The Daily Mail runs a story built around the “mean girls” Jezebel piece — and ends up suggesting the opposite of my original conclusion.
And at Jezebel, a second story for the week: Can Men Handle Being Ogled? . Excerpt:
Not so long ago, psychologists insisted that most women simply weren’t visually aroused. Women, we were told, might have an aesthetic appreciation for a handsome guy, but they weren’t actively lusting after what they saw. After twenty years of being given permission to gaze on the hot and shirtless (from Marky Mark to Taylor Lautner), women have become more vocal than ever before about what they like to look at — and what they’re thinking about when they look. The old myth that women aren’t visual has been debunked by everyone from Sex and the City to the writers and readers at this very site.
This doesn’t mean that women’s desire is the primary cause of poor male body image. Men’s own misinterpretation of what women want is far more of the problem. (For example, many men don’t realize that their girlfriends might lust after Lautner or Gosling — and still be attracted to their own less-than-perfect male partners. These guys don’t get that desire isn’t a zero-sum game). But whatever the cause, the problem is getting worse. Male vanity, it seems, is here to stay. And the old hope that men’s experience of being objectified might lead them to stop objectifying women has proved spectacularly false.656
Would you say the same to women Hugo? That their partners might lust over some [perfect women] but they can still be attracted to their less-than-perfect partner?
Given all the stuff you have written about subjects like pornography and the effects of women surely you have to give men the same benefit. Seeing their partners lust after a non-realistic perfection can’t be healthy surely?
Hugo Schwyzer,
Author, Speaker, Professor, perpetuating double standards.
“The Daily Mail runs a story built around the “mean girls” Jezebel piece — and ends up suggesting the opposite of my original conclusion. ”
I would have put it more like this:
The Daily Mail runs a story built around the “mean girls” Jezebel piece — and thankfully ingnored everything I had to say about the subject.
Unreal. So Women getting objectified and men getting objectified are both the fault of men. Of course, of course.
Hugo, have you ever managed to find some (in your opinion) sub-optimal outcome that couldn’t be blamed on men somehow?
The last paragraph is pure victim-blaming, by the way.