Objectify This

I recently came across some discussions of gender by- wait for it, wait for it – men.

Thomas Brakar and Clif of Blown Glass are in a heated (blog) discussion over their differing perceptions of the masculinity crisis.

For starters, Brakar believes that there is one, while Clif thinks that “Quite simply, it’s a generational thing, where older blokes want young blokes to “be like them”, and thus confirm their authority and power. There is no “real” masculinity, and blokes should step back from policing what blokes should, or should not, be and do.”

Apart from the jaunty Aussie (thanks for the correction, Clif) slang, I would have put it the same way, myself. Especially in comparision to Brakar’s response that “Men get better pay and the top jobs. I agree. There is no real masculinity crisis. It’s an advantage to be a man in almost every country, but still guys are thinking that they’re not good enough. It’s all in our heads. But the question is: If a crisis is only psychological, isn’t it still a crisis?” Yes, Brakar, clearly, it’s a crisis. The crisis is that this belief that masculinity involves the domination and oppression of others, especially women, results in a rape in the United States every 2 1/2 minutes.

And the crisis is that it’s socially acceptable. Women are portrayed in the media as sex objects for laughs and attention, and, according to several studies, this results in the perpetuation of oppression and self-objectification, because, as the film theorist Laura Mulvey points out, the gaze of the camera and Foucault’s panopticon (definition) is presupposed to be male.

If this kind of wide-scale oppression occured with the representations of any racial group (and correct me, please, if I’m wrong about this, but I don’t think it does), there would be a major outcry. Racist imagery persists, I know, but not on the scale of the sexually exploitative imagery we’re used to.

I’m not saying that I don’t think women’s bodies are beautiful, and I know that they’re effective vehicles of marketing. But I don’t think that there’s a male correlate to the culture of objectification this creates for women. I mean, really. Check out this site and tell me you don’t think it’s a little strange to see a man objectified.

In this article from the Boston Globe Jackson Katz and Sut Jhally have something more to add – that the crisis of masculinity is resulting in the sudden rise of disaffected boys shooting up their schools. Granted, their addendum of ‘white’ to the description dates their article as pre-Virginia Tech, but their point still stands- something fucked up is going on here.

Katz and Jhally write that ” Political debate and media coverage keep repeating the muddled thinking of the past. Headlines and stories focus on youth violence, ”kids killing kids,” or as in the title of a CBS ”48 Hours” special, ”Young Guns.” This is entirely the wrong framework to use in trying to understand what happened in Littleton – or in Jonesboro, Ark., Peducah, Ky., Pearl, Miss.,
or Springfield, Ore.

This is not a case of kids killing kids. This is boys killing boys and boys killing girls. What these school shootings reveal is not a crisis in youth culture but a crisis in masculinity. The shootings – all by white adolescent males – are telling us something about how we are doing as a society, much like the
canaries in coal mines, whose deaths were a warning to the miners that the caves were unsafe.

Consider what the reaction would have been if the perpetrators in Littleton had been girls. The first thing everyone would have wanted to talk about would have been: Why are girls – not kids – acting out
violently? What is going on in the lives of girls that would lead them to commit such atrocities? All of the explanations would follow from the basic premise that being female was the dominant variable.

But when the perpetrators are boys, we talk in a gender-neutral way about kids or children, and few (with the exception of some feminist scholars) delve into the forces – be they cultural, historical, or institutional – that produce hundreds of thousands of physically abusive and violent boys every year. Instead, we call upon the same tired specialists who harp about the easy accessibility of guns, the lack of parental supervision, the culture of peer-group exclusion and teasing, or the prevalence of media
violence.

All of these factors are of course relevant, but if they were the primary answers, then why are girls, who live in the same environment, not responding in the same way? The fact that violence – whether of the spectacular kind represented in the school shootings or the more routine murder, assault, and rape – is an overwhelmingly male phenomenon should indicate to us that gender is a vital factor, perhaps the vital factor.

Looking at violence as gender-neutral has the effect of blinding us as we desperately search for clues about how to respond.

The issue is not just violence in the media but the construction of violent masculinity as a cultural norm. From rock and rap music and videos, Hollywood action films, professional and college sports, the culture produces a stream of images of violent, abusive men and promotes characteristics such as dominance, power, and control as means of establishing or maintaining manhood.”