Tzadeck Wrote:Okay, I’ve been trying to think about this but I guess my thoughts are all over the place.
First, I was trying to think about what irks me a bit about the concept of “sexual objectification.” I guess the two biggest reasons are the two I already mentioned: 1) I’m worried that it demonizes men for appreciating the attractiveness of females, which has its roots partly in biology; 2) I’m worried that it sends the message, to both male and females, that sex is a bad thing (I mentioned that this might have its roots in Christian thinking). The more subtle concept “Males, you shouldn’t think of women as objects for your sexual desire—and women, you shouldn’t want men to think of you as sexual objects” breaks down to “Males, there is something bad about thinking of women sexually—and females, there is something bad about wanting to be looked at sexually.”
I dunno, i really think this is the wrong distinction... i think you are considering sexual objectification in the wrong way. I really don't think it's about looking at someone and thinking "they're hot", or thinking about them in a sexual way. This is something everyone does. Sexual objectification does something more than that; it allows someone to approach someone else as if they weren't even human... and it results in the ability to turn empathy off because of that. It can be difficult to distinguish between the two in certain cases, but i think there definitely is a difference.
Tzadeck Wrote:(Take the following with a grain of salt
In general, I really wonder what role biology plays in human sexuality. Perhaps men really are biologically more likely to separate sex from the-relationship/emotions than women are. You could speculate that because men and women devote considerably different amounts of resources to childbirth (the male very little, the female a LOT), you would expect them to have different reproductive strategies and reproductive goals. Of course, it’s very hard to know to what extent that might be true, and of course we shouldn’t shape our society based only on biology (for example, we can’t forgive rape even if it might originally have a biological role as a reproductive strategy).
Well, i have a problem with this kind of evolutionary explanation, and with evolutionary explanation in general. It just seems that "anything goes" really, as an evolutionary explanation. We're trying to argue from the justification to the fact, without ever proving the "fact" to begin with, and then end up ignoring other equally valid explanations, and other equally valid implications of that explanation. For instance, you could also argue based on what you said that women should not get emotionally attached to men because they need to devote their emotional resources to bringing up a child, and a man is unlikely to stick around anyway. Or that women should not get emotionally attached until they actually have a child. Or that a good strategy for both of them would be for the male to raise the child because the female has already devoted significant resources to growing the child in the womb and giving birth, so the male has more resources left to give. I mean, there is just no way of telling what a "good" evolutionary explanation should look like, especially if you haven't got any actual facts to base it on to begin with.
There's another thing to think about too... if the "resources" thing were true, you should expect to see the same pattern repeated across males and females of all species who's resources are used in the same way as humans. Except you don't... almost every possible sexual strategy is seen among animals, both as species, and at least for some of the apes, within species too.
There ARE certain things that can tell you about a species' strategy as a whole (though not necessarily the individual members), such as testis size. It's been found to have a direct correlation with how much sperm competition there is. Where there is low sperm competition, the testes are smaller, and where there is high sperm competition, testes are larger. Human males have smaller testes than chimpanzees, but larger than gorillas, signalling that females are rather more monogamous than chimpanzee females, but rather less monogomous than female gorillas (where usually the alpha male has access to a group of females, and all other males lose out). However, there's nothing as far as i know that provides any evidence about emotional attachment.
In fact, there's no real reason to believe that the emotional attachment thing is not cultural. With our generation, more than our parents, it's become fairly socially acceptable for girls to have casual sexual relationships without emotional attachment too. And with this happening, you tend to see a much wider range of relationship styles and strategies than you did before. (or at least, they are more visible, anyway). In other societies (i can't remember which, but i think it was Chinese), women get to pick which men they sleep with each night, they let them in through a window, and they don't have to remain monogomous, but can switch and choose. It very much depends on the person, but it seems to me that culture does influence this a lot too.
The key word in genetics study at the moment is epigenetics. And i also think this is where things get interesting. It's all about how the environment influences genes. So, people are born with a set of genes, but there are environmental triggers which sort of flip a switch on those genes, allowing someone to adapt to their environment as they grow up. These genes remain switched on after the switch. In the physical sense, it's how identical twins can end up looking completely different from one another as they go further through life. It's also very important for behaviour, allowing different people to adapt different strategies depending on their environments. One really sad example of this is in child abuse... when a child is physically, emotionally, or sexually abused, areas of their brains adapt and grow in a different way from children who are not abused. For example, where a child is emotionally abused, their auditory cortex ends up atrophied compared to normal children. Child abuse also affects the development of empathy, for understandable reasons. And you see epigenetics at work in mental illness too, where someone can be "at risk" genetically, but never develop an illness because of the environment they were brought up in, vs. those in a different kind of environment who do.
Sorry, i'm blabbering on a bit. But i think epigenetics is important for understanding how culture (environment) can affect how people behave, and what they then take to be "true" about the way they act.
Now, it's clear that we don't know enough to really speculate on lots of aspects of this. But one of the ways we could ask about rape in different cultures is by looking across cultures and asking how common rape is in different societies. Maybe we get a baseline figure which represents rape as a purely biological strategy. And maybe there's significant differences in the statistics between different cultures which represent the cultural and epigenetic factors. In fact, there do seem to be significant differences in rape statistics between cultures (both within one society, and between societies). So the next question to look at is what factors might be influencing those differences in rape statistics. And it turns out that there do seem to be patterns, concerning "interpersonal violence, male dominance, and sexual separation".
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.11...x/abstract (This is social research that is based off anthropological studies, so take with a pinch of salt, but it's still interesting to think about.)
Which leads us to this:
Tzadeck Wrote:Well, my thoughts are pretty disorganized, so it’s obvious I need to think about this a bit more. But, I think that in essence this is all about empathy, right? You should try your best not to hurt people--that’s the most important idea. In some situations it might be okay (or inevitable?) to think of a woman in only a sexual way. But that could be okay only under the right conditions: as long as she is okay with that (for example, with a woman who wants just a physical relationship too from time to time--individuals vary greatly on this type of thing), and as long as you aren’t hurting anyone else (maybe by blabbing about it in a douchey way).
Yes, i think empathy is the most important thing in our personal interactions with others. And i think that empathy is connected with moral responsibility. But one of the things i'm concerned about is perhaps social responsibility is actually wider than that. Maybe i should have responsibility for the kind of culture i am contributing to, even if my own actions aren't harming anyone in an obvious way. For example, i think the stereotypically male attitudes and behaviours harms males as often as it harms females, because it doesn't allow people to develop fully in their own way as human beings when they are trying to play into a stereotype. So if i then play into a submissive role, what am i doing? What am i saying by doing that? I'm saying that i think a culture in which males are dominant and females are submissive is a good one. And i know that these kind of societies are ones in which rape is most prevalent.
Or, to take a perhaps clearer example, when i was playing poker, i used to worry about the social effects of it. There were very clearly people who were addicted to gambling, and had some pretty severe problems with it. So it's natural to wonder about whether any of the responsibility for the effects on their lives lies with me if i participate, and win money from them. Now, on one hand, it seems pretty clear to me that everyone should be able to make their own decisions about this, and ultimately that responsibility lies with them. I wouldn't have wanted someone else to try and force me not to play, even if i had been in a position where i had a gambling problem. On the other hand, i can't really assent to the proposition that i think poker's a social good. And i don't really think it has anything valuable enough about it to make it worth it. So i think although the moral responsibility lies with each individual, some of the social responsibility does fall on me, because by participating i'm saying that that is how i want society to be.
I think there's times when maybe other things, such as aesthetics can overrule social responsibility (but not moral responsibility). For instance, i know someone who really hates the light given off by energy saving lightbulbs. They only like the old sort of lightbulb. But even though it's clearly socially irresponsible, i think that's overridden by aesthetics. Maybe because aesthetics doesn't have to be universalised. If only the people who truly prefer the light of old lightbulbs uses them, then we can get along alright with that until someone invents an energy saving lightbulb with nice light. The problem lies more with those who don't make the choice at all, or do it in a dishonest way.
I dunno, i feel like my thoughts on social responsibility are also quite disorganised. It's something i'd like to have a firmer position on, but the relations between it and other things are quite complex.
Tzadeck Wrote:Some of it was just douchiness. For example, I guess calling someone ‘hot but crazy’ strictly speaking is not objectification. After all, that’s judging someone by both their personality and their physical attractiveness, which doesn’t meet the definition (In fact, in a sense it’s the opposite—it’s saying ‘this person is not of any value despite her attractiveness, because her personality is shitty.’ Although, this is obviously him just hiding the fact that he’s been hurt by her in tougher language)
In Britain at least, "she's crazy" is a very common way of dismissing someone as a person. Because you don't have to consider the fact that you've actually hurt someone if they're crazy; crazy people don't deserve empathy, they're unpredictable, they get overemotional, and it's not justified emotion. I've seen and heard it tons of times. This guy had clearly hurt the girl he was talking about, and didn't care in the slightest. It's just another way of keeping someone at arms length, and dehumanising them.
