A First-Hand Account of Objectification By a Woman

The theme of objectification is one of the main ones in contemporary feminism. A common criticism of media is that it objectified women. Rape isn’t just an act of violence, but an act of objectification. While it may not be explicitly implied, since this term appears mainly in feminist discourse you may decide that this experience is unique to female. The problem is, once we decide a problem is uniquely-female we become blind to the errors.

I’ll first define ‘objectification’ both in the arts and in personal interactions, and what I mean by ‘uniquely-female’. Criticism of feminism has sadly been dominated by people like those from A Voice For Men, who view the whole thing as a sort-of conspiracy to ruin males’ lives. I don’t believe their perfectly-ordered universe. Rather, it’s just possible that some feminists – like all humans – err.

Defining Objectification:

Wikipedia has Martha Nussbaum’s criteria for objectification, which is excellent in understanding what it is. Coped directly:

Instrumentality – treating the person as a tool for another’s purposes
Denial of autonomy – treating the person as lacking in autonomy or self-determination
Inertness – treating the person as lacking in agency or activity
Fungibility – treating the person as interchangeable with (other) objects
Violability – treating the person as lacking in boundary integrity and violable, “as something that it is permissible to break up, smash, break into.”
Ownership – treating the person as though they can be owned, bought, or sold
Denial of subjectivity – treating the person as though there is no need for concern for their experiences or feelings

In the media/fiction, objectification occurs when a character doesn’t have agency. By that, it means it doesn’t have personal drives or wants or needs. Instead, they have a very specific, narrow role. Often, ‘objectified’ characters will supposed to be central to the story. For example, a cashier who appears for one scene isn’t objectified since they appear only in one scene. Interchangability and having a minor role isn’t a sign of objectification.

What makes a character feel real and interesting is their interior – wants, needs, personality and actions/reactions derived from these. Objectification reduces a character for some specific use that makes them interchangeable with an object. It is the removing/ignoring of the interior of a character. An objectified character cannot drive the story and is dependent on the external world.

Better to be a dildo in use than a discarded dildo

Examples include the female characters whose role is to be pretty. Their role is no different than that of a picture or of a potted plant. Notice how this doesn’t say women can’t be pretty in media. Rather, when a female character contributes nothing but her looks she becomes an object. She has no interior. Another example is the ‘strong female character’ archetype, when a female character’s only role is to kill people and do stuff to advance the plot. Rey from Star Wars: The Force Awakens is an excellent example. Such a character is a tool for the writers to move the plot, but the character doesn’t add anything else besides advancement – she has no unique reactions or worldview or desires.

Objectified characters are objectified by storytellers, not their traits. A character can be dependent and ‘weak’, like Yuno Gasai from Future Diary yet she’s not an object. That’s because while she depends on a male for emotional stability, her role isn’t to move the plot. She exists on her own, has her desires and personality which translates into such toxic love.

Notice the difference in roles and how central they are. It is not about how the character will act in real life – Rey is clearly ‘stronger’. What’s important is their role in the story, whether they do a single thing, whether they’re a storytelling tool or are themselves the source of the story.

In real life, objectifying people is on a scale. You can treat people like tools to achieve certain objectives. For example, being friends with someone only because they give you free rides. Here, the friend becomes an object who doesn’t exist and has value in and of itself, but for the objectifier exists for a specific purpose – free rides. This is classic Deontology. Overall, thinking someone is good only for sex and raping them are two things on the same scale. Both deny the agency of the person and see them only as a means of achieving a specific purpose. The rape only adds violence.

Objectifying people in personal interactions is treating them as means instead of ends.

Uniquely Female:

In feminist discourse, people either talk about problems as experienced by females or discuss problems as if only females experience them. It’s a blurry line. In general, the latter form shows how men and women experiences the same thing, differently. For example, due to rape statistics, women experience the fear of rape far more commonly than men. Discussing a problem this way doesn’t mean men don’t get raped – only highlights how differenlty women have it.

I want to puke

In general, this is an excellent tool to explain why we need feminism. While men and women can suffer from the same things, they don’t suffer in the same way. Both genders suffer from the beauty standards, but beauty for women means something more than just being sexy. Most of their social value depends on that. Notice how a lot of female actors are young and beautiful while there is more variety in male looks. Notice how comments about female artists keep returning to their beauty.

The problem with the former style – ‘only females experience this’, is that it causes an erasure of other individuals’ experience. I specifically chose that word, because the problem with this erasure is not that it hurts men – but it that it hurts people and writes off their suffering. This article in Elite Daily is an excellent example discussing a problem as if only females experience it. I will critique it in another time.

A First-Hand Account of Objectification By a Female

The purpose of this is mainly self-therapy. Also, opening this wound is partly to encourage others to open theirs. This isn’t a ‘we don’t need feminism’ statement at all. My experience doesn’t cancel the high rape statistics, slut-shaming, constant objectification of women in the media and other issues.

The reason I present this story, except for my own sake, is that in a discourse that constantly frames men and male heterosexuality as aggressive we forget there are people behind it. We move from discussing the problems of high rape statistics to saying we should approach every stranger as if he’s a potential rapist. Put yourself in the position of the victim and you don’t have to justify yourself. Yet, without you seeing it, you cause great suffering. All the supposed structural oppression means nothing at this point.

How me and my ex met doesn’t matter. The important details is that I was 3 years older than her. She was in school. I was in the first year (or second?) of my military service. Both of us were weirdos. Look at this from outside, and it seems as though I’m in power. As the stereotype goes, I was the big man who found a girl with zero self-esteem. I’m older and was male, so supposedly I had more privilege.

Only this isn’t exactly what happened. The black dog bit me in the military and my depression was severe. I nearly comitted suicide and self-harmed almost on a daily basis. Sex was a hard thing to do. I could do some of it, but I needed more time to maintain erection. What this meant is that while we could do various activities, I had to be a little numb through it all. Remember, I was on the brink of killing myself and I had guns to do it.

After some months of this, my ex decided to dump me. This is objectification and no celebration of bodily autonomy can make it any different. My ex couldn’t see the difference between a vibrator and a person. You throw away a vibrator when it doesn’t function and doesn’t get you an orgasm. You don’t do this to a person. I was reduced to only my sexual function and my ability to maintain an erection.

When I hear complaining about being looked at, about being approached to because you look good and therefore objectification, I laugh. No one wrote you off. No one reduced you. People only acted because they found you attractive, but there was no active reduction of your other traits. If anything, approaching and getting to know a woman because she looks good is the opposite of objectification. In this scenario, the male wants to enjoy other traits of the person besides how they look. In my case, my sexual function was the reason I was erased.

At this point, any discussion of my male privilege are irrelevant and not helpful. The privilege of being male didn’t help me, since nothing after this actually helped me this. The end result was trauma – suicide, military service, sexual objectification, abandonment, self harm all come in the same package. I had no way to heal.

This isn’t a call to arms to defeat feminism. I wouldn’t be able to open this wound unless I soaked the idea that the patriarchy is also rigid on us males. Rather, I want to encourage males to open up their wounds and make interiors visible. We cannot only talk about women as victims when they can cause trauma. We cannot dismantle ‘toxic masculinity’ unless we let males actually deviate from it – which includes opening of wounds, some of which are caused by females. In truth, if you want to get rid of ‘toxic masculinity’, you’ll have to look at these wounds and not write them off so quickly.

I still hold this depression. It’s not as strong, but it’s there. It left me with a gaping wound and my already messed sexuality is even more messed than now. If the narratives I got were that true, that females were so powerless such a thing couldn’t happen but it did. Clearly, we need to move on from the absolution of male privilege. Reality, once again, proved itself more chaotic than our ideas.

Nowadays I’m not too angry. I’m too far gone with my damaged sexuality. All I can do is help others.

Margaret Atwood – Wilderness Tips

At its worst, Wilderness Tips suffers from Atwood’s most common flaw. Although she’s blessed with intelligence that never gets in the way of her stories, there is always a little too much distance between the reader and the characters. That’s an odd complaint, considering the book’s genre. Compare it to Raymond Carver, and Atwood has better characters yet doesn’t create as much sympathy.

It’s odd. It should be the opposite. The close look at people in all their glorious flaws should make us feel closer to them. Atwood isn’t shy of the first person narrative. Yet it’s the same case with every Atwood book – its emotional impact is always a little low compared to the intellectual side of things. Then again, there are some brilliant stories here and it’s a prime example of how realist fiction should be done. So Atwood couldn’t get around her tiny flaw here, but it doesn’t matter when everything else is so brilliant.

Short story collections can be hard to review. They’re not music albums. They’re often written over a long span of times. They tend to contain experiments and snippets. For many authors, short story collections are B-Sides & Rarities – odd pieces of prose that are interesting for the die-hard fan, but don’t go anywhere and don’t really ‘conclude’.

The latter part is important. Even if you’re a great short story writer, why are all of these stories packed together? In music albums, you often have an overarching sound connecting it all. Great albums also have good sequencing, with songs sounding better in their place in the tracklist. Wilderness Tips isn’t so good that it starts with a bangs and concludes, but it’s a masterwork of a genre. That alone is enough to make it feel like a complete work, instead of just assorted prose for the diehards.

‘Realism’ is an annoying word to use when discussing fiction. It’s also necessary, which makes it more annoying. No one actually has any access to what reality is. It’s the Map and Territory situation. You perceive parts of reality, but never all of it. So how can humans write something ‘realistic’ when they only perceive a very tiny part of reality? Keep in mind that fiction deals with the most unstable aspect with reality – humans, their relationship and how they experience the world.

Some opt for a dry, ‘nothing ever happens’ style to inform the reader it’s realistic. That’s basically a cop-out for people who aren’t imaginative enough or too insecure. The ideal technique for realistic fiction is to steal stories directly from reality itself, and always be aware every story has as many sides as it has characters. I don’t know how many of these stories are based on true cases, but Atwood’s portrayal of relationships has always been brilliant. Here, she’s in top form.

I wish I had Atwood to help with me with relationships. She never slides into strawmen or caricatures. Her men and women aren’t heroes and villains, but flawed people. Sometimes their flaws make them easy to manipulate or abuse. Sometimes their flaws lead them to abuse or be terrible to others. With great understanding comes great pessimism, though. All over these stories is disenchantment and cynicism towards the idea of romance and sexuality.

It’s not so much that Atwood is a rowdy feminist out to castrate men. Women can a lot of flak too. Many of them are attracted to married men and work on starting an affair. The crucial thing Atwood focuses on is that every relationship has two participants. It’s never one person doing things to the other. Affairs aren’t just sluts seducing innocent men, or men being pigs. Both sides choose to do it.

Some relationships are abusive, though. Some people are assholes and only them are to blame for what they do to others. In these stories we see what pessimism is truly like. The assholes are never evil caricatures, rapists in the dark or hot young gaslighters. It’s easy to understand why they do it and that includes the backstabber in “Uncles”. What’s more horrifying than the act itself is their humanity. Atwood knows evil people don’t come from outerspace, kill people for the fuck of it and get blasted by dudes with sixpacks. What drove them to that behavior can also drive her or me or you or anyone of us.

The best story here is perhaps the aforementioned “Uncles”. While Atwood’s feminism and exploration of women’s position in society isn’t huge here – women are the main characters mainly because Atwood is a woman – that story explores it brilliantly. Again, it’s about showing the two sides of things. This time it’s about the relationship with a beautiful, perfect person who’s used to approval. I’ve met those. Women who are pretty can have it very easy in life, especially if they develop a few skills. Their good looks already means people are nicer to them.

People are jealous of you when you’re successful. The jealousy is even harsher when your luck is obvious. Everyone is successful mostly because of luck, but the Beautiful People’s type of luck is so obvious it’s excruciating. We also all know that our love for the Beautiful People is what gives them their success. We’re to blame. One way to deal with jealousy is to demonize the successful, disregard their successes or assume their feelings aren’t worthwhile. They’re so successful, so who cares if we humiliate them? It mirrors things I’ve seen in real life.

There’s also enough variety in tone and prose style to prevent this from becoming variations on a style. The hard realism and theme of relationships allow Atwood to experiment with story structures and styles without causing any disconnection between the stories. It’s the most versatile I’ve seen Atwood yet. Some stories have a more poetic, somber tone to them. Others like “Hairball” have jumpy prose that’s unlike anything she’s written. Sometimes she apes Carver completely with hard, dry prose. The tone is always appropriate for the stories, too. This variety helps to reinforce the realism. People experience reality differently. If all your stories are written in the same way, you’re too narrow for reality.

Wilderness Tips is an excellent short story collection. The only flaw is the slightly disappointing closer (“Hack Wednesday”) and the distance Atwood can’t rid of. Still, at its best this is how realist fiction should be. The events are exciting. There’s always a feeling of uneasiness and unstability which define reality. People are flawed human beings, sometimes weak or evil or talented but they’re always human. The stories also conclude more than they just end hanging in the middle of things. No one writes prose like Carver, but this is where I’ll direct people if they want to understand realist fiction.

3.5 tips out of 5

Schrodinger’s Rapist or: Stranger Danger 2: Electric Boogalo

There are all kinds of problems with Schrodinger’s Rapist. It’s fairly logical, but it only states obvious things that don’t further our understanding. It’s a nice-sounding buzzword, too. As far as trying to reveal greater truths about the existence of rape culture, it’s a failure. In order to reveal rape culture, you’ll have to reveal something. This is just Stranger Danger with a feminist paintjob.

I’m going to tackle it from various points.

First of all, the language switch. This is the quote from Rebecca Watson with the sexes switched:

When you approach me in public, you are Schrödinger’s Rapist. You may or may not be a woman who would commit rape. I won’t know for sure unless you start sexually assaulting me. I can’t see inside your head, and I don’t know your intentions. If you expect me to trust you—to accept you at face value as a nice sort of girl—you are not only failing to respect my reasonable caution, you are being cavalier about my personal safety.

Dear women, you are Schrodinger’s False Rape Accuser, or Rapist, or Heartbreaker, or Run-Away-With-Child-er, or Mugger. I’m afraid, too.

What if made this a race issue? Schrodinger’s Black Mugger. Assuming black people commit more crimes (for whatever reason – class or genes or rap cred or because of biased reporting), wouldn’t it be reasonable to think a black person is Schrodinger’s Mugger until he proves otherwise?

Schrodinger’s Rapist is true, but its logic also encourages distrust of women. Even if you confine it to rape, males still get raped. Even if it happens less often, it does. Men being in power doesn’t matter. It’s not going to make the experience of a raped male any better.

Schrodinger’s Rapist is also an extension of Stranger Danger. Stranger Danger is an idea that should’ve been discarded long ago. People remember it when they want to ‘keep their children safe’ (=locked in the house with only a math textbook) and forget about it when complaining about how antisocial everyone is.

Stranger Danger is promotion of asocial behavior. Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t respond when they talk to you. They’re all out to get you. What people forget is that everyone is a stranger until you get to know them, including the parents. The baby simply didn’t have any control.

Strangers might hurt you. Asocial behavior is certain to hurt you. Isolation is a common factor when it comes to depression and depression is a common factor when it comes to suicide. Stranger Danger didn’t contribute anything.

Stranger Danger (Schrodinger’s Rapist) also fail because it’s not only strangers who hurt us. These strangers have probably been brainwashed with being asocial, too. It’s often people we are close to who hurt us the most. Rape occurs more often by familiar people rather than strangers.

That makes perfect sense. If you want to rape, it’s easier and safer to do it with someone you know, who trusts you. They will be less resistant at first. You already know how to interact with them and how to coerce them to having sex. You can guilt trip them later. If you’re the dominating person in a social group, they will less likely to accuse you.

The idea can cause more harm than good. It will make women fearful of strangers, but it can make them more lax with familiar people who are most likely to rape them. Where does the circle end though?

It also misses the point. By telling people not to act like rapists, you’re actually telling rapists how better to conceal themselves. A person with little regard to consent doesn’t need to be told how ‘not to act like a rapist’ but why rape is so wrong.

Acting like a rapist and raping are two different things. A person can have an aggressive, loud behavior. He can even care little for personal space and accidentally touch you, but it doesn’t mean he’s a rapist. It means he’s loud, obnoxious and doesn’t care much for personal space. It doesn’t mean he’s inconsiderate (or sadistic) enough so he will harass you.

The only surefire way to tell if someone is a rapist or a sexual harasser is when they actually do it. We should not teach people how not to act like a rapist. We don’t people not-acting like rapists, but we want them to not rape at all.

I also saw a claim that talking to people who are currently in the middle of something – reading a book, on the laptop, browsing Facebook on their phone is rude. I fail to see rudeness in initiating social interaction. It’s rude to keep pushing if a person tells you s/he’s busy, but it’s possible that this person is browsing Facebook because there’s nothing to do on the train.

You will get hurt less by telling a person who approached you to leave you alone then by not being approached to at all. Loneliness is more damaging than we think. The fact some people won’t leave you alone is rude, but is a different story.

(Here’s some Hypocrisy With Natalists moment: You think it’s rude when guys approach you while you’re reading a book, but think it’s fine to force people into existence? That kid you just forced into existence and wants to die suffers way, way more than you.)

If Schrodinger’s Rapist is supposed to make us understand better the fear women have of rape, it fails. It’s Stranger Danger in disguise. It’s actually worse than Stranger Danger. Its main message is that you can’t trust anyone. In some ways it’s true. Anyone can hurt you. The key word is ‘can’. It’s possible they will and it’s possible it won’t. There is one thing that’s guaranteed – loneliness, isolation and fear of communication will hurt you no matter what.

Of Feminism and Mad Max: Fury Road

While I spent a few paragraphs in my review of Fury Road discussing feminism, I want to delve deeper into it. It’s been a huge talking point, and it’s a beautiful flaw. The misinterpartation of feminism is so gross and overdone in this film, we have a lot to learn from it.

Feminism is the promotion of women’s equal rights so they’ll be equal to men. The key words here are ‘equality’ and ‘women’. While feminism is concerned only with women, it doesn’t mean it’s automatically against equality. It just highlights how females experience discrimination. There are people who say feminism is another word for female supremacy. While this is an obvious straw men, Fury Road would make you think it’s right. It’s ironic that Sarkeesian, the feminist you love to hate also saw the film as not feminist at all.

In Fury Road, all the female characters are on the good side. There is not a single female character among the bad guys. There plenty of faceless mooks, and none of them are female. It’s not a co-incidence. There are around 7 females around this film, so this is not just a case of a few characters slipping through. There are only two male good guys. One of them is a bad guy who does a 180. The other one, Max, who remains morally gray until he fully joins the girls.

Already, we have a very unequal representation of the genders. One gender represents goodness and badassary. The other one represents vileness, cruelty and tyranny. The film makes sure you’ll know gender has a lot to do with it.

The bad guys are defined by masculinity and represent the patriarchy. One of the bad guys is called Rictus Erectus. Immortan Joe’s most terrible crime is keeping these breeders and forcing them to bear him children. We see that male children are valued much more (Erectus being sad that he lost a baby brother). There are only war boys, and they deserve to get to Valhalla.

There isn’t an attempt to explore the patriarchy, to ask maybe they’re right. We do not get an oppurtunity to see things from the bad guys’ point of view, or a chance to see whether they did some good. We just see how vile they are. They wear skulls. They’re all mascular. They’re obsessed with violence. They view women as things. Even Gizmo makes an appearance as the fat, rich patriarch.

It is not a coherent system that just happens to be terrible. It’s just showing us how terrible a system is. There plenty of questionable ideologies out there, but that’s not because Hitler wanted to be ‘evil’. ‘Evil people’ just act out of a different system of values. The film doesn’t show this.

There is not even an attempt to make them charismatic in the villainous way. George Miller’s previous villains were odd, and pretty funny in their unique way. Even when they were cruel, they had a certain style that made them fun to see on screen. In Fury Road, Miller wants you to hate them so much you’d tatto “If I had a hammer I’d smash the patiarchy”.

Yet what is the alternative to this cartoon misogyny? Furiosa does not have a character. She’s an action heroine. She wants to do some good because it drives the plot, but that’s it. She asks for redemption, but the why is never made clear. It’s just a piece dialogue that was tacked on. She’s a pretty good action heroine – charismatic, devoid of sexuality and looks great with guns – but she’s not an engaging characters.

The wives tend to sit in the back and they all talk the same. They do help around the car a bit, but they don’t have an individual personality. The closest they come to showing some humanity is the kind-of-love relationship the redhead has with Nux, and the one who wants go back to the safety. None of these things are explored, but the format of the story won’t let them anyway.

Finally we have, among the female angels the old women. Their main role in the story is to tell our heroes to go back, and thus instigate the final scene. The final scene is great, so they do a great service to humanity. They also shove themselves in it. They have no charisma, no personality and we already have two action heroes that are good enough. Adding them is just adding more fighting women, but that’s it.

Immortan Joe is pure evil, so his alternative can only be goodness. Since the females are all on the good side, that’s their defining feature. This is not a clash of two ideologies. There isn’t even the cheap method of painting one philosophy as an evil straw men. Men are evil. Women are good.

This is not even a straw men of misogyny. There is no subversion of any norm. Misogyny was never about painting men as righteous with the moral high ground and women as evil demons. The ‘tempting women’ is a common trope, but it’s hardly the only color misogyny wears. Misogyny is often dismissing women as stupid, uncapable and thus inferior. More often than not, misogyny strips women of the ability to be good or evil. Women are just ‘things’ to fucked and then thrown away. Your average gangsta rap song will inform about how bitches ain’t shit but hoes and tricks.

There are red pillers who’ll try to paint women as evil conspirators, but if Fury Road is a respond to them, it’s just as pathetic. Swinging from one extreme to the next only brings you closer to the ones you hate. So you switched the genders of the Red Pill narrative, but the story is just as sexist.

As for the sexual object norm, it’s so insidious that even female heroines fall to it. Eve is a silly women that was easily conned by a snake. Black Widow’s main role is to be eye candy. There is no challenging this norm, with Furiosa being just a generic action hero and the old women completely unnecessary. Anita called this ‘cartoon misogyny’, but it’s not even that. ‘Shallow’ implies that there is minimal depth, but it’s as barren as the wasteland the film takes place in.

More importantly, the film doesn’t question the big premise misogyny relies on. Before dismissing women, misogyny assumes that sex is a factor that’s meaningful enough. Fury Road doesn’t question the importance of gender roles. It encourages it.

There is no meaningful difference between putting wome in the kitchen or in the factory. You’re still assigning them roles based on their gender and deny them their individuality. Men have been allowed to exist outside their gender for years. Even in characters where the sex is important, it’s not their whole character, like Bellow’s Herzog or Roth’s Portnoy. Get rid of the gender, and what do the wives, or the old women have?

Fury Road assigns a role to women and that is to be Jesus. That’s why there’s no room for them to develop. Developing them would mean they could be wrong, or be flawed, or think bad thoughts. These would make them seem less ‘good’. It would also make them more human and more realistic. I do not believe women are angels, and I find them to be equal to me in strength and in weakness. By turning them into angels, the film denies them the oppurtunity to be human.

Ironically, the two male characters that get some sort of character development are male. Mad Max is a fantastic hero. Despite being presented as a rugged action hero, there are plenty of moments where we see through the cracks. The distrust and paranoia he expresses at first, his jerky movements, his awkward way of speaking that points at an antisocial personality – these are small details that help establish who Max is. Max is a person who’s a family man at heart, but has been wrecked by the wasteland and turned into an antisocial animal who only cares about surviving and can’t even communicate. Nux gets a less interesting arc of waking up from the patriarchy and redeeming himself by joining the women.

George Miller was aware of this ‘feminism’ when he made the film. He says he’s now surrounded by wonderful women so he ‘can’t help being a feminist’. I wonder if in an alternative universe where Miller is not a director with groupies, he’s still a feminist. It’s easy to side with women when they’re attracted to you, but women deserve rights not because they give you sex or affection. You should be a feminist even if all women will find you so physically repulsive they will never get close to you. It seems as if Miller cares less about women as fellow people, and just rewards them for their affection. That’s nice of him, but next time he should reward them with a more honest portrayal.

So, we have another film where women are confined to a role and none of them are allowed to be fully human. It’s not even a unique role. It’s just an oversized Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Instead of rescuing a single man from his boring, they rescue a whole civilization thanks to their femininity. Maybe we overdid it. We spent so much time praising women, hoping it’ll make up for past mistakes but we kept refusing to let them share their experience. Women do need to be praised further. They need to be portrayed as the humans they are.

There are no angels and no demons, just people with different ideas.