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Comment by EugeneOZ | Hacker News Reader

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EugeneOZ·

Many of them seem to be trying to exploit women’s or men’s sexuality.

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Because sexuality equals exploitation?

In the commercial context of movies and advertising, yes?

Particularly where depictions of non-white women and "degenerate" lesbians are concerned, depictions of female sexuality are almost always exploitative.

Precisely how do you define "exploitative?" In the commercial context of movies and advertising, every depiction of anything is "exploitative," in that it is leveraging the depiction to make money for the movie financiers or advertisers.

I mean, precisely, the phenomenon of the male gaze[0].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_gaze

I have a hard time getting on board with that paper.

> The paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world. An idea of woman stands as lynch pin to the system: it is her lack that produces the phallus as a symbolic presence, it is her desire too make good the lack that the phallus signifies.

Do you have a substantive criticism to make?

This would be an interesting discussion, but I don't think this article, or HN, are the right place. In short, the paper boils down to "sex sells" but wraps it in so much linguistic and semantic psychoanalytic sophistry that it's barely intelligible, and hardly actionable. Psychoanalysis is on very unstable foundations (see Popper's critiques), and this attempts to build on that, which doesn't compel belief, at least with me.

That isn't exploitation. If you read that entire article, the concept of "exploitation" doesn't occur once.

The concept of exploitation occurs in the first paragraph.

No it doesn’t. The first paragraph talks about objectification, not exploitation. They are different concepts.

I spent years of my life studying this.

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