Equal Objectification is Awesome

Every time someone brings out a sexy ad with a half-naked model and starts complaining about objectification, I find that I have exactly two complaints.

Excessive airbrushing makes me angry. Fine, go ahead, tidy up the hair and get rid of acne. But it’s completely unnecessary to photoshop a perfectly good body into a bobble-headed Barbie doll. American Apparel does very good business with a strict policy against photoshopping their ads. There’s no reason any other company has to go overboard. But this is a topic for another day.

My other problem, and the one I’m going to discuss here, is that the half-naked person is almost always a woman.

I don’t think that sexualization is demeaning or degrading. That belief is a very short step away from saying that sex is demeaning, which is bullshit. I do think that the objectification of women and women alone is responsible for a lot of problems.

I’ve heard some people say that equal objectification of men would just make the situation worse. Two wrongs don’t make a right.

These people are wrong, and here’s why.

Women are sexualized and objectified so much more than men because heterosexual male sexuality is the only sexuality that society acknowledges. This makes sense — men have controlled the world for all of history, and so of course their sexuality is mainstream. There is nothing wrong with heterosexual male sexuality, but there is something wrong with a culture in which it is the only sexuality.

This is why society forgets that women like sex. We only have sex for expensive dinners and diamond rings and material gain. In this view, a promiscuous woman who doesn’t care about these things much have something wrong with her. We have low self-esteem and daddy issues and obviously we are far too damaged and messed up to ever take home to Mom and Dad.

Girls making out is hot. Guys making out is gay.

Girls don’t want sex, so it’s our job to stop the boy from getting what he wants. And we all know boys only want one thing.

If we saw more half-naked male models plastered on the sides of buses and in the pages of magazines, we would have to acknowledge that men can be sex objects too. And if men are sex objects, then women (gasp!) must like sex.

Once society realizes this, a lot of sexual double standards will stop making sense. Furthermore, a society that can accept two kinds of sexuality is much more likely to accept two more kinds — gay and lesbian.

If it’s normal for women to enjoy sex, than “slut” stops being an insult. Women stop being forced into the role of gatekeeper, and teenage boys stop being treated as mindless hormone-controlled sex fiends. All in all this creates a society that is more respectful of both men and women.

Companies with equal opportunity objectification — like these shopping bags — should be applauded. Other companies should be encouraged to do the same thing. PETA uses naked men in some of their ads and should use them more often.

I will make two exceptions for places where equal objectification shouldn’t really be expected.

The first is places that are very clearly catering to a certain demographic. Regardless of what you think of Hooters (and considering this website’s audience, I doubt it’s anything good) you can agree that their customers are almost entirely heterosexual males and they shouldn’t be required to have sexy male waiters. (Although I might start eating there if they did.)

The second is individuals. Artists, writers, or anyone who makes art by themselves shouldn’t be required to or castigated for failing to present a point of view that isn’t their own. If they want to, they should go ahead and try, but arguing that an artist is sexist because he photographs a lot of naked women is ridiculous.

It’s not the sexy pictures that are bad. It’s the trend of only sexualizing women.

I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on this. If you have links to any media that practices equal objectification I’d be interested in that as well.