I don't understand the term sexist as it is used sometimes.

For instance, one day our newspaper printed an ad of a high end food retailer.
It showed the belly and hips of a naked woman. On her hip, someone had stuck a vanilla ice cream cone, and the ice cream was dribbling down her stomach, obviously meant to look like semen.

Anyway, the press board jumped all over our paper and demanded we remove it. Sexist!

So the Big Boss (the Lord of all hirings and firings) stormed into our morning meeting and shouted: "I want to know of all women in the room: is this ad sexist?"
We girls all looked at each other and the youngest of us finally piped up:
"Well, can we have one of a naked man, too?"
(I've never seen him so nonplussed.
"Uh...I'll see what I can do", he said finally and walked out again.)

The point is, why is this sexist? I can see it's pornographic and gratuitous and maybe tasteless, but sexist?
Everytime I ask, someone says "Because it objectifies women."
Yeah, so? When I see a picture of a man's butt, I certainly don't think about how great his character is.
I'd opt to objectify men a little more, to balance things out, if someone asked me.

I just don't get it.

Or the EU-Porn picture I posted: the one with the spread legs and the nifty blue underwear. Clover said it was sexist. Yeah, I was annoyed at it too, but not because it showed a woman.

Any opinions on this?

Semen tastes nothing like vanilla ice cream, but to get to the issue at hand I`d say that poster probably does objectify women but then most of us look at strangers as objects until we`re introduced to them and since we live in a capitalist environment in which anything (And anyone) can be regarded as a commodity I think it`s an irrational but all too human response. We don`t like to think of ourselves as objectifiers but we are invariably co-opted into doing so as your female colleague illustrated. Exploitation is basically okay as long as it`s mutual.

quote:

We don`t like to think of ourselves as objectifiers but we are invariably co-opted into doing so as your female colleague illustrated. Exploitation is basically okay as long as it`s mutual.

Exploitation?
Okay, my brain is somewhat slow today, but how is this exploitation? (Or maybe we understand the term differently?)

To *exploit* means to take advantage of something (Or in this case someone) for personal gain. A fact that is unavoidable in any commercial transaction. The worker exploits the boss for wages, and the boss exploits the worker for his labor and so on. We all `exploit` the talents we are given in nature, that`s how society functions and why I for one make no distinction between the prostitute selling her body for sex, the athlete taking drugs to enhance his performance (And thus earnings) and the college professor exploiting his brainpower. It`s the way of the universe.

i took an intro-level course on women's studies last semester and was appalled at how much of the course seemed to be about dismantling the english language. we spent several weeks discussing the fact that we say "hey guys" to multisex groups, and use terms like "freshmen" instead of "freshpeople" and how this is "sexist language". it really kind of disgusted me. there are bigger battles to fight.

this ad you're describing strikes me in much of the same way. yeah, okay, it's conceivably sexist. we spent a class discussing advertising and how part of the objectification of women is their use in ads; they're shown in pieces, such as just their hips, instead of as whole, and the ice cream thing is definite sexual imagery. and yes, it's done to women in advertising all the time, and to men much less frequently and with much less intensity. and yes, it probably sends a lousy subconscious message to constantly be bombarded with these images. yes, it's even part of the problem of bigger issues such as violence against women, because seeing a person as a thing is the first step in being able to abuse them.

i don't know where i was going with this. pulling the ad from the paper seems like making a mountain out of a molehill. it's treating a symptom of the problem instead of the disease itself. our concept of sexuality as human beings is so fucked up, there is no one consensus on what's appropriate. my sexy is your sexist and vice versa.

the way we deal with this shit is ridiculous.

Personally, I wouldn't find anything wrong with an add like that. A naked woman, big deal, I see one in the shower every day... And sexual things, I can see why it might bother some people, but I don't see a problem. Sex and the human body are natural things, not something to be abhorred. People seem disgusted by stuff sometimes, that's really just part of life. I dunno, I just think things that are natural shouldn't be shunned. I mean, you look at old art, and there's sexual imagary all over the place. Back then, it was just thought of as natural, and the human body was beautiful. Putting a sexual image of a woman OR man somewhere was art, it wasn't disgusting. Nowadays though, people blow a gasket over that sort of thing.

And really, femenists bug me. They're the same as chovanists... only the female version. Along with what Grey said... hearing things like "people holes" over man holes and "snowperson" over snowman... it's really very stupid.

And this may just be me... but I think a naked person in something isn't as bad as a lady wearing "sexy" underwear. I mean, nudity is just... you know, nature. But, the suggestive clothing is just that, suggestive. It's like not natural, but supposed to look very sexy. It's supposed to be something that in TV shows and all, men "want to take off"... I dunno, just what I think...

Well, that's my view on things of this nature. Don't be ashamed of stuff like sexuality and nakedness... don't call it "sexist". It's natural, get over it, and accept nature the way it is.

Yeah, I know what you mean about the "people holes". We have the same thing in German, but about noun endings. You have to be politically correct when you're looking for an employee. So you have to write that you need an/a accountant/ess. Looks bloody ridiculous.

As to pictures, well, frankly, I think we have too many images of sex and naked people about anyway.
They don't titillate, they just bore.

I still don't get the sexism complaint, though.

Hmm. The ad in and of itself isn't sexist, I don't think, just the attitude that reflexively thinks of women as the only possible objects of desire. They don't show men in such a light because, as I have heard adolescent males explain it, "that would be gay." Like men are the only ones allowed to be homophobic, and conversely, that anyone seeing the male body as sexually desireable (both gay men and heterosexual women) must have something wrong with them.

When I was an adolescent, I was extremely uncomfortable with my sexuality, homophobic, heterophobic, you name it. I found the constant media images of women as objects of sexual desire pretty threatening- one, because I (being an idot homophobic adolescent) didn't know how I was supposed to feel about them myself; two, because this was the sort of body that I inhabited and it made me start to think of heterosexual men as these leering predatory things; and three, because men were so very rarely depicted in the mainstream media as objects of sexual desire, I felt cheated, because I really didn't know how I would (or should) react to such a thing. Although, being phobic of sex in general, I didn't actively search any of this out, and in truth may have found them just as threatening. But I don't know that, do I? goddamnit. Still feel cheated.

So, there are actually at least three sorts of people with "yuk" reactions to sexual images- those who are obnoxious prudes about sex in general, those who are homophobic (or heterophobic I guess) prudes who don't want to see sexy pictures of people they aren't attracted to; and people who object to certain sexual images on the grounds that it treats human beings (although in our society, mostly women) as objects to be desired rather than as subjects with their own needs and desires.

The last one is the more High Minded of the three, and the one that I think most women would claim as their reasoning... but I think a lot of them (the hets and gay boys anyway) are actually at least partially going, "God, yuck, I don't want to see her girl junk, that's gay!"

Now I want ice cream...

Out of curiousity, what were they advertising? Icecream, or just the food chain itself? Was there any wording?

I'd agree with Natalie: Very few things are sexist in and of themselves - it's the context of a society that in many ways is still very patriarchal and sexist that makes such ads (potentially) sexist.

And as far as the whole "gender equality in language" thing is concerned, whether in English, German, or any other language: Sure, it's often silly, but criticising it a) is often just as silly and b) shows how much we've internalised many of the sexist elements in our culture. Onions, you mentioned that the "ein/e Buchhalter/in" thing "looks bloody ridiculous", but what looks ridiculous to us has more to do with what we're used to than with any inherent ridiculousness. It would also look, sound and feel stupid to many people if all the masculine words used as coverall terms were replaced by their feminine equivalents... because they're used to the masculine forms being the norm.

Anyway, most fights for equality have odd, and perhaps ridiculous, elements. That is normal, because there's always a fringe that may be questionable. But these things aren't black and white. To quite a few people (perhaps even a silent majority of conservatives and reactionaries) things that should go without saying for you and me (I apologise if I'm assuming things on your part here, Onions) are just as silly as the "ein/e XXX/in" thing is to you.

Thirith, I think what annoys me so is that often paying tso much attention to the noun endings distracts from the more important things -
Like the famous glass ceiling, maternal/paternal leave, equal wages and all the other stuff.

And Amy, they were just advertising themselves. The chain is famous and don't actually need to explain what they sell. They were just trying to catch people's attention.

quote:

Originally posted by onions:
Thirith, I think what annoys me so is that often paying tso much attention to the noun endings distracts from the more important things -
Like the famous glass ceiling, maternal/paternal leave, equal wages and all the other stuff.

That's definitely true to an extent, but I think that these 'battles for equality' are fought on different fronts. At least in Switzerland, things like the glass ceiling, equal wages etc. are parliamentary matters, whereas the linguistic discussion of gender equality is more a thing of the public discourse, letters to editors etc. I don't remember the parliament discussing gender-based suffixes in any great detail.

(Anyway, I guess we all have our bugbears - I personally feel like screaming every time I read that oh-so-clever pun "Herstory"... Yes, it might have been witty the first time, but by now it's so hackneyed that any self-satisfied feminist academic who uses it should be exposed to 24 hours of Sam Shepard and David Mamet plays and Hemingway novels...)

*g*
We have:
"Gibst Du mir bitte den/die SalzsteuerInnen?"

Part of it is that I'm in the writing business. And then I'm told I can't write: "Mit einer Mannschaft von 30 Mitarbeitern" because our female readers would be alienated.

You know, I think that some of it is also just teething troubles. Fairly often a gender-neutral equivalent is found eventually; for instance, at Uni we always talk about "die Studierenden" now, which sounded awkward at first, but I now think it's a perfectly okay substitute for "die Studenten" or indeed "die StudentInnen".

Have you ever read that Mark Twain essay on grammatical gender in German? It's nasty but good fun. (Somehow I think Twain didn't like the German language very much.) I think it's this one here, although I haven't read through it in detail.

OMG, Thirith, I laughed so much I had tears in my eyes...

Especially the diary entry about the doctors successfully removing thirteen syllables from a patient.

The longest Austrian word is a title: "Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaft-Schifffahrtskapitän"
(with two extra f's in there thanks to the New German Spelling)

Twain's completely right, too.

I thought that the word "guy" was gender-neutral when I was a kid, just a nice informal way of referring to a person or group of people, "hey you guys." I was disappointed when I found out people looked at you funny when using "guy" for a single girl (rather than a group of girls.)

Now, I think of it as more of a masculine and/or plural sort of word.

(I was also disappointed when I found out "macho" could only refer to males, as it described the tough-guy behavior of my classmate Amanda so very well.)

quote:

Originally posted by Thirith & His Enormous Tibia:

(Anyway, I guess we all have our bugbears - I personally feel like screaming every time I read that oh-so-clever pun "Herstory"

yeah, and besides, everyone knows that the feminine of "history" is "hystery."

Absolutely hersterical...