45 Comments

It may not refer to a specific thing - and it doesn't, in fact - but that doesn't mean it applies to everything.

Also, women get accused of, y'know, making themselves objectify-able.

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Objectification seems to be an ill-defined catch-all buzzword used to denigrate any type of sexual behavior or preference of other people (almost always heterosexual males).

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"Perhaps men get hornier viewing swimsuit models, and then try harder to gain sex from other women. But few complain about similar effects on women from watching sexy rock stars. Or from men watching ads for sexy female clothes, or live women in swimsuits at the beach or in sexy party outfits."

I have heard all these objected to on grounds of objectification. Am I unusual in this regard?

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>Heterosexual men seem to benefit more from marriage than hetero women, should they get less “consideration”?

You have that backwards; women benefit far more from tying a man down to them than the men do. The stereotype of the bitch ex-wife taking the children and all your money exists for a reason.

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Except since a rape index doesn't include rapes that weren't reported, or rapes that may not be considered rape by law in Japan, or any country listing stats like that, that says very little about the ACTUAL incidences of rape in Japan, and in no way indicates that Japan really has a lower rate of rape that most other countries.

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It’s peculiar how offensive Easterly believes the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition is. It seems most of the flaws in his argument have been addressed (I particularly liked “agnostic’s” point about the decline in rape proving that these images are not leading to an increase in sexual harassment) but there are still a few that I would like to point out.

Easterly claims that photographing a woman as a “sex object” in a swimsuit goes against her rights. What about her right to chose? These women weren’t forced against their will to be photographed in swimsuits. Denying a woman the right to be photographed in such a manner goes against her rights even more than looking at such a photo. It also completely disregards the history of the bikini. Once upon a time women were not allowed to wear bikinis- think Annette Kellerman, who was arrested for doing just that. Some argue that the popularization of the bikini was a feminist act; women were asserting their power and dominance. I can understand why someone may have an issue with this as it suggests that a woman’s power comes from her appearance, but I would argue that it is not the sole source of her power. A perfect example of a woman using her body in such a manner is the “I’d Rather Go Naked than Wear Fur” PETA campaign. Yes the women are photographed nude, but they are using their bodies to support an intellectual opinion on animal cruelty.

Easterly also points out that only 10% of Sports Illustrated pages are devoted to women’s sports when he argues that the magazine suggests that woman should be more concerned with their appearance then their athletic abilities. There is only one Swimsuit Edition each year. As Sports Illustrated is a weekly magazine, that means that at best 1/52 or around 2% of Sports Illustrated pages are devoted to showing images of women in bikinis. I would therefore argue that their focus is on woman as athletes, not as “sex objects.”

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The main issue is that the attractiveness of women is remarked upon and noticed more prominently than the attractiveness of men. This leads to two problems for women:

1. Women receive proportionally less attention for other merits (i.e. competence, intelligence), which reduces their access to opportunities that require those merits.

2. The amount of attention paid to a woman's physical attractiveness can sometimes reach such a high level of frequency and/or intensity that it becomes distracting, irritating, or even threatening.

Both of these issues are significant *regardless of the individual woman's level of attractiveness*, though probably they are worse at either extreme of the spectrum.

I'm not sure if men looking at women modelling swimsuits far more often than the reverse is actually contributing to this problem, or merely a result of it.

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That is precisely the problem. The surfeit of swim-suit covers creates a false parallel that a woman wears a swim suit to appear "sexy" and not as something that serves a function at that time.

A woman wearing shorts is looked differently from a man wearing shorts. It is unfortunate that clothes that serve a purpose are enhanced with meaning that is not intended.

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Women are sex objects. Duh. They are also other kinds of objects. They are depicted as sex objects and also as other kinds of objects. Is the objection that no single depiction can fully capture all that woman are? Perhaps we should outlaw all depictions of women and elevate women to the status of Gods in our absurd modernist religion.

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I do see a down side to these pictures and video, that is that they seem to fool men into think that there are more beautiful women available than there are. This makes them less likely to settle and in turn to have kids. It can also make a married man less satisfied with his wife.

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That would have been a good opportunity for you to explain what the "central defining feature" is. I believe you've done something like that vs Bayes, but now we are talking status.

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Unfortunately, yup. See, e.g., Sandeep Mishra, Andrew Clark, and Martin Daly, "One woman’s behavior affects the attractiveness of others," Evolution and Human Behavior 28 (2007) 145–149.

I still think porn is a net good. It eases some of the pain of the undersupply of female sexual services.

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Male sexual demand > female sexual demand. That has to balance out somehow. Best it do so with raunchy magazines rather then psychological damage and rape.

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Your obsession with 'Status' for social interaction is just like Yudkowsky's obsession with 'Bayes' for intelligence. You're both well wide of the mark I'm afraid.

Status is just the mechanics - 'motive force' or 'engine' of social interaction, it's not the main defining feature. Same deal with intelligence. Bayes is just the mechanics - 'motive force' or 'engine' of intelligence, it's only secondary to the main defining feature of intelligence, which is something different entirely.

You could point to a car and say; 'The engine explains the car'. No. The car needs the engine, but the engine only accounts for the mechanics of the car, whereas the actual purpose of the car is getting from place to place. Status is not in the drivers seat for social interaction, and nor is Bayes in the drivers seat for intelligence.

An obsession with the mechanics of things, whilst missing the central defing features entirely, seems the hall-mark of high-IQ transhumanist system-oriented folks.

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We think that the N-word is bad because using it means that one dislikes people of African descent as a class, which we judge to be immoral. What’s the similar immorality in the mind of someone gazing upon a sexy image of a woman? Is Easterly saying that it’s simply wrong for heterosexual men to fantasize about sex, period?

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