripped abs," well then life just isn't fun anymore, therefore not worth living. I'm just programmed differently. I prefer to live the examined life. Nothing made me that way that I can think of.. I just always.. was.



So, perhaps examine why you are attracted to what you are attracted to, and the effects shallow attractions have.

Mind Marauder

An excellent post. Right now though I've reached a point where looks no longer mean much to me at all. If I am shown two pictures of women and one is obese and one is a super model and someone asks me: "Who is more physically beautiful?" I will tell them the super model. The answer would be based upon the question. "Physically beautiful." Now emotionally beautiful? Intellectually beautiful? Who knows? You can't unless you have some other determinate that will, most likely, take time to observe. But physical beauty has been proven to be scientifically determinable based upon angles of the body. It has become objective.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetr...attractiveness)

The sexiness of facial symmetry across cultures and species Anthropology.net

Promethea

Ok, science.. so basically we have gravity, and shallow attractions as two things that are never not correct?

I call bullsh*t- and I will tell you why. It's all theory, and a lot of it is contradictory. As a sociology major, I say through many documentaries on attraction and the pseudo-scientific why behind them all- and then, there were other theories that contradicted those too. Theory. Theory. Theory. Not scientific fact.

Actually if you want to believe it, you can pretty much look only for evidence that supports it, and prove it that way- but is it correct? Maybe not.. and how deeply are they examining it..

Oh, and how about all the EXCEPTIONS to the 'rules?'

Not accurate. You are stating theory as fact, when it is only theory, and there are exceptions to it all. Null and void.

Mind Marauder

True, very true. But the existence of a rule implies exceptions. That's the naturally order.

Promethea

Problem is, it's not even actually a rule to begin with. It is a simple theory, and not a very well thought out one at that.

It is measuring based on what a large percentage of people think, but it can't answer why they think it, at all. That wouldn't be possible because it would have to examine human nature- real human nature. But as we exist today, we have grown from our nature into something that is less than our pure nature. What I mean is that there are many factors which determine things that we can't take apart from our nature in order to understand that very core nature.

Perhaps the majority of people have shallow physical attractions because they are conditioned to.

You can't extract only our true nature and test it. Other things are interfering.

Also- look at other cultures. In Haiti the men prefer larger women with more weight sitting on their thighs and hips. It is similar in some parts of Mexico. Also, look at how beauty standards have changed through out time.

Now, you are trying to say that science has proven that we are all attracted to something in particular- then why do people repeatedly go against that alleged scientific fact?

Cause it ain't science, or fact.

Seems the only thing we can truly make a claim for is that it is in our nature to be sexual creatures, sure- but what determines what we are sexually attracted to is way too complicated to even begin to explain away as something so short-sighted.

Pic related- it's my submission for beauty standards being different through out time.

I will give you cultural- but scientific; never.

OrangeAppled

^ Promethea, I see the general idea in your post and over all it makes some good points.... However, most men don't find thin fashion models attractive, if you ask them. I would say that breast implants are a better example of how skewed beauty ideals are. The women presented to men as ideal are slender with disproportionately large fake breasts, hair extensions, and fake tans (at the least).

I also take offense at the idea that curves are "more womanly". XX chromosome and a vagina make you a woman, not big boobs and wide hips. A very thin, lanky woman is not less of a woman. I would argue that's something we've been fed also: that woman should look ONE way, and there is ONE beauty ideal that everyone should desire. Sayings like "real women have curves" are just as damaging as images of very thin women in magazines.