Is it surprising to learn there is a Marked Rise in Intensely Sexualized Images of Women, Not Men?
It’s funny we live in an age where we’ve learned so much that enriches the traditional understanding that men and women are shaped to their different roles in reproduction and we fail to transfer any of that newly enriched understanding to our public social and moral and political beliefs. For example, there is strong evidence from IQ tests that there are more smart women than smart men but nearly all geniuses are men. Since males and females have pretty much the same average IQs, this tells us that most dumb human beings are men. Why is this a surprise to so many? Why have so many reacted with violent emotions against this claim when I’ve made it in an otherwise calm discussion? Do we remain enchained prisoners of those sexual revolutionaries of the 20th century who conquered much and destroyed much more?
So far as I can tell, all traits developed in response to our environments have bad aspects, or at least aspects which are bad from some viewpoint. Human females have bodies and attitudes adjusted to their need to raise newborns which are describable as ’embryonic’ and will need a decade and a half of care and education — or more. Unlike, say, female lions, female humans aren’t as capable in violent activities as the males of their species. Women are relatively weaker and slower compared to men than female lions are compared to male lions. They are more dependent upon men for protection and support, a fact easy to deny when we’ve become dependents of centralized powers and their various welfare programs and police forces. On the other hand, human romantic love is founded upon the particular weaknesses and strengths of human males and females. Maybe women and men gain more than they lose from women being physically weak and men having to protect them? Maybe much that is good about sexual relationships has been destroyed by our political system in which false promises of protection come from the central governments and boys are trained to call in the Seals to protect Mom.
And so I return to the article’s specific topic: the ‘pornifying’ of women. Natural inclinations of men and women are developing in bad directions in our morally loose societies, which are less societies than mobs of individuals dependent upon central powers and impersonal systems of production and trade. Because of the traits which are so valuable in successful reproduction, women are more exploitable and probably more ‘willing’ in some ways to be exploited. I’ll quote from the article I already referenced, Marked Rise in Intensely Sexualized Images of Women, Not Men:
A study by University at Buffalo sociologists has found that the portrayal of women in the popular media over the last several decades has become increasingly sexualized, even “pornified.” The same is not true of the portrayal of men.
These findings may be cause for concern, the researchers say, because previous research has found sexualized images of women to have far-reaching negative consequences for both men and women.
…
“What we conclude from this is that popular media outlets such as Rolling Stone are not depicting women as sexy musicians or actors; they are depicting women musicians and actors as ready and available for sex. This is problematic,” Hatton says, “because it indicates a decisive narrowing of media representations of women.
“We don’t necessarily think it’s problematic for women to be portrayed as ‘sexy.’ But we do think it is problematic when nearly all images of women depict them not simply as ‘sexy women’ but as passive objects for someone else’s sexual pleasure.”
Our ancestors thought to raise their sons not to exploit women and to raise their daughters to avoid exploitation. Men were even raised to protect women. This was a matter of moral order and self-respect for both males and females. In their efforts to conform to the herd as directed by centralizers of power and self-righteous reformers of society, modern men in recent decades thought to raise their sons and daughters to be genial creatures of muted sexual characteristics. Those partially desexed creatures would respect each other because… Well, just because. A good enough explanation for two year-olds and also for the likes of modern political theorists and social reformers.
A number of years ago, I read The Sexual Brain by Simon LeVay, a book that discussed the crucial role the brain plays in human sexuality. Professor LeVay, himself homosexual and an activist, put the female brain and the menstrual cycle at the center of that book. A thinker paying attention to reality, even one making claims of the moral goodness of homosexuality, has to realize we are sexual because we, as a race, reproduce. That’s why we’re still here and why human beings are likely to be living on the surface of the earth for many centuries.
Because of the different roles men and women play in reproduction, their brains are radically different and Professor LeVay emphasizes that even the brain of an effeminate homosexual is still a male brain. There are some men whose brains were not masculinized either because of genetic problems or because their mothers didn’t produce testosterone during crucial development periods when the male embryo can’t yet produce it or at least can’t produce enough. There are few such men and we can currently do no more than sympathize with a hellish situation.
There are many things to be said on this general subject and we can explore matters in terms of history or biological evolution or moral freedom or political stability, but all these differences in human males and females have implications for pornography, visual depictions of human beings and human sex acts in advertisement as well what is sold in that seedy video store.
Men have brains which react strongly to visual evidence of sexual opportunities, (A quick Internet search indicates the situation is more complicated than I remembered it to be. There is not a single brain-region but rather a vaguely defined network of brain-regions involved when men are sexually aroused by images.) As a result — and speaking only of heterosexuals, men can be more easily aroused by the visual display of women’s bodies than women can be by the display of men’s bodies.
This has implications for moral and social order, as do most human attributes whether common to most human beings or differing between the sexes or differing between ethnic groups. As is stated in the article: “These findings may be cause for concern, the researchers say, because previous research has found sexualized images of women to have far-reaching negative consequences for both men and women.” In more direct terms, women can be more easily exploited in certain ways. Just because of the different roles they play in reproduction, girls can be raised to be women who accept their exploitation and boys can be raised to readily exploit women in certain ways. An honest appraisal of clothing store catalogs and television shows and magazine covers tells us we have twisted the youth of our oh-so modern societies in exactly this way.