Hey now, let’s not go villainizing Bratz dolls; which long preceded Instagram and were never meant to represent young girls but young adults on the verge of being college students.
I defend their existence as an alternative to the Barbie doll, one of the most highly visible examples of physical objectification and unrealistic beauty standards.
Consider that Barbie is now 58 years old; and yet after all that time, the heifer stillcan’t stand on her own two feet, literally.
I thought I was already clear about that. What I find “creepy” is people who bother each other with vague personal problems rather than actually forming alliances to do anything. Sexuality is not unlike eating, or exercise, or other forms of maintenance. Imagine if people were as neurotic about sharing food as they are about sex! Don’t eat with a group! Don’t eat in public! Don’t (gulp) actually cook for a stranger simply because they are hungry! That’s putting issues of personal attachment ahead of altruism, which I think is creepy and antisocial.
There are a lot of parallels I think between “belonging” in the form of emotional attachment and “belonging” in terms of ownership of property. There are vast populations of people who apparently cannot conceive of things just being, and not being “owned” by anybody. So when you explain that it doesn’t belong to anybody, most of them instead think of it in terms that you are conducting a ruse because you want it to belong to you. Because hey - it would be crazy/unthinkable that somebody didn’t own it. People can’t process dynamically negotiating shared resource where no parties are entitled to them. Those who think that being attached to people or objects is selfish and neurotic should not need to play along with that game to function in society.
Attraction is not as selfish and infantile as objectification, but it still normalizes attachment and lots of other personal problems. Living socially is a matter of formal organization, not having varying arbitrary levels of personal intimacy.
I reject the general premise and methodology of using statistical analysis to describe the subjective experiences of libido, sexual pleasure, and/or shame. These quantative studies describe the self-reported historical behavior of the participants, which is inherently biased and distorted by participants’ unexamined social conditoning. Studies like these tell us very little about how people (especially women) experience or feel about their sex drive and sexuality or account for the real biological differences between female and male masturbation. Measuring the frequency or number of occurrences of masturbation with orgasms within a specified time period favors short, frequent occurances of masturbation over fewer, extended periods of masturbation with or without (multiple) orgasms. By structuring a study so that it is designed to capture behavior that is known/believed to be more likely to occur in one subject group (whether that is accounted for or not, i.e. we have a basic understanding of the masturbation behaviors of male humans, do female humans match up?) the study is inherently biased.
I recommend reading The Clitoral Truth for a biological and phenomenological exploration of female sexual response and behavior.
I’d like to see more people doing qualitative studies, which would allow for potential bias and assumptions to be addressed and argued directly and offer the opportunity to explore what people are doing now and how they feel about and experience their sexuality.
I’ve known women who are as sexually charged as if not more than any man. I’ve known men who are complete prudes. In the US we live within a puritan based society as such we are ALL regardless of gender or proclivity taught and encouraged to repress what we think or feel.
Instead we should migrate to a structure where we encourage anything that is mentally and emotionally healthy within the confines of adult relationships wherein consent is the primary and truly only requirement.
If X person agrees to do ABC with Y person, then Why the fuck would Z person give a flying fuck about it?
Answer: they shouldn’t. And before anyone says “oh but of X and Y are doing it in public then…”. Well doing anything in public inherently involves everyone else so it’s not consentual!
We need to grow up. And understand it is ok if we do not understand that someone can enjoy or like something that is revolting to someone else. We need to accept that consent is what matter above all else. A corpse cannot give consent. A child cannot give consent. An animal cannot give consent. A drugged or incapacitated person cannot give consent at that time (they could have given consent to before hand).
My only problem here is that consent can not only be given, but withdrawn. An intoxicated person may still be capable of withdrawing consent if they wish, but an incapacitated person definitely cannot. If a person is in no condition to be able to withdraw consent in the moment, then it cannot be assumed to still exist.
I was speaking more in regards to an agreed upon play rape/drugged fetish. If that’s what two people agree to ahead of time who are we to judge or deny them. Regardless of our feelings on it.
Even though I don’t agree with you with regards to the most pressing differences of sexual behaviors being biological in nature - even if they were, so what? The same determinists who like to use something being “biological” as an excuse for behavioral or social problems still do outre things like using medicine or surgery when they have physiological problems! Show me the MRAs who agree to succumb to some curable disease with the excuse that the illness is more natural than the cure.
People have some serious double-standards between framing and solutions of tangible physical problems, and invisible mental/emotional/behavioral ones. Because when it is one’s own mind which malfunctions, the tendency is to identify with the problem rather than solve it.
You’re posting evidence that, in the current social context, men tend to express sexual desire more overtly than women.
What you aren’t posting is substantial evidence that these differences are biologically rather than culturally driven. Which is what folks are arguing about.
If mens sex drive was indeed the problem AND we agree it’s not possible to modify it, then shouldn’t lust based objectification be considered normal and subject to exemption from being demonized?
The easy way out of that conundrum is to accept that our natural urges are just that. It is our social expression of primal urges which can be troubling.
Repressing these urges because we may feel they are an unwanted intrusion on the object of our attraction only makes sense when there is a well understood power imbalance, the powerful male must not subject a woman to his intense desires, lest he overpower her in some way.
Except all my experience tells me otherwise. The belief that our sex drive is so powerful exists to reinforce/justify our position of power.
Women absolute have as high a sex drive as men do, but the expression of that drive is socially conditioned.
When you “catch” yourself thinking about sex when you see a woman in an ad, you’re response is in part socially conditioned, you were taught the appropriate response by your culture. Your desire for sex is real, but you must understand that as a man you are both allowed and expected to desire women without much judgment.
Most women (and a few men) are not always taught this Pavlovian response, there is no association between an object of desire and free reign to pursue it. If there is any internal dialogue, it does not seem to be “Pursue, attack, you are allowed”. Their conditioned response is different.
Measuring sex drive needs to take this into account. Otherwise just like with other faulty measurements we will be missing the obvious. Lack of freedom to pursue sex, will look like low sex drive.
I realize, but I think her purpose is to reduce the exaggerated body image to open up more choice for parents/girls who would prefer that.
Despite the amount of vocalization from consumers, I don’t see the toy companies really responding to consumer wishes for more realistic depictions and a wider variance of skin tone when I’m walking through say, a Walmart toy department.
