objectification of the sexes - is it a level playing field now?

women have dismembered mens body parts to use, men have dismembered womens body parts and blow up dolls, more women look at porn than ever before (as er, do men), everyone can make ads asking for things like 'nine inches or less need not apply' (dont think ive ever seen one saying 'less than a c cup need not apply' though), everyone has naked people of the sex they want to look at... everywhere on tv, in ads, in magazines... men are more fucked up about their bodies than ever before (though perhaps we have some way to go to reach women's anxieties in this area) and so on and so on.

oh you big hunk of loving, titchyschneider

500 posts by nightfall, nothing resolved

Maybe we should just skip the 500 posts and let this one drop off the bottom of new answers never to be seen again?

women have dismembered mens body parts to use

then... the rumours are true?

'titchy'

'nine inches or less need not apply'

has this seriously ever appeared on a f4m dating ad?

No. Lock thread and move on.

no

Men have become more objectified, but it's nowhere near "level" yet.

500 posts by nightfall, nothing resolved

why should tonight be different from any other night?

"has this seriously ever appeared on a f4m dating ad?"

not in those words. but surely everyones seen classifieds asking only for 'well-endowed men'.

Yes, on M seeking M adverts.

yeah I have literally never seen that in my life

ITT - Titchy reads Craigslist, feels worried.

masonic, wrong.

titchy I have received various emails that you might be interested in, can forward them if you want

Hrmmm. I dunno. I've certainly written my fair share of F seeks M dating adverts. I have specified that I was looking for 9" or more, but I was talking about *hair* not penises.

Are you sure you've not got that confused? ;-)

cosign all the nays tbh

I know that image bombing is WRONG and BAD and we must not do it, but please, please, please, mods, can't I just have a little itty bitty flood of flashing drill and bass penis action?

It would seem very appropriate and on topic.

behemothic, dong

xxxpost

one thing i am certain of is that women on dating websites are profoundly interested in the size, shape and appearance of their potential suitors' penises. i mean, relatively sure. that's the assumption i've been working under.

TWELVE INCHES OF LUUURRRRRRVE, BABY

ian johnson 8=========================================================D to thread

"thread"

nobjectification

i've copyrighted that word now I think I'm going to be a rich man.

original post is a grand oversimplification of the issue. as a male i feel we are the advantageous sex. movie nudity is still predominately female, and while television advertisements have featured more and more males in using sex to sell, it is still mostly females. And well hanging around several males, I can tell you that there are still way too many men who don't have a healthy viewpoint of women.

the pornography industry is still predominately geared to men -- I don't suspect more women look at porn now than before. What studies do you have to prove that? As an observation I really think its just that more of them admit to it than before.

regarding Craigslist, I hope that's a joke. cuz uh...I've seen more than my fair share of mysognistic postings there from men.

i think that was well nobserved san te.

ANYWAY

i never said only women make 'ill have a large penis please' ads.

i said 'EVERYONE can'.

if they want.

obv ilx is too liberal, non-objectifying and RATIONAL a place to even think of such a thing.

and OF COURSE the original post was a grand over simplification of the issue.

regarding Craigslist, I hope that's a joke. cuz uh...I've seen more than my fair share of mysognistic postings there from men.

― San Te, Monday, 26 July 2010 13:58 (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Actually I think that one about the guy who slept with a woman who put his flash drive in her vagina then walked out was the precise thing that levelled the playing field

shouldn't that be knobservation and knobjectification, ken?

titchy i was actually surprised how you could have forgotten something so nobvious

Bloody ILX knobscurantists!

isn't it a bad idea to try and start a thread on gender issues w/ what you admit to be "a grand oversimplification of the issue"?

Original post = "I can't put my Hooters calendars up in my cubicle anymore and I'm pissed off about it."

xpost - isnt it a bad idea to go through life lacking a sense of humour?

everyone has naked people of the sex they want to look at...

I feel like either this sentence needs more added to it or someone should be sending SWAT over to let the naked girls out of titchy's closet

WmC i dunno - many people spell it knob but I always preferred the spelling without the k for some reason. i don't know if there is an official spelling though since as yet i have been unable to nobtain an oxford dictionary or a profanisaurus.

this is a thread where I would welcome deejs presence

next up -- "come" vs. "cum"

christine, if you read my post theres no ire, or resentment about it. im in fact pleased that we have reached a point where men can buy a fake vagina and women can buy a fake penis and they can buy these items from their local high street without being judged. i put my hooters calendar up with pride thank you.

Whenever I read that first post I can't help but feel Titchy is just looking for us to tell him it's okay for him to be watching porn and cruising random internet pick-up sites.

i wouldn't mind having a cop at deej's presence.

Or maybe looking for some women to tell him the same thing. (xpost)

cruising random internet pick-up sites.

isn't this..

so is this thread a joke then? if so, move to appropriate location!

women have dismembered mens body parts to use

O_O

what this thread (sorta) gets at is the fact that "objectification" isn't really the problem anymore. like okay sure men are increasingly subjected to the 'female gaze' or w/e, hooray for POST-SEXIST AMERICA -- except that like, the porn that dudes are into these days isn't about objectifying the female body, it's about humiliating and abusing it, which is a rather different thing.

the porn that dudes are into these days isn't about objectifying the female body, it's about humiliating and abusing it

hey! some of us still like the plain old objectifying kind.

Someone start doing bullet points on the thread where we sum up clusterfuck threads now. It'll just make things easier in the long run.

heterosexist matrix of desire

^ this is what I call my dick

is that after taking the blue pill, crüt?

not calling out to the ladies in question

oh yeah, but jeez, who does that anymore?

Dude, there is a whole blog about it: http://hollabackdc.wordpress.com/

there are hollaback blogs for different regions - i have a friend that this happens to on a regular basis on her way to/from work at a cafe in North Oakland

yeah, i meant it more like, who that you might actually know & voluntarily hang with

FUMING. My friend L was coming out of a Tube station in West London today, when all of a sudden a strange man crept up behind her and touched her neck. She had a bit of a fight-or-flight response and basically pelted the dude (she made him cry). Get this: when the station agent came over, he reprimanded my friend because the guy said he was just 'asking her out'.

well that's horseshit

o_O

he should have offered her a drink at the very least

but srsly that's terrible

Personally I'm glad dmac stuck his neck out to question the Bidisha article, because as soon as it was posted a few men appeared to say "well yes but that's all very obvious, I don't think anyone would disagree with any of that", while I'm fairly sure most of my male acquaintances would roll their eyes and say "but it doesn't mean anything, what a lot of fuss about nothing", etc

and, y'know, most of my male acquaintances are fairly smart, and some of them are not completely jerks (hey, they can mostly go an entire conversation with me, and the real jerks do not let a lady with my looks through a sentence without shutting it down to go talk to someone else)

so, I appreciated the reminder that actually for a lot of men, not all of them DiS posters, this doesn't go without saying at all

(ugh, that's not cool, suzy - man I jump a mile when friends touch the back of my neck even, never mind a stranger I don't know is there)

Regretting usage of "stuck neck out", unfortunate regarding suzy post, and also it has that sort of speaking the truth the PC brigade can't bear to hear! vibe to it when obv I didn't mean that, but, uh

touching a stranger's neck is way, way over the line. wtf dude? more to the point, wtf helpful station agent?

Yeah, if you're a woman and you're assaulted sexually, IT'S YOUR FAULT! Even if someone films it, films you explicitly not giving consent and throws it in a porn film...

http://tigerbeatdown.com/2010/07/27/all-your-boobs-belong-to-us-some-thoughts-about-consent-while-female/

(one of the few places where reading the comments will not make you lose your sanity)

x-posts

the guy said he was just 'asking her out'.

jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesus

relatedly, some days it is hard to work out which is worst between 'hey lady can't you take a joke' and 'hey lady can't you take a compliment'

idk what you look like spacecadet but i wish you wouldnt be down on yr looks so much all the time.

okay I want to read Kate's link but a) I am at work and b) the unfortunate broken part of my mind is too busy giggling because I misread the URL as "all your boobs are belong to us"

well that link really vibesw/ the little mackinnon ive tried to read

Oh, it's SFW.

And it IS All Your Boobs Are Belong To Us. That's the point of the article, that it's not really funny.

But, you know, once you read it, I'm hoping you might realise that actually, boobs do belong to the actual human beings that are attached to them, which is kind of the point of the article, and why so many people are so upset about this ruling.

yeah, incomprehensible. "implied consent" to be forbibly stripped and filmed nude cuz you were dancing and aware of the camera? fucking revolting.

"forbibly" = forcibly, duh

The quote from Echidne is particularly salient, about the idea of women's bodies and who they are supposed to belong to. (It's also part of a great longer blog post which is kinda difficult to link to directly, but worth reading if you can find it.)

Cis, these shining examples of manhood are always sharing jokes with us and paying us compliments. Who knew?

My friend should have the station dude face some discipline for that. Creepy neck dude is probably on CCTV in the station, too. I think quite a few public-facing TfL types could do with a harassment workshop. A couple of years ago (in another Tube station) some younger guys - think white van man with no driving license - made passing comment about my chest after doing the 'BOO!' thing to me on the street five seconds previously and when I shouted at them (they were walking into the station too) the attendant did not come to my aid. So I asked him a polite WTF. Answer "I thought you knew those guys." Next WTF not so polite.

I was going to talk about Zerowing but you know what, never mind

I should also add that my friend tore the creep a new one along the lines of GO CRY EMO BOY when he was all like 'she nearly broke my finger!'

this is the london hollaback http://www.hollabackldn.com/

i don't think many dudes actually realise just how commonplace this sort of thing is, i remember when i first started finding this out by looking at these sites (and talking to women i knew, lol) it was pretty shocking.

i don't understand how anyone feels they have the right to behave like that man did to your friend, suzy.

Another layer to this: she's lived here for less than two years and was mostly terrified her reaction would get her deported.

I've never been inappropriately touched by a stranger in that way, here or anywhere else, but I can tell you I'd want to kick dude hard enough to create a new orifice where his perineum used to be, then gouge out his eyes and trachea with my house keys. *big cheesy smile*

the weirdest thing is the faux-outrage that's common to all the men who get called out for their behaviour - c'mon at least acknowledge you were crossing the line!

that sucks, suzy. it reminds me of a time i was waiting at a bus stop in chicago and a dude came up behind me and put his hands on my waist. i did sort of want to hit him, but i didn't say anything, just flinched and then walked as far away as i could. it was broad daylight and there were tons of people around, but it was truly terrifying for a moment.

I've never been inappropriately touched by a stranger in that way, here or anywhere else, but I can tell you I'd want to kick dude hard enough to create a new orifice where his perineum used to be, then gouge out his eyes and trachea with my house keys. *big cheesy smile*

tbh when someone touches my neck in a creepy way my response is to punch/kick them super hard but the eye/trachea gouging thing is an instinct I'm not familiar with

holding keys in your knuckles while walking home at night is a pretty common thing for women (and men! i did it for about a week after someone tried to mug me a few years back) to do i think?

and i would absolutely go for the eye

I guess I need to be more vigilant

reading that hollaback, and getting crazy riled about how entitled people feel, that they should be allowed to holler anything that they want, and that women should just take it and be thankful, and "why do they dress like that if they don't want the attention", and.. and... and...

i mean, its just crazy to me that people think this kind of behaviour is okay. and its depressing that it seems more and more okay with generations younger than me. it perhaps shouldn't be a surprise, but its very depressing to see things regress like this.

there are a couple of older hollabacks there which pertain to the "shouting at people out of cars" thread

Not sure if its exactly for this thread but its been 40 years since The Female Eunuch has been published! Saw an interview with Greer yesterday (she dislikes it now, but seems pleased at its success) and the interviewer was trying to be all hard mode, which is the wrong approach as it didn't really tease out as many of her views, she spent much unnecessary time simply batting away.

Hooray for cop uncle schooling me on quite a few dirrrrrrrty self-defense tricks, like trachea press. I've been teaching people the house keys thing since I first moved to London and it's always new for someone. Added bonus: I am left-handed, and have never known a lefty to have a bag nicked from her arm.

I wish I had a cool cop uncle like that. As it stands I can't trust cops or 'protective' authority figures at all, esp esp esp in this arena.

Hey, hasn't it been at least six months since Katie Roiphe explained to us younguns how much better women had it when they had the opportunity to be drunkenly groped at work?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/fashion/01Cultural.html

seems so wrong on so many levels. many lives in the 60s were as buttoned up and repressed as roiphe's straw we, and many of the seemingly polite and upstanding people around us have quirks and undersides we know nothing about. i know plenty of philanderers, addicts and alcoholics, even people who keep booze in their desks. i'm not convinced that "our" lives have lost any spark of danger or risk.

how does Roiphe feel about seatbelts?

Greer wrote a follow up book to The Female Eunuch where she softened/modulated/built on some of her harder line stances. It's called The Whole Woman or the Complete Woman or something like that that I'm just blanking on, even though it's been sitting on my nightstand next to my bed since I bought it.

I don't even want to get into the whole "omg rape culture" aspects that we're starting to get into, for obvious personal reasons. (I mean, even the idea of "rape culture" is something that is hotly debated even in feminist circles) But yeah, the sense of entitlement that some men hold towards female strangers' bodies has always just been staggering to me.

The Whole Woman, yeah, which she did talk as an improvement to the written-in-a-six-month rush of The Female Eunuch.

“You look beautiful, but are you 100 pounds? I only date women who are 100 pounds or less. If I think you are lying, I will bring a scale.”

http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/roundtables/love_lies_and_online_dating.php

Man, I am 5'9" – if I weighed that little I would have a BMI of 14.8 aka "almost dead."

I am 5'9 and when I was super duper skinny I still weighed 124 lbs

if I weighed that little I would have a BMI of 14.8 aka "almost dead."

no prob, he'll bring a scale and a mirror to hold up to your mouth

Sheesh, even at 5'0" that would still be a BMI of below 20. If you weigh that little then you can't give blood in the UK because they figure you need it all.

(I know this because I am 5'0" and I was once too light to give blood but even then I was 10lb too fat for this dude. Now I am the size of a small firetruck and will just run him over if I see him)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7ZrBCY9ipI