Avert your eyes, girls, I get to look YOU over

by Yonmei

PZ Myers posted I have been objectified! which is where I found out about a post I want to write about and won’t link to directly: a post on a blog called Common Sense Atheist entitled “Fifteen Sexy Scientists”, dated 16th July. All the scientists (apart from Myers himself, who’s number 15) are women: all are white. There’s also a header pic of a revealingly-dressed woman bending to look into a microscope – except she is not looking into the microscope, but at the photographer, whose camera angle is peering down at her breasts.

The man who put the post together defends his picks with “Why no men? Because I unavoidably find women more sexy, of course! ….. I’m not pandering to my male readership. I’m pandering to me. ….. Are you saying it would be nice if I were ‘freethinking’ and not attracted to women with a waist-to-hip ratio of .7, with clear skin and big eyes? ….. I’m just not aware of non-white sexy women. My favorite women in the world are actually darker-skinned Latinas, as it happens. If you can point me to some sexy non-white scientists, I will most gladly add them to the list. ….. You’re tired of women being portrayed as beautiful? I’m not. This is a post about sexy women. So it portrays women as sexy. …… Also, as it happens, latinas are my favorite. I just couldn’t find many latina scientists on a quick search.” (That last comment was directed at someone who pointed out this post was not just sexist, but racist.)

What the Common Sense Atheist did was search the web for photographs of women who identified as scientists (at least one of whom is still a student) and defended this with “I took pictures that are already online and put them together in a list. Just to be clear: is that the objection? That I took public pictures and put them altogether with the word ’sexy’ at the top?”

(I’m quoting him exactly because he claims “I’m tempted to make a list of the hundreds of ways people here and on other blogs have explicitly misrepresented my stated views, often even erecting strawmen which said the opposite of what I explicitly claim. Quite exhausting.”)

I’m pretty certain that this epMotion ad depicting a number of attractive men dancing round a scientist to sell her the automated pipette system has already been linked to from this blog (Warning: clicking on this link will start video/sound playing on an endless loop: lyrics here if you need to be reminded) because I remember discussing/reading discussion about the unusualness of an ad for something-geeky using sexy men to sell it to a woman.

Or, really, the unusualness of having sexy men being objectified for a woman’s gaze at all. The 15th photo on Common Sense Atheist’s list, P Z Myers: Myers is (from a lesbian eye view) a reasonably attractive man, if you’re into that kind of gender: I could certainly (from a slash fan’s view) pair him off with Samuel Gerard in a cross-universe adventure in which scientist and US Marshal save Chicago from anti-evolution terrorism and have hot sex, angst, and sizzling dialogue, except I don’t do RPS. But the photo of him riding a dinosaur is plainly not intended to be read as a sexy photograph – though nor are some of the other photographs in the list, of young scientists working out at the gym or on the playing field. They’re made “sexy”, “objectified”, because this “common sense atheist” presumes to put them up as if they were his pinups, his to look at and admire, in a way he does not intend to be admired himself.

Being the one who looks is the position of power. Bitchy Jones (whose blog is absolutely amazing and absolutely NSFW) wrote in Who’s a pretty boy then:

But, look, right, let’s workshop. And by workshop I mean I’ll keep hitting these keys until feel less-sectionablely-hysterical and then we can all get on with our lives. What the f*k is an out of shape submissive man all about? How does that even make sense? If you really truly are all and only about my pleasure, how come you’re not all working out round the clock and living on egg whites just to see me smile?

How come you’re not all (or an above national average proportion of you) totally buff and groomed and lust scented like gay men?

How come submissive men aren’t all about well cut jeans and tight t shirts over their lickable torsos and expensively cut knicker-dampening suits and butchy boots and dirty looks. Yeah, not all women like the same thing, but there are vague ideas, there are archetypes women find hot and until you can buy a Hot Sissy Maid 2010 calendar in my supermarket I’m betting the look most submissive men are going for isn’t one of them.

I mean, why? Why are you doing something that no women want or like? Isn’t that, like, the opposite of your entire thing?

I love Bitchy Jones. I’m probably going to be quoting her quite a lot in this post. Because there is no other way that she would ever get to confront this Common Sense Atheist, who asks in a following post (entitled) “Am I Sexist (round 2)” (yes, he ended up having to do a series):

So all that leads me to suspect the last post in this series is going to have the title “Yup, I Was Being Sexist.” But I don’t really know yet, because I’m still trying to figure out what the arguments are. Obviously, there are lots of bad or obscure arguments on offer against my original position. Researchers in moral psychology have shown that moral judgment usually happens like this: We have an emotional reaction to something, and then we invent post-hoc reasons to defend our unthinking emotional reaction. And of course that’s no different here.

This is the classic: How can I be sexist? I didn’t mean to be! But in reaction to this, let me post Bitchy Jones in response to an equally deadening reaction from the organiser of an online “Bondage Award” contest which was in principle open to all, and yet in which the only photos on display were of women being tied up:

Well, before I jump up and down and froth too much (like I ever..) let’s see what the awards people have to say: they point out patiently, that right-minded, sane complaints are all very well, but really, they – the awards – are not actually sexist because they never meant to be sexist.

Yes, it’s unfortunate that in the page inviting nominations women are pictured tied up, being drawn tied up and, um, surfing the net wearing a ball gag. (WHAT? People do that? Or is it just a way of making a woman who is looking at porn still a looked at bondage-sexay thing – because, god, women can’t just look at porn without also putting on some kind of sexy pantomime for anyone looking on (who? who surfs porn for an audience)). Really, though, really, I have never seen anything so stubbornly insist that women have to be the sexual display object even when they are consuming porn. And what is she even looking at. Sites featuring sneering mandoms? Do they exist? I’m guessing no. Meanwhile the guys (who are – irrelevant aside – hot) get to be riggers (ahem), photographers, artists, retailers, owners of fetish companies, consumers of pay-for porn (yeah women only surf free sites – wearing ball gags – so no one ever make any porn for them. There’s no money in it.) In other words, the men get to be sexual agents.

But, yeah, just unfortunate. Because, the most fabulous and rigorous argument against sexist arsehattery (or other retrograde arsehattery) is wheeled out here: it is just this way because it is, okay! It just turned out this way. In fact, all representation of anything ever that seems to endorse only the majority viewpoint and tastes is just a fucking coincidence, okay, and stop whining or, you know, pointing it out.

Apparently, the guy who runs the awards just took a bunch of his favourite pictures off of his hardest drive and sent them to an artist who drew the pics. And that is just what happened, okay, so shut up. No one is trying to be sexist. Calm down, dear.

Look, why does slash make (some) men feel so uncomfortable? It takes the butchy/heroic guys they’re supposed to get to identify with, and sets them up as sex objects. Women write stories about these guys getting sexually used: describing them in luscious, flattering, sexual terminology: women are objectifying men. Men find that disturbing. At a convention I’ve been going to for some years, the first year I went they had one slash panel, held Sunday night, that was packed out: the next year they had half a dozen, attended by slash fans only: the year after, they had so many I had to miss some, and not a few were attended by non-slash fans, some of whom caused trouble by insisting we had to justify ourselves: and last year, one slash panel was convened by a man who opened the panel by declaring that he didn’t much care for m/m slash, what he wanted to know was where to find the slash stories with women in them. (And bizarrely, an audience full of slash fans, most of whom would have rather talked about m/m slash, helpfully tried to direct him to the saffic slash sites.)

P Z Myers writes in response to Common Sense Atheist:

I’m also bothered by the premise. I think it’s an excellent idea to promote the idea that scientists can be sexy, and women who are comfortable with that should be able to proudly present themselves as sexual beings. But the important concept is that women should have the choice, and their decisions should be respected. Men do not get the privilege of having the roving eye, of being able to pick individual women out of the crowd to tell them that here, they get to be object of sexual interest, especially not if they’re going to then publicly display them as clever eye candy.

There are so many things wrong with the Common Sense Atheist post, his dismissal of women trying to explain what’s wrong with it not least of them – but one of the worst is just that he’s taken pics that people put up on the Internet and decided that these real people, these scientists and students, are just to be dismissed as pinup girls. These are real people, with real careers, who may not even be aware that their pic is appearing on this blog post as this charmer’s “sexy scientist”.

I have written stories in which fictional characters get used and abused and objectified. I don’t write RPS because my imagination cannot get going on the real people – even though the vast majority of RPS is about the public persona of famous people (actors, singers, politicians), rather than the people themselves, and I’ve read and enjoyed RPS that was so clearly satire or out-there fantasy that I suspect the people named wouldn’t care if they did read it. (Blair getting screwed by Bush: is this RPS or political satire?)

The power to look is a privilege that men do not relinquish gladly, whether they express it by forcing women to cover or to uncover, by taking over BDSM culture or by objectifying scientists or by showing up at slash panels and demanding that the women present talk about anything other than the sexual use of fictional men. The power to look and the power to ensure women don’t look back.

Bitchy Jones gets the last word:

19 out of every twenty dominant women aren’t happy or comfortable with femdom as an identity or a place to live. That’s a lot.

That’s 95%.

95% of dominant women aren’t comfortable in femdom. Are being shut out of there own sexual culture.

Maybe there’s more to this than individual acts between individuals?

And I can’t pretend it’s all okay. Something is very wrong here. I’m sorry if your kink got in my way but, really, what would you do it you were me?

And that’s why I have this sledgehammer.

- More blogging by Yonmei at http://yonmei.insanejournal.com

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