General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: With all the anti-pornography talk, can we have a sex positive thread? [View all]Kurska
(5,739 posts)This is why I find your argument so extremely patronizing. You're telling women that despite how much they could possibly enjoy it, doing porn you personally find objectifying means they are exploited. The fact you're allowing a tiny bit of wiggle room in saying "they might not feel exploited though", doesn't change the fact you are essentially dictating the terms of their person to them.
"are men judged on the basis of their sexual attractiveness, in Western culture?"
um... yes they are. I could link you about 20 studies in 20 minutes that say that people vastly prefer attractive people to unattractive people, regardless of gender. Even babies prefer looking at attractive and symmetrical faces over unsymmetrical ones. Off the top of my head I've read studies that say attractive people are more likely to get a job, more likely to be helped by bystanders and are paid more for the same job than "ugly people". Given nothing but attractive or unattractive faces, people ascribe more positive personality attributes to attractive faces. This phenomenon is so common that it has it's own neat little moniker in social psychology "To people, what is beautiful is good". Again, this is commonly observed for both sexes, not just women. Our society is immensely vane and shallow towards everyone, men included. Empirical evidence says that if I was he-man adonis, I'd have an easier time finding a job in just about any field, including academia. Are women more affected by this phenomenon, probably, I can't tell you for sure I imagine it might depend heavily on the exact situation (as is often the case in things like this). I can tell you that I've seen the effect replicated over and over again for both women and men.
I'd link you academic articles about this, but unless you're currently affiliated with a university of some kind you probably wouldn't be able to read them.
For throwing out the whole "your argument is very poor" line, you don't appear to actually have investigated some of your core assumptions very deeply.