Objectification, Amsterdam Style

Last week, I was in Amsterdam for IDFA – the biggest film festival in the documentary world. In between film screenings and networking events, I would walk around town indulging in my favorite activity: street photography. What struck me the most was the ubiquity of ads that objectified both men and women: they were strikingly similar to those that I see every day around Paris. I somehow didn’t expect to find this in the Netherlands, a country that consistently ranks in the top 10 of gender equality nations and that is far more progressive and down to earth than France.

A couple of examples that were plastered all around town:

I’m thinking of starting a regular feature on this blog, posting offensive ads that I see around town (Paris, that is). Thoughts/suggestions?

Funny Ha-Ha or Just Plain Lame? (Vanity UNfair)

Entertainment Weekly’s blog has an interesting post about the latest issue of Vanity Fair.

Judd Apatow’s funny boys — Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, and Jonah Hill — “recreate” the sorta-famous Scarlett Johansson/Keira Knightley nude photo shoot for Vanity Fair this month, with Paul Rudd playing the role of the creepily lurking Tom Ford. Except, of course, they’re wearing nude body stockings. Because, of course, we wouldn’t really want to objectify them. It’s supposed to be funny, see.

The post’s author goes on to discuss the issue of female comedians and the debate on whether or not women can be funny. And the issue that some celebrated female comedians, who have recently become household names and received lots of acclaim (Tina Fey in primis) have actually been featured in Vanity Fair, wearing next to nothing and snapped in overtly sexy poses.

The post concludes:

So that leaves us with this: Men being objectified is so silly as to be hilarious, but it’s better if funny women are also hot. Or maybe it just leaves us to conclude that Vanity Fair has a lot of conflicted feelings to work out in magazine therapy. What do you think? Would you like to see the Apatow crew baring all? Would it be as funny a parody if female comedians did it?

(emphasis mine)

Read the full article here – highly recommended.

I had yet to write about the issue of female comedians, so this is the perfect opportunity. Something that terribly saddened me was the recent Vanity Fair issue (yeah, again, same culprit) with Tina Fey on its cover.

What does a hardworking, funny, brilliant – yet average looking – woman have to do to be taken seriously, get better and better assignments, and eventually be openly embraced by the mainstream? But of course, she needs a makeover!

Before:

And then, after the makeover is complete, she needs to show off her Most Important Assets.

After:

Could the Tina Fey of the “before” photos ever been featured on the cover of Vanity Fair, just as she was?

Pregnant pause.

Think.

Did it take you more than a nanosecond to come up with the answer “of course not”?

Because that is the obvious truth.

Because a female comedian cannot be appreciated just for her brains.

On the other hand, these two beauties (first on the far left and the guy between Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd) got a golden ticket to a Vanity Fair cover:

Princeton Study: “Men view half-naked women as objects”

From the Daily Princetonian.

Doug Eshleman writes:

Some men may view scantily clad women as objects rather than as people, a recent study found. The research, conducted by Princeton psychology professor Susan Fiske, Mina Cikara GS and Stanford psychology professor Jennifer Eberhardt, was performed on 21 undergraduate male students at the University who identified themselves as heterosexual. Fiske’s team used an MRI machine to scan the brains of the students while they viewed a series of photographs of men and women, some of whom were fully clothed and others of whom wore only swimsuits.

The pictures of bikini-clad women activated brain regions associated with objects or “things you manipulate with your hands,” Fiske said. The students also remembered the photos of the half-naked women better than they did any of the others, she added, noting that the subjects remembered the bodies, not the faces, most clearly. Fiske said the results indicated that some men may objectify or dehumanize partially clothed women, though further research is needed to confirm these findings.

[...]

“I think [the study] does relate to the effects of having pornography and sexualized images of women around and in the media because they spill over into how people treat women in general,” Fiske said, adding that these images may dehumanize women and encourage men to see them as objects. “You have to be aware of the effect of these images on people,” Fiske explained. “They’re not neutral. They do have an effect on how people think about other women.” 

 

Full article here.