Tumblrites are talking about how men rarely feel objectified, both the negative and positive parts of that, so I thought now was a good time to post my essay on men and women, subjects and objected.
This is probably going to be my most controversial essay in a while, where I try to add some vocabulary about the complicated way our society views women and various minority groups. So I need to start by bolding two disclaimers (even though that’s always a momentum-halting way to start leading your audience on a thought process.)
- Everything I am describing is at the margins. People are judged “thickly” based on a lot of factors - their skills, their reputation, other object-level facts - and I am just discussing one factor of many. Please feel free to append to every paragraph “But this generalization is only a tendency, that affects some cases where we don’t have strong reasons to view it otherwise.”
- This essay is about how we perceive certain groups, and how society treats them, not how they actually act or are. Sometimes these perceptions are even internalized, but there is nothing essentialist about them.
So with that out of the way, let’s talk about subjects and objects.
***
Two riddles.
The big riddle of modern progressivism is that for fifty years now we’ve nominally said men and women are equal and free to do the same things, but sexist results still exist on a scale that can only be called “very obvious”. Congress is 80% male. 96% of Fortune 500 CEO’s are men. The income gap is as large as ever, but it’s nothing compared to how few women even have the super-rich jobs for income to be compared to. We could understand why back in the 60’s and 70’s it would take some time for women to come into the positions they were previously forbidden from… but after fifty years, time during which most people specifically would *prefer* to promote women (at least nominally), why is it still so bad?
Conservatives say this is evidence of women just being not as good as men at these fields. That would have to be a very strong biological effect if so, so I am skeptical.
Liberals say it’s because our society in many covert ways continues to be woman-negative, and those unconscious biases and structural problems make it almost impossible to advance.
Which brings us to the other question: in such a male-dominated society, why do things really suck for (some) men?
If I told you there were two groups, with similar economic situations, but one of them had *ten times* as many people in jail as the other, what would you think? As a cosmopolitan trained in these arguments already, you probably would not just chalk it up to “well the more-jailed group must be intrinsically ten times more violent.” You might expect that they were somewhat more violent, but also we were unfair in the courtroom and gave harsher sentences to this group for the same crime (which is true, with 63% longer sentences), and this group was targeted by police more, and even if they were more violent it was probably due to social conditioning and so not really their fault. This is basically how we respond to the disproportionate incarceration rate for black people. But the incarceration gap is *even bigger* for men and women.
So we have a paradox. Men rule the roost at the highest levels of power in every field, and yet are massively overrepresented in the worst punishment and living conditions our society can choose to give someone. This goes against everything we know about oppression – British colonialists did not jail their own more than the natives they were colonizing. The rich upper class doesn’t treat a large part of their class as much worse than the workers. If the situation were reversed - with women ten times likelier to be in jail - there would be no end of explanations for how that is both caused by and feeds the structural problem of all the power at the top being in the hands of men. So how can the reverse happen?
***
One word people toss around a lot regarding sexism is “objectification”. Often it’s just a negative-affect word that means “women are treated badly”. But let us take this word seriously, and investigate what specific symptom it refers to.
Objectification means the person is turned into an object. It means treating them like a means - towards male pleasure, commercial titillation, what have you - and ignoring their agency, their responsibility, and their own desires. In a sentence, the object is what the action is done to.
And there’s no doubt that for all our public commitment to equality, women are made into objects much more than men. Not only do they grace advertisements as a generic sign of “you want this”, but almost every standard of success is measured by “how many women can you get.” How many woman will sleep with you, how many will be your friend and come to your events, how pretty is the woman on your arm. Women are treated as a reward and a measure of success.
[To reiterate my disclaimer: this is all at the margins. But it’s there.]
The downsides of this are clear. No one takes the object seriously. No one faults the object, but no one wants to give them responsibility either. Protection can easily become a gilded cage. And in a world where power is 99% perception, being perceived as powerless really means you have less power. (We call this dynamic “performative efficacy.”)
It’s shocking that we haven’t stopped doing this, and have made barely any progress in this since we nominally started treating women equally. But then, are we even trying?
So let’s look at the other side of a sentence: the subject.
***
A subject is an independent being who is making decisions, for the sake of themselves or what they value. Their own happiness is an end, and they are expected to have responsibility and accountability. In a sentence, the subject is what does all the acting.
In our society, men are subjects. The MALE gaze looks upon the WOMAN.
The upsides of this are the obvious opposites of the downside of female-objectification. People tend to give men responsibility and accountability. You can trust them with leadership. You’re a little bit afraid of them, or at least willing to believe them when they claim they have power. If they succeed at something, it’s not due to luck or people wanting to be nice to their pretty face, but to their own skill and talent. Men get put in the highest positions of power, because we believe they are the power-wielders.
But the downsides can’t be ignored either.
When society judges you as having agency, as being accountable, then when things go bad it’s all your fault. The contextual factors are considered just excuses. We need to punish the subject because they need to learn not to screw up. If a subject commits a crime, we are much much harsher on them, and you get the massive prison discrepancy.
(This starts from birth of course, and men and women have internalized and perform many of these subject-object behaviors. Many men feel they must prove their worth, and so engage in risk-friendly choices that will either make them wildly successful, or fail badly. Men are always at the vanguard of new fields, feeling the need to prove themselves, and taking credit when their startup or election or gamble succeeds, or blaming themselves in the far more common scenario where it fails.)
God is usually depicted as male, but so is the Devil. Men get to occupy the extremes of every reward and narrative spectrum our culture defines itself by.
***
We can see how easily these perceptions encourage our attitude towards risk. If you believe yourself a subject, and a risky proposition is offered to you (start a business, ask a person out, study an obscure academic field, commit a lucrative crime), then you believe the relevant factor in that coin-flip is *you*. You choose whether it succeeds or fails, and you have faith in yourself, so you will reap the successes of it. So you go for it.
If you have the object mindset though, you sympathize with the ways external forces might affect all those things, and are less likely to take a bad risk (or maybe any risk). You can see yourself getting the bad outcomes, and would rather take the tack that will punish you less for it.
***
Many minorities get much of this object-treatment (asians, poor people), as a way of infantilizing them. But some minorities get the subject-treatment instead.
In particular, our society treats black people like subjects. I was struck by this description of how black and white children are treated in schools. http://www.vox.com/2016/2/8/10940558/beyonce-super-bowl-conservative-backlash
“Children in most societies are considered to be in a distinct group with characteristics such as innocence and the need for protection,” Phillip Goff, a University of California Los Angeles researcher and author of the study, said in a statement. “Our research found that black boys can be seen as responsible for their actions at an age when white boys still benefit from the assumption that children are essentially innocent.”http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2014/03/black-boys-older.aspx
Another study found people tend to associate what the authors call “black-sounding names,” like DeShawn and Jamal, with larger, more violent people than they do “white-sounding names,” like Connor and Garrett.
(The perception of capacity from violence, of course, is linked to viewing someone as a subject.)
And when black subjects can pierce through to the successful side of the class treatment, they also benefit from its biases. For instance, our society is much more comfortable with a black male President than a white female President.
No, I don’t just mean one primary election that was pretty close anyway. But all the culture before than. Our movies and television portrayed black Presidents *all the time*. http://badhowto.com/movies-with-black-presidents-in-the-last-25-years/ Usually it wasn’t even a major feature of the character when they did. They were just considered competent and badass, (although less so than the white male protagonist, probably).
Whereas women presidents were… well can you think of a movie or television show about a female President? Okay, you probably thought of two - were both of them explicitly about the fact that she was a woman? It’s really just a much more foreign concept to us.
(To advance this incomparably useful correlation - that who your culture is comfortable jailing is who they are comfortable electing President - I can recall one hispanic male President (from the West Wing (spoilers, I guess)) and no asian Presidents.)
If you are poor and otherwise disadvantaged, of course, you are probably going to get the “fail” side of the subject coin-flip. You won’t very often reap the rewards of being considered independent and accountable, and will much more often be punished by society for the faults of your failures.
And there are a lot of poor subjects.
***
Let’s flip back to how much this sucks for objects, who often feel they are stuck beneath a glass ceiling.
In jobs, if you are the object class, at best you might be favored. People might feel bad for your mistreatment, and try to take pity on you. If you are hiring a vendor for some new need, and one of the vendors is a woman, you might feel “If I pick her, I am helping professional women get a leg up” and so if all else is equal, you’ll give her the job. Whoopee sexism pushed back.
But what if she tries to negotiate for more money? What if she says you just don’t understand how much your company needs her product, without it you will go bankrupt, and you need to pay her twice as much because she can go elsewhere.
Well, fuck her then. You were being generous and showing her pity. Now she’s just being greedy. You can go talk to someone else. None of that pity you had really helps her if she is trying to aggressively negotiate with you.
But what about a loud white man? You’re much less likely to toss him a contract out of kindness - but when he says you need his product, you might actually feel threatened. He can negotiate a higher price out of you, because you believe he might be right. He might be a jerk, but he’s a jerk who has you over a barrel. You aren’t trying to benefit his maleness - in fact you are annoyed by it! - but it lends credence to his appearance of power, and allows him to get a lot more money out of you.
And here we see reports that a third of the gender wage gap is due to different negotiating styles. Of course since some of these perceptions are internalized, people trying to push this back by teaching women to negotiate more and better are doing good work. But it can only be so successful, when the problem is that *employers don’t believe them*. A woman you are proud of hiring because she is a symbol of your Efforts in Diversity simply isn’t able to negotiate more out of you than a jackass you begrudgingly hired because dammit you need him, even if they both bring the same skills and same negotiating styles.
(Somewhat more tenuously, I believe this is part of why fields dominated by men end up doing better. If the Web-UI people are trying to convince firms that they are needed, and the Big Data outfits are competing over the same cash, and the Big Data looks much more like subjects, then Big Data as a field ends up with a lot more cash. And then we are stuck sitting around wondering why all the male dominated firms have all the money even though they are obviously jerks and have you seen how good and diverse some of these Web-UI consultants are. But this is all hypothetical.)
***
This leads us into how powerful these traps can be. To some degree, people are punished for even deviating from the script. Most people don’t like having their assumptions questioned over all. That sort of stereotype-panic is just bad and should be fought.
But I think the more common problem, is that the various subject and object strategies are important and useful, and they just don’t work when done out of class. If a woman is aggressive, she may just come off as annoying, and not threatening. If a man feels like a victim, he may receive only derision not sympathy. It’s much easier and safer to continue playing to type.
It’s incorrect to say women aren’t allowed to be angry. Women can be angry all the time. But their anger isn’t taken *seriously*. It doesn’t reward them, it just makes them look silly. A man can be angry and it may be effective, or it may be seen as dangerous, and he’ll either reap the benefits or consequences of that subjective responsibility. (A black man’s anger will be taken *very* seriously, and will almost always be punished, especially in upper class society.)
These sorts of stereotypes - full fledged dynamics of how we expect people to operate - are extremely powerful juju. Your ideology or project can advance a lot more smoothly if you take advantage of them, than if you are trying to resist them. People want to be good and embrace new ideas, but (if not challenging this exact dynamic) they will still go with the grain of how our presumptions work. It’s like when you’re trying to attack sexism, by making fun of virgin neckbeards who live in their mother’s basement.
Right, let’s get to that.
***
So this is the most controversial part of the essay, where I discuss the failures of modern feminism. Feel free to get off the train now, and just take in the vocabulary established in the above parts.
Modern feminism can not resist the temptation to treat women as objects.
As I said, this subject-object architecture is a very powerful tool. At a deep, unconscious level we reflexively treat women as passive and as rewards, and men as individuals with responsibility, and so strategies based off of those facts will be very compelling.
(Which gives us the meme of “Dead Girls” http://www.theawl.com/2015/08/our-incorruptible-dead-girls where our media seems obsessed over these images of passive victims of brutality. And why progressive arguments sound only two steps away from a Nancy Grace special.)
Look at that insult above, calling a male a “virgin”. This more-than-implies that his worth and success as a male are based on whether he has gotten a woman to sleep with him. While the insult might shame him for whatever bad behavior he was engaged in, it will only increase his certainty that he needs female sexual objects to prove his worth, and he will continue to treat women that way. (Or even if he had slept with women, he will smugly feel the insult is inaccurate, and that his sexual success is part of what proves feminist arguments wrong. It’s just going to be dumb all around.)
And this part of a broader tendency to treat women like currency. In the 80’s you had frat keggers where men showed how cool they were by how many women were in attendance (I assume at least. I was six at the time.) And a “sausage fest” meant that your party only attracted men, and thus was a failure, because women are the objects of how we measure status.
Whereas now in social justice circles… your party is measured by how many women are there, because it proves you are aware of women’s concerns and make them feel comfortable there.
In both these cases, women are viewed as anonymous objects in a group, where more is better. They are not treated as individuals with concerns based on their personal desires and thoughts. If we want to make a group “safe for women”, are we asking individual women what they feel? Often in such cases, the opinions of individual women do not count, because these opinions aren’t the same as what “the group of women” is presupposed to feel.
In reality, women will come to your party, or not, based on a variety of reasons, most of which have little to do with you or especially your political beliefs. But when we perceive women as objects, every decision we make becomes centered around “how do I increase the number of women I have around me.”
(There is almost no one who treats men like this. It’s understood that men come or go to your party based on their own weird individual desires and thoughts. Like human beings who are not your responsibility to manage.)
There is nothing radical about treating women as currency. We have done it for thousands of years. Even treating them as currency to show “how much you value women” is basically the chivalry that still kept women in gilded cages and anyone could see for its sexist implications in like five seconds. (Hence the derision of calling some social justice defenders “white knights”.)
Saying a woman is a helpless object, whom you need to protect, is *extremely emotionally powerful*. It is how sexism has actually operated for… ever, basically. And often people *are* objects who deserve protection. But if that becomes the major praxis of how you practice feminism, then you are heavily indebted to the master’s tools.
And so we have done this for a few decades more and… all the metrics of sexism have held steady. In fact, the last few years have seen a flurry of social justice pressure, and still all the substantive results we want have held static. http://associationsnow.com/2013/08/study-finds-corporate-board-diversity-stagnant-are-nonprofits-similar/ Even on the political level, the only candidate for President who was a woman and had a chance of making it… was the same one as eight years ago, and who follows the quasi-sexist tradition of a wife continuing the rulership of her husband.
(Of course, it is very worthwhile to mention that not all of feminism does this. A lot of feminist thought is about “not treating women as objects”, and how people should listen to their desires and thoughts as individuals, not “puzzle-boxes” to be solved. This is great. But whenever faced with argumentative pressure, many are too quick to fall back onto object oriented discussion, which hits enough memetic buttons that their opponents are usually scared off. The MRA trying to portray a woman as *actually having power* is often doing more to counter stereotypes than the liberal who can win arguments by not ignoring such power.)
***
A lot of MRA’s and conservatives have tried to draw attention to the plight of men-who-failed (either are in jail, or just unemployed and single) as evidence that our society does not favor men. Liberals too quickly dismiss this evidence, in their rush to show the many ways men hold more power than women.
They ignore the possibility that these two facts are one and the same. The way we treat subjects as worthy of condemnation is related to the way we don’t give actual power and responsibility to objects.
By being aware of this, we can salvage a lot of the good parts of modern feminism (women can make choices) and avoid the bad parts of it that are currently plaguing our discourse, and have been part of our general social antagonism since day one.
***
To inject some moral objectivism and answer the obvious questions: are women objects, are men subjects, what is the actual correct interpretation here (and not just bam’s comments on the social perception)?
Men and women alike, are both subjects and objects. Everyone is sometimes a mechanical result of how the world acted upon them. And everyone has desires and thoughts that should be respected. I think people have these both in roughly the same proportions, identifying when to treat people as which is hard, but the important thing is that most groups of people have these subject-object traits in the same proportions as other groups, and are not uniquely objects (or otherwise.) Treating someone as *only* a subject, or object, will generally be to their detriment, no matter how tempting it is.
(Also I hate risk-friendliness and anything that encourages it.)
***
I should also make clear that this essay does not mean I think “men and women have it equally bad, in different ways”. It is very possible for this dynamic to hit one group harder than another - for instance I think it’s inarguable that this dynamic hits black men very badly, and they mostly only bear negatives.
Also our society could *both* be female-negative, and female-object-oriented, as some sort of double-screwage.
It really just hits all individuals differently, and differently depending on their context. Some people come out from this system as net losers, some people undergo horrific unnecessary suffering because of it, and some people come out as net winners. As a simplistic stereotype, it is on net bad and we should grow beyond it.
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