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Comment by nilkn | Hacker News Reader

This is just a random thought, but it does occur to me that a lot of effort is expended in discouraging guys from objectifying women, but little to no effort is expended in doing sort of the opposite: encouraging women to objectify guys.

I've never really thought about it before, but maybe the most natural solution is to just level the playing field rather than trying to get a big group of people to stop doing something that they more or less naturally do. We're definitely seeing this happen with celebrities and big budget movies, for instance. Nobody's stopped objectifying women, but they have started objectifying men more than ever before, at least as far as I can tell. I've heard more about Chris Pratt being hot this week than I have about any female celebrity, for instance, including his female costar Zoe Saldana.

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That's because the people who think objectification of women is bad tend to also think objectification of men is bad. Those people don't want to live in a world of ubiquitous or or even just balanced objectification; they want to live in a world with none.

I don't think ridding the world of all sexual objectification is even remotely realistic. It's human nature to do it, and you're not going to change human nature. Are you going to make it illegal?

Culture modifies human natural behaviour in all sorts of surprising ways. You cannot tell out of hand which behaviours are natural (whatever that means) and which are cultural. Why are women's appearances scrutinized to much greater extent than men? Is it because our culture* discourages male objectification, or because it encourages female objectification?

Even if it is natural, that doesn't mean it's desireable. That's just an appeal to nature.

While laws are an extreme method, they're routinely used to better ourselves, and even more often to better others. It's worked for (what we currently consider) undesireable behaviours like theft, smoking in public places, environmental pollution, seatbelt wearing, illegal parking, murder, and looking funny at cops. That's a pretty varied list, so why wouldn't it work for sexual objectification? I don't think we should use such a drastic approach, but it's not ridiculous, either.

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* Cowardly assuming we're all in the West.

> Is it because our culture* discourages male objectification, or because it encourages female objectification?

Both. There's still a lot of latent homophobia throughout the US. What I mean by that is that there are many folks who are decidedly pro-gay-rights, but still feel uncomfortable around the sexualization of the male gender.

There's one thing I'm interested in: happiness. What's going to make the most people happy? Many laws that are morally prescriptivist, like those banning gay marriage, end up just oppressing people because it turns out gay marriage is perfectly fine and doesn't harm anyone.

I don't believe open displays of sexuality are harmful to anyone so long as we don't have double standards and we do exercise good judgment. So the idea of outright banning them by law does indeed seem completely ridiculous to me. It's just as ridiculous to me as banning gay marriage or banning porn or banning prostitution.

The reason we do have double standards is precisely because we've been led to believe over generations that the sexualization of men is wrong. Because many men haven't learned to be comfortable with their own gender, homophobia has been able to flourish for decades. It's gross when two guys kiss, right? Of course it is--you can find millions of people who will agree with you because they've carefully been hidden from that their entire life. Banning sexualization and sexual objectification will just lead to future generations who are even more incapable of coping with the realities of human sexuality in ways that aren't immensely harmful to many people.

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