Recently, I
had an excellent discussion of sexual objectification in an ethics course.
However, I was concerned about the way in which my students—especially my
female ones—insisted that anyone who “dressed like a ho” was denigrating
themselves. My concern was the cultural and historic tone-deafness in which
these claims were made. To try to get them to pause and reflect, I told them
that by the standards of my youth in the 1980s, the typical dress of
contemporary young women is scandalous. The implication was, though I am not
sure anyone got it, that those who were decrying the other women were in fact
in violation themselves. Hence, I tried to get them to move beyond drawing
lines given whatever current beliefs they had. I failed, I believe, but at
least one of my male students make a funny comment about male sexual
objectification and “crotch rockets” (not referring to motorcycles), and thus I
would turn to male sexual objectification, which is much less discussed in
contemporary American culture.
While there
is much fuss over the hyper-sexualization of the female body in American
culture, there is not enough discussion of the sexualization of male desire and
agency. While one can rarely watch a commercial without a female sex object
implicitly hawking wares, rarely does the public consciousness note that such
marketing treats men as dumb brutes largely subsumed by the power of
sexualization and gendering. Should we really conceive of masculinity as wholly
beholden to any seduction that fulfills heterosexual male fantasies?
In all the
public discussion of the hyper-sexualization of the female body, where is the
discussion of such for male desire and critical intelligence? In fact, while the
female submission to male fantasies, becoming a sex object, is publically
considered “bad” or at least ambivalent, the male submission to these
heterosexual fantasies is meet with knowing glances, fist bumps, and
backslapping.
I long for a
resistance to the sexualization of male desire and agency.
No comments:
Post a Comment