Half-naked women in bikinis! Olympic athletes montaged into soft porn! Ads that promise the girl along with the car! What's the problem with objectification, anyway?
Patriot Daily posted a great diary yesterday, called "Objectifying Women Not A Progressive Value." (Go there to see all the above images.) She quite rightly defined objectification as the "process of representing or treating a person like an object" rather than an equal human being with rights, and then launched into the meat of the diary, which is an astonishing assembly of graphics and video that drive home the ubiquity of hyper-sexualized objectifications of women in mainstream culture.
I was struck by a couple of comments, including one that I thought was perfectly fair, and that asked for some extra clarification. PDNC begins with the premise that objectification is harmful to women, but the commenter wanted to back up a bit and discuss that foundation assumption. His questions were reasonable, and I figured he wasn't the only person who didn't have a clear grasp of the frame of the argument. And, yes, he could go read some books, but we all have a lot of books we need to read, so I figured I'd try to lay it out neatly in one diary, in non-academic language.
What is objectification, anyway?
The theory is one of relations. There's a subject (the eye, the heart, the brain -- you can put yourself in that position) and it looks at an object. Let's start with inanimate objects: the table, the door, the keyboard. In theory, we call this look "the gaze." Subjects gaze: they look at other things.
That was pretty straightforward, so let's complicate. You (the subject) are looking at another person (the object). And that person is also her own subject, and is looking at you. In her eyes, you are the object. Every person is a subject, looking at objects. We can't ever be another person, right?
But we can recognize that other people are subjects, too, even if we can't climb into their heads. We can understand that they are somehow different from chairs or doors or keyboards. This is called "recognizing subjectivity," and as you might guess it's an important part of empathy -- feeling for other people.
So, if we're all subjects, and we're all objects to other people, how is "objectification" in advertising (or other media) a bad thing?
Let's go back to the empathy part. Part of being able to recognize another subject is being able to imagine ourselves in their position. We can look at them looking at us, and realize that we are both doing the same thing. Most of us like it when other people recognize us as subjects. It's crappy when they don't, because we feel like we're not important, or we don't matter as people.
So, given all this, let's imagine a short story that has both a male character and a female character. The author writes them both in the first person, so that we can see how each of them views the same situation differently. This kind of writing embodies both subjectivities. We can see through each subject's eyes, equally. The story requires that we gaze from inside each character's head, and see the unique way that the world and the other character looks to each of them.
Now I'm sure you can imagine how subjectivity and objectivity might work in literature. Authors write lots of characters and make choices about which characters the reader will "inhabit" (or "gaze out of") and which characters will simply be gazed at by both other characters and the readers.
Now, let's look at that from a little girl point of view -- let's make her the subject. She is reading Huck Finn (one of my favorite books, btw). Twain wrote Huck in the first person because he wanted the reader to see everything through Huck's eyes. Our little girl adopts his gaze, sees things from his perspective as she experiences his world. She loves Huck, and wants to be him, to float down that river herself. She reads more books, and, strangely enough, they all have male protagonists who slay dragons, and go on adventures, and marry princesses. She loves to look out of the eyes of characters like that. But... all those characters are male. (This was the case when I was a kid.) The female characters are all written as objects (except Pippie Longstockings!). Apparently only boys get to do cool things, and think cool thoughts. She never learns what the princesses are thinking, because the author never tells her. Mostly, they just seem to be there as prizes in the end, like the ring in the Cracker Jack Box. So, she has a choice, she can be Huck, or she can be the princess. Which would you choose?
This is a form of literary indoctrination. It's not a conspiracy, but it has the effect of one. Boys "naturally" think that they're supposed to subjects, but girls learn they can only be subjects if they gaze through the eyes of a boy. You can also apply this to black kids, or Chicano kids, etc. If you have to inhabit a white character to be a subject, and it's clearly better to be a subject than an object, you're going to inhabit the white character. But you can see the problem here. Male characters and white characters often reflect the sexism and racism of their authors and society at large, so in order to fully identify with them, you have to see your objectified self in sexist or racist ways. (This is what we theorists mean when we say that oppressed people have "internalized" the racism of their oppressors.)
So, now let's skip to film. I like horror movies, so let's choose those for an example. In a film, you can't get inside the head of a character. But the camera position gives you the sense of being in a character's head because of who it looks at. We call that the "camera's gaze."
We all know the genre conventions of horror movies -- buncha kids in some isolated scary place, freaky killer who picks them off one by one, until one brave kid is left or they all get killed. Pick your favorite off the video shelf and watch it. Watch what the camera looks at, and how. The gaze is almost always that of the killer, who is almost always male. The victims are both male and female, but the "tastiest" victims are girls and women, and often the killer just seems to be getting guys out of the way. The camera lingers on the victims, as the killer selects his next target. When the killer makes his move, we see the results of his work. We almost never see both the killer and the victim in the same frame, because it would ruin the illusion. What makes a horror movie "work" is that we can both fully inhabit the crazy subjectivity of the killer, and imagine the terror of our object, the victim. That wouldn't work if we didn't recognize our victim's subjectivity, though. (A move psycho who took out his rage only on inanimate objects wouldn't be very scary.)
So, hey, horror movies recognize both the male killer's and the female victim's subjectivity, so how is that objectification?
Now I'm going to introduce a new idea. Subjectivity and objectivity are relational, right? But not all relationships are as equal as they were in the short story I described. The new term is "subject position." In horror movies, the subject position of the victims is one of powerlessness and terror. The killer holds all the power, and the victim has none. In the relationship between the killer and the victim in a horror film, the killer is an "agent" and the victim is… a victim, powerless. The killer is the one who can stop and start the action in the scene, not the victim. (In fact, this power is often displayed when the camera lingers on a victim and we think the killer is going to attack, and then gasp with relief as his gaze moves on.)
In horror films, power is usually split along gender lines. Male subjectivity is powerful, and female subjectivity is weak. (Reversals of this convention take place, and put a new spin on old plots, as in the Nightmare on Elm Street series, but these reversals only "work" because they challenge our expectations.)
This male/strong vs. female/weak dichotomy is drummed into all our heads from a very young age. It's repeated in every form of media we see. And repetition is incredibly powerful. We become what other people, and hence, we, believe we are. (For a very readable survey of how this works in racial terms, I strongly recommend Are We Born Racist?) Women rarely have the opportunity to inhabit strong, positive female characters in a subject position, but they have endless opportunity to inhabit male characters. Judith Fetterly, long ago, wrote a wonderful book called The Resisting Reader about exactly this problem.
I bet you an already guess what this has to do with objectification in advertising....
Now that you've got the concept of the "camera's gaze" you can apply it to advertising copy. You can tell, pretty quickly, if the camera's gaze is male or female. And the male gaze is ubiquitous in advertising, and especially in advertising that uses women's bodies as part of a sales pitch. So here I am, a woman in the world, thinking about buying products. And so many of the products I want to buy are pitched to men, using female bodies as "bait." And not only are they "bait," but they're shot in a way that emphasizes that the male subject is the agent, and the female object is powerful only because of her outside appearance. In a way, it's like horror movie subjectivity, but instead of being confined to theater, where I can take it or leave it, that subject-object relation is absolutely everywhere.
Advertising, for the most part, turns us into men looking at women. And the more powerful "we" (the male character whose subjectivity we inhabit) are, and the weaker the female object is, the better, right? Advertising works by playing on the desires of men to be more powerful, and the desires of women to please powerful men. (There are some interesting histories of ads specifically for women's markets, and they take a different trajectory, but pleasing men is still a strong emphasis.) These aren't "natural" desires -- they're instilled via the culture, which is sexist and racist. Thus they reflect and replicate existing inequities. It's a rare ad that sells via social transgression -- usually the ads we view as socially transgressive are actually behind the social curve. For example, those "groundbreaking" ads featuring normalized gay couples didn't start appearing until the demographics in the regions they were aired seemed "ready" (in the eyes of the ad agency). Ads want to attract, not alienate.
How do I know what kind of objectification is bad? Am I always evil for drooling over women in bikinis?
As you can see by the examples above, and thousands of others, there's an interesting correlation between the roles given to women in advertising and the roles given to women in pornography. The poses are interchangeable, though the outfits differ. This is because advertising is a kind of pornography. It isn't selling sex directly, but, then, neither is porn. Both are selling power and desirability to men in the guise of a product, and using the promise of the bodies of women to do it.
Every representation of a human being involves some level of objectification. The real questions are: How damaging is this objectification to segments of the audience? How does this objectification support or challenge the current power structure? Objectification, remember, is subjective. As a feminist, I'm interested in equality for women, and I'm an anti-racist. So I find objectifications that depend on racism or sexism, that "naturalize" inequality, and that affirm stereotypes to be offensive and "wrong." The objectifications you dislike will be based on your own value system, so I can't tell you what they should be. All I can say is that it's important to recognize how literature, film, and other media, including advertising, reinforce inequality, and dictate to us (usually without our conscious realization) which subject positions we should inhabit.
How do we know for sure that objectification can be harmful?
Well, we're pretty clear on the fact that negative stereotypes are harmful, and most of the objectifications in advertising play on negative stereotypes. For lots and lots of social psychology and sociology and neuroscience surveys to back this up, I suggest the following reading, in addition to Am I Born Racist? (which I mentioned above).
Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel
Racism, Sexism, and the Media: The Rise of Class Communication in Multicultural America
The Psychology of Prejudice and Discrimination
The Harms of Crime Media: Essays on the Perpetuation of Racism, Sexism and Class Stereotypes
Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do
1:43 PM PT: Good night from the Continent. As always, it's been fun. I'll try and check back tomorrow, but I've gotta get a conference presentation finished this week. Peace, Love & Feminism!
