Manly Thor's Day Special

Hef and sexual objectification
Roger Ebert has written a long piece defending Hugh Hefner. It's worth a read, click on over and check it out.

I don't know that I agree entirely. In any case, I have no intention of dealing with it point by point. But there was one issue that leapt out at me:

Nobody taught me to regard women as sex objects. I always did. Most men do. And truth to tell, most women regard men as sex objects.

Like a broken record now, the people who want to condemn porn come back to this point about objectification over and over again. But Ebert is absolutely correct here. Learning to objectify women sexually is like learning how to like the taste of sugar or the touch of soft, warm skin. No one has to teach us to do this because we all do it naturally.

A further point made by Christina Nehring in her book A Vindication of Love is that it is normal and good that we objectify one another during sex. In fact, as she notes, most of us sometimes want to be thought of as objects, that is what we want when we want people to think us desirable.

And Nehring, perhaps because she is a woman, gets to the real problem which is not porn. Here it is from a male perspective. I get up in the morning and go to buy coffee and, as I walk down my driveway, two hot girls from the local university go by. I look at them and I objectify them. To be honest, they're helping but I meet them more than halfway. I think of them all day and at three o'clock in the afternoon, I switch Firefox to private browsing and Goggle "college girl" and click on images. Now I'm really objectifying. Okay, but I'm also in love with a real woman: I don't think of the woman I love and cherish like that too do I? Surely I don't objectify her.

Well, if Ebert is right, and he is, I do. We all do. And while it may be true that most women sometimes objectify men, I suspect the real issue is that women are more amenable to being objectified than we and they let on. That, as Katherine Hepburn does to Jimmy Stewart in the final scenes of Philadelphia Story, there are some moods where she will shock us by asking "Why ever not?"

And that is the real problem isn't it? This objectification doesn't seem to fit with our ideas about love. A man expects a woman to behave herself naturally.

I grew up in a tough mill town and there were several porn theatres just a few blocks from my house. I saw a few porn films in my teen years and that a lot of that early porn tended to always follow the same plot. A woman would be bored with her current lover or even just curious and she'd set out on an adventure in which she'd have sex with a variety of partners: one would typically be black, another would be an anonymous encounter where names weren't even exchanged, one would be dominant, one would be another woman .... And it always ended with her, now fully satisfied, and in bed with some guy she loved (often the guy she'd started with).

The reason for this plot line was, if you'll pardon my being a little explicit, to satisfy the customers. In the days of porn before people watched it at home, a bunch of guys would be in a theatre, none of them sitting very close to anyone else. Every once in a while one of the guys would get up and leave and that was because the woman had just played the scene he'd come for, whoops, I mean the scene that matched his preset desire. Yeah, I know, it's gross. If the floor was sticky you didn't think that someone had spilled their soft drink if you know what I mean.

Now you know why home video revolutionized the medium.

But here is the thing, remember that last scene, the one where the woman is united in blissful sex with the guy she really loves? It was boring. Really, really boring. And unfair if you think about it. She gets her hard core thrills with a bunch of strangers and then she comes home and has gentle, soft-focus "lovemaking"with the guy who really matters to her. Even porn maintains this double standard: enjoying a woman is one thing and love is something else.

There is something that tells us that it may be okay to go out and sow some oats but then you're supposed to come home and settled own. We might think it an important developmental stage to have some fun or we might think it just tolerable or we might think it a serious sin requiring serious penance but that objectification stuff has nothing to do with love.

A weird jump
 Hold on 'cause I'm going to take a really weird leap now.

In the early 1980s, I was in a Thai restaurant and unwillingly eavesdropping on the couple at the next table. The woman at the table said she was really tired because she had been working so hard lately. The man made sympathetic sounds and supportive comments.

Sounds like a pretty normal conversation right? But it wasn't because she then went on to explain why she was so tired. She told him that every night, after falling a sleep, she traveled to another plane of existence where she met other people like herself. There, she and they worked all night long to build a new world. This new world was necessary because we were so determinedly destroying the present world that all humanity would have to be transported to this new place. They were working against the clock because no one knew when time would run out for the earth but it could be any time now.

I caught the guys eye at one point and he looked a little ashamed. Whether it was at the conversation or about what he was doing I don't know. After they had left, I thought, "It's amazing the crap men will pretend to agree with just to get laid."

And it is amazing.

But, looking back through the lens of twenty-five years life experience since then it seems to me that the real exploitation ran the other way. This woman wasn't crazy. She may have talked herself into sort of believing some of what she was saying but her talk wasn't the talk of a delusional person. I think she knew full well that by holding out the prospect of her putting out she could string this guy along. She knew that he would play along with her self-aggrandizing fantasy life in return for a chance at sex.

Hers is an extreme example but you can step into any coffee-shop in the land and catch a conversation in which someone with sexually power strings along some poor victim. A lot of women never even come across with the sex. They have the power and they use it.

It's rarer to see the game work the other way but it can happen. There was a guy named Adrian who went to school with me who did it. He came from a family of superb athletes—both his parents were elite cross country skiers—and he had blonde hair, blue eyes and a body to live for. He used to sit at parties with a guitar and girls who desperately wanted to have sex with him would endure hours of Adrian talking about what he called "my music" in order to do so.

Typically, he'd have more than one pursuing him in cut-throat competition. I remember sitting with my then girlfriend across the room one party and making some mocking comment about what was going on with Adrian and realizing from her offended response, that, if I hadn't been there, she would have been right in their with them.

The thing is Adrian could barely play that guitar. He had to ask other people to tune it for him. He was trying to learn, or at least he said he was. He had a notion every bit as crazy as the woman building a new world. He thought he already had the music in him and learning how to play guitar was just a technical detail like someone deciding they wanted to go to Cleveland and all they had to do was buy a ticket. And so he talked about his music and he used the girls who were willing to listen to him to make the fantasy seem a little more real.

The man in the restaurant and the girls at the party were both objectifying someone else sexually but the real exploitation was going the other way. Sexual objectification is an exploitation game where you can turn the tables at any time. The trout can aggressively pursue the fly, thinking of it with no more compassion than we think of when eating a potato chip. But the trout can also be enticed to attack a carefully presented decorative bit of feather and gaudily coloured thread with a hook in it.

Let Lady Gaga explain it to you:


Now I get even weirder
Okay, this is where I take all this somewhere eudaemonistic.

I think the lesson here is that what can redeem us is if we see what we are doing as fitting into some larger end. For me that means this:

So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.

There is nothing you can do to stop looking at women with lust. You're genetically programmed to do it. There is nothing you can do to stop wanting to see her naked, to stop wanting to get her so hot that she does things she doesn't normally do and so forth. And there is nothing you can do to change the fundamentally aggressive, predatory nature of sex; as I've said before, sex may start loving and tender and it should definitely end that way but no man or woman is thinking about peace, love and understanding in the 90 seconds immediately before coming and anyone who tells you different is a liar.

The thing you do have control over is the larger context. What life plan do all these individual acts fit into? Is this going somewhere real or are you too just bluffin' with your muffin or whatever it is you have?

That won't sit very well with some, Hef wouldn't like it for sure, but I think that if you really want to avoid exploiting others, you need to fit into God's plan.