Gendered objectification

Also, the phrasing “I’d fuck her” makes it sound like you’re doing her a favor, when it’s probably more likely that she wouldn’t even talk to you.

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That’s why the “hidden” bodybuilding diet is in a lot of the intermittent fasting diets, it’s what Hugh Jackman used and what the entire 300 cast used. They eat enough calories to build the muscle, though the extremely ripped people still basically eat chicken, sweet potato, and spinach exclusively. Seriously, this guy was eating like a king during this time though he complained about how much he was eating:


Except, all that advice is hidden behind the wealth gap. Only a few books or blogs talk about things like that, but in less than 1% range the trainers all have a laundry list of supplements and dad diets to give you and then blame your inability to be perfect on why you can’t do it.

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Enh, some people value looking cut and all that comes with it to eating good food. I could never have the discipline the folks who count their macros do, but I can see where they are coming from: they have a plan and they’re working toward an endgame. Different strokes for different folks. Although, yeah, I don’t know why it has to be so bland.

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Exactly this! And nobody every talks about it!

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No. My shame comes from when I do. When, upon seeing someone for the first time, I consciously acknowledge my sexual attraction (aka, “i’d fuck them”). For the vast majority of people I see, that is my last interaction with them.

I’ve become used to suppressing those thoughts, but they are straight objectification.

Heck, I worry that even the subconscious sexual attraction of people I don’t know - which is based on nothing more than someone’s appearance - isn’t objectification and I feel guilty about that as well.

As I said, body building and weight lifting are interesting, for a lot of reasons.
Building muscle mass for purely aesthetic reasons is of course a very privileged thing to do.

Haha, side note, but I read a great twitter rant about the economies of post-apocolypic armies. And how it can’t work. Armies consume a lot of calories. If you have a small village, you could support maybe one or two, maximum five none-working only eating warrior types. They are expensive to have around! So much like body building, its not a thing that everyone can afford to do. The calories alone are massive resource. As I said, interesting.

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Personally speaking, worker-buff is way hotter anyway. A body earned through labor has an inherent quality to it that a body earned through ‘self-improvement’ (a concept borne of upper-class idleness that the low people of the world rarely have time for) can’t possess.

Not to say that I judge others for working on themselves and trying to find some measure of satisfaction within their own skin- I certainly don’t. I do think it’s relevant to understand and recognize the origins of the behavior tho.

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I like to eat good food more than I value “looking cut”. I am not going to eat bland food for the sole purpose of looking better, when I can eat something that actually tastes good.

That being said, I avoid fast food and don’t overeat. If I ate the food that was immediately available to me, in the portions that it’s available, I would be an honest 300 pounds by now.

It’s also a privilege for me to be able to cook, both in knowing how to cook and having the time available.

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And others have the opposite set of priorities. I enjoy a cuppa tea at about 3 in the afternoon. Others work out, then put bananas, avocados, skim milk, chia seeds, low fat yoghurt and whey powder into a blender and call it snack time. Then note it in a little macro tracking app. Live and let live…

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See, this is interesting to me. Because you can “opt-out” of this by valuing good food over “looking cut”. This feeds back into our topic on gendered objectification. Because women, in general, do not get to “opt out” of aesthetic objectification. We are always judged, always observed. Whether we want to “opt-in” or not. Its not a privilege for me to “look good” its a societal expectation, and we are punished if we do not comply.

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Totally agreed.

The whole concept of “self-improvement” or “character building” just seemed ludicrous to me. Great, you’re doing busywork so you can feel good about yourself according to a metric of your own choosing. You have fun with that.

Agreed again.

This thread has really opened my eyes to the types of body image issues that women face. Most men don’t face these things at all let alone every day like women do. It’s like women get shamed for not looking like the model on the magazine cover, when the models don’t even look that good in real life, and looking good is what they’re paid for. Ridiculous standards are ridiculous, but they’re still widely used.

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Only to an extent. If I was overweight or obese, people would consider me a fat slob until I proved that I offered some value to someone. The difference is that being a little bit overweight is tolerated in men, but not at all in women.

This is a huge part of the reason anorexia exists.

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The difference being men get a chance to “prove” they can offer something, women do not, because for women, what is being offered is our appearance, the rest is secondary. For men, that is reversed. As I said, its all interesting.

And lets not get into eating disorders, there are many root causes, not just our sexist image obsessed society.

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I’m not arguing.

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Oh I know, we’re agreeing!
If we were drinking and in person this would be what I call affectionately “drunken yelling” - peppered with a lot of “I KNOW” and “RIGHT!?” :wink:

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This topic, right here, bothers me so much.

I have a close family member who will simply not go out without makeup, because they believe they are simply unattractive otherwise. This has nothing to do with how often or how much anyone says anything to the contrary, it is, in their mind, a fact, immutable in meaning.

Now, clearly, I can’t blame them for this belief, because I know that it’s not only that society has conditioned the whole “women in makeup look better” argument as you posted, but also because this belief is so pervasive it’s hard not to call it “true”, right? I mean, my family member believes it as a core belief of their being, but also because it’s just as likely that, to them, they look better with makeup on than not. But the societal pressure has been there their whole lives (and for literally millennia before that), so how can you even try to separate one from the other now?

Worse, I can’t argue that they’re beautiful without makeup because my belief doesn’t opt them out of others reactions as to the amount of makeup my family member does or does not choose to apply when they go out.

The result? They almost never go out. Certainly never on the spur of the moment, and certain other situations they’d otherwise love (like swimming at the beach or engaging in outdoor activities that could cause perspiration) are pretty much guaranteed to happen only in seclusion.

As a male, the situation absolutely incenses me, but I know that I’m both helpless to do anything about it, and more importantly, can’t even comprehend how much worse it is for my female family member. And I try very hard to remember that whenever the issue comes up or negatively affects their going out.

I don’t know how we, as a society, move past these issues but it’s bloody well time.

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Because there’s more to the equation than just what one person wants from any interaction. This problem is amplified by the fact that our society only tends to focus only on men as having agency and therefore only men’s wants and needs matter.

Well stated; it’s to our detriment as a species that we’re still hung up on such petty attributes.

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The economics facet of Seven Samurai in a nutshell. Villagers sacrificing white rice to eat millet in support of the defenders.
So many other issues of objectification touched on in the film - especially that of Shino.

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People must think I’m ALWAYS sick, because I never wear make-up. I suck at putting it on and never bothered to improve my technique because I just can’t be arsed!

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This be me. Fortunately, I am such a bundle of other issues that pretty soon no one notices the lack of makeup. :-S

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