520. An Irrational, Unjustified And Outrageous Distinction

520.   An Irrational, Unjustified And Outrageous Distinction

Under German law, being caught having child pornography on his computer usually suffices to send a man to jail.    But any man is legally free to consume as much pornography as pleases him, as long as the abused objects in the pictures are above a minimal age.  

The prohibition of child pornography is justified by its goal to prevent abuse.   Pornography has been produced by the abuse of real life children and there is the probability that consuming pornography is the first step of lowering the threshold towards subsequent real life abuse.      

This makes perfect sense.   But it makes just as much sense concerning grown up women.    Restricting this form of prevention to the protection of children cannot be rationally justified.   It is an absurd outrage to deny to women the same entitlement to be spared abuse by all possible methods of prevention, which are recognized as necessary for children.    

1.  Abuse is as bad for women as it is for children.

Any man of average physical strength has sufficient physical power to force the same amount of harm upon a woman of average strength as he has to force it upon children.    Women have no better chances to defend themselves against physical violence than have children.   Women are as much at the mercy of men's civilized self-control as are children.       

Any variety of real life abuse, no matter if rape, manipulation, taking advantages of someone's helpless and dependent situation or apparent self-objectification, is enabled by the abuser's mental process towards replacing inhibitions, self-control and restrictions by subjective justifications and excuses.  

The first step in this mental process is objectification.   (More about the perceptive objectification in entry 519.)    Objectification is an attitude concerning the essence and quality of other humans, which usually follows desensitization until the abuser's perception is distorted.   The abuser is void of the ability to perceive other humans as persons with human dignity, instead they are only perceived as objects, utilities, commodities.  

While some people objectify others due to some mental defect in their brain, like psychopathy, objectification is also the unavoidable result of desensitization and habituation.  This can happen both by the passive observation of role models abusing other human beings and by actively participating in and practicing abuse.    When women and children are objectified as existing for the purpose to be used sexually, pornography is one major source of this effect.  

There is always the hazard of objectification, because a body is perceived as a visible object, while the personality, the qualities of the mind are not directly visible.  Their discovery is only accessible indirectly by communication.    Therefore there is an unfortunate vicious circle.   Any attempt to communicate requires at least a minimal expectation of the other's ability to communicate as a person.   Nobody expects to communicate with an object.   Objectification precludes communication, while communication can reduce objectification.   Thus, once there is objectification, it reinforces itself further by the loss of any chance to rediscover the person hidden inside of what is perceived as an object.   

2.  No differences justify abusing women more than children.

Objectification includes the general fallacy of believing in and accepting, that the alleged purpose of the objectified person's existence is being used.   Whenever abuse of women becomes normal, common and regular behavior, some men are not even aware of the alternative of appreciating, noticing and recognizing women's mind and personality.  

This fatal process, that pornography leads first to desensitization and objectification and then to lowering the threshold towards real life abuse is the same, no matter if the degraded human being is a woman or a child.   Any distinction cannot be rationally justified.   Whenever men justify such a distinction, it is based upon a fallacy.

Male fallacy 1:  

When the victim is a woman, biologically her body is apt for male homeostation, while a child's is not.  This difference leads to the fatal fallacy, that abusing a woman's body as an object for sexual homeostation is often considered as less evil, less harmful and less traumatizing.    

The implicit implication of this fallacy is an outrage.   Those men, who objectify women by perceiving and believing, that women's ultimate purpose is to serve men's needs for homeostation, often also see nothing as really wrong in getting the fulfillment of this purpose by hook or by crook from reluctant and resistant women.    It is a monstrous fallacy to believe, that forcing women into their alleged natural purpose is more acceptable than forcing something upon a child, who is not considered to exist for the same purpose.      

Male fallacy 2. 

There is one difference between children and women:  Only women can be made to appear preempting male objectification by self-objectification, while children are usually accepted as being too young for consent.

The general male fallacy, that women exist for their homeostation is reinforced by the subsequent fallacy of believing in some women's apparent free choice of self-objectification.   Men often succeed to usurp control over resources for survival and they use this control to coerce women by dire necessity into submission to the objectification.   When hopelessness and resignation cause women to refrain from resistance to their fate, this is often mistaken as agreement.   This alleged choice of self-objectification facilitates the abuse and it allows men to condone and justify the objectification of women.    Manipulating women to comply by self-objectification is in reality a part of men's strategy and method to succeed in achieving the benefits of objectification with the least effort.

Male fallacy 3.

Some women are as much the unhappy victims of their instincts as are men, they too are feeling the urges of dishomeostasis.  This female dishomeostasis is the unfulfilled breeding instinct.    These women only appear superficially to cooperate with men's objectification by self-objectification.   It is men's fallacy to misinterpreted it as women's acceptance of existing to serve men.  In reality, these women's self-objectification is their method to restore homeostasis by becoming pregnant.   

Once they have reached their breeder's homeostation, they have no longer any reason to continue the self-objectification to men.   These men are dissatisfied when the women's breeding homeostation ends the men's recurrent sexual homeostation.  The women continue the self-objectification, but they shift the target away from the men and towards the slavery of raising the children. 

Objectification of people is not restricted to sexual abuse.   Whenever someone reduces his evaluation of a human being to the benefits and advantages to be derived from a utility, this is a form of objectification.    Whenever self-objectification blurs the awareness of both the abusers and of the victims for the true outrage, this perpetuates the abuse.  

When a person is forced by slavery to labor for the owner's profit, the objectification of slaves cannot be denied.    Therefore when and where slavery was abolished, it was done based upon the acceptance of the principle, that no human being exists for the purpose to be used for another person's economic benefits.   

It is time to abolish all sexual abuse too by this principle:

No human being, no matter if child or grown up woman, exists for the purpose to be used for men's homeostation. 

Apparent self-objectification is no ethical justification for the objectification of human beings.

 

A man, whose self-worth and self-esteem depends on his own correct and decent behavior only, refuses to participate in any objectification of women, even in spite of alleged and apparent female self-objectification.    Unfortunately, such men are a minority of men, they are the ethical quality elite.  

The majority of men are gullible and self-deceiving by willingly mistaking any appearance of women's self-objectification as sufficient justification for abusing women.   As long as they can maintain their false belief in female self-objectification, they allow themselves to feel decent and no jerks.  

They are oblivious of being jerks and abusers, when they objectify women directly as users of prostitute's bodies or indirectly by consuming the actors' images in pornography.  They really believe the absurd myth, that women prefer this form of earning an income over a decent job, where they could use their brain instead of their body.   It needs a lot of moronity in men to really believe such a myth.       

519. The Effects Of Desensitization On Perception

519.   The Effects Of Desensitization On Perception

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120515131719.htm

"everywhere you look, women's sexualized bodies are on display. A new study  [....] finds that both men and women see images of sexy women's bodies as objects, while they see sexy-looking men as people.

Psychological research has worked out that our brains see people and objects in different ways.

Pictures of people present a recognition problem when they're turned upside down, but pictures of objects don't have that problem.

People recognized right-side-up men better than upside-down men, suggesting that they were seeing the sexualized men as people. But the women in underwear weren't any harder to recognize when they were upside down -- which is consistent with the idea that people see sexy women as objects. There was no difference between male and female participants."

This study shows the real devastating harm caused by the social norm of the oversexation of society together with the media exposing everybody to its impact, even those, who do not wish to be desensitized.  

The results are scary.   Not only is the objectification limited to female bodies, but even worse, this perception is shared by the women.   

Taking into account men's physiological need for recurrent sexual homeostation as a biological reality supplies an explanation for the impact of the overwhelming influence of the ubiquitous desensitization by the media as far as it concerns men.   

Theoretically, men have different options of how to cope with this necessity.  There is the choice of either being a companion in committed monogamy or physical and virtual promiscuity.  This choice is determined by the emotional and intellectual influences of education and culture.  (In entry 101 -  Promiscuity is a Scourge of Humanity - I considered the existence of a promiscuity inhibition that predisposes people to pair bonding, until it is destroyed by desensitization.)   

But the desensitization by the oversexation of the media has deprived many men of a real choice, it leaves them only the two varieties of abuse by objectification of women's bodies, which is virtual promiscuity by the exposition to pornographic pictures and real promiscuity by copulating like dogs from the gutter.   They are desensitized to the state of complete oblivion of the fact, that women's objectified bodies contain a personality inside.    

Unfortunately for the women, the objectification of female bodies gives a huge benefit for their most primitive instincts to all those men, who are unaware of what they are losing by depriving themselves of the higher quality human benefits of emotional pair bonding.     

It is much more difficult to explain, why the women share the effect as is shown in the study.  Being degraded and abused as objects can certainly not be declared as beneficial to women by any person aware of the fact, that women have a personality, a mind, a cognition inside the body.    

Men's control over the media not only favors their own desensitization motivated by the urges of their instincts, obviously it also enables men to manipulate stupid and even average women into self-harming compliance with being used and degraded.   

It cannot rationally be denied, that many women today present their exterior in public in a way, that functions as a very strong appeal to elicit male instincts.  Many women are radiating the unequivocal message of being available as objects.   

This description of facts does not imply, that these women are consciously wanting, accepting or tolerating to be abused or to be the intended target of abuse.   They are the victims of the same devastating desensitization by the media as are the men.  But these women are double victims.  In addition to being the victims of male abuse, they are also the victims of themselves by enabling and contributing to the male abuse.  

The oversexation and objectification by the media has several effects upon women.  These effects are reinforcing each other:

Men have economic power and under extreme circumstances even physical power enabling them to supply for or withhold from women the means for survival and for a higher and more comfortable standard of life.  These men often use their power to coerce and manipulate women to serve their needs for homeostation.   

Whenever women subjectively experience the scarcity of men offering attractive resources,  they are prone to compete by deliberately sending triggers to men's instincts.  The strongest signals are considered as the best strategy to gain access to their resources.  It is a competition by self-objectification.    

People are at the risk of being oblivious of those effects, which never elicit any reactive behavior.   This is also the case for women, who do not usually experience male instinctive reactions to existing triggers, only because there is the contrast of other, even stronger triggers.    A woman in decent shorts and a t-shirt is the probable prey, when the alternative is a woman under a shador.   But the same woman has a good chance to be spared annoyance, when the alternative is a woman in a tiny bikini.  

Some women's competition for triggering men's instincts has led to a dangerous and dysfunctional extent of the self-sexualization of nearly all women, no matter if this helps or hinders their real intentions.  Fashion for average women has currently reached a generally accepted and tolerated amount of lascivity, that is biased to accommodate only the competition of the self-objectified women.  

For those other women, who do neither want to trigger instincts, nor to sell themselves nor to be abused, it hides men's true hazardous extent of susceptibility to triggers.  These women are only spared to experience themselves as triggering instincts as long as they are compared with those doing worse on purpose.  

Being a bit less lascivious does not protect them from being abused by desensitized men, whenever there is nobody else to serve as a stronger trigger.  By the general desensitization, these women are made unaware of how contra-productive this is to their real goals.     Being less lascivious than the extreme desensitized average is still too much, when a woman wants to attract a man with her brain and her personality. 

The more a woman is intelligent, educated and cultured, the more she is aware of the potential for the emotional benefits of a deep and dignified bonding with an intellectual companion and the more she suffers when degraded and objectified.   The ubiquitous oversexation is predominant in those media, which are catering mostly for the low and medium education level of the majority and not for the critical minority holding an elevated education.   
Thus the majority of women is encouraged to attempt selling their bodies as an acceptable way of getting advantages.   They are manipulated to not feel bad about selling themselves.  This attitude is enhanced in the media by omitting entirely the alternative of the true non-physical benefits of the monogamous companionship from women's awareness.   

The majority of women are not only kept ignorant and unaware, but they are manipulated to feel good about themselves as they are.   
They are the majority, and they have a detrimental impact on what is considered standard, normal and thus justifiable for all women.

I was wondering about the women participating in the study.  Do they really perceive all women as objects whenever presented visually as sexualized or do they distinguish between themselves as different from whom they would consider self-objectified and self-sexualized?  

Which led me to find the published original study, which suggests the female students could indeed be lacking to identify with the sexualized targets of the study:

https://dipot.ulb.ac.be/dspace/bitstream/2013/107553/1/Bernard%20et%20al.%20%282012%29.%20The%20sexualized%20body-inversion%20hypothesis.pdf

"Seventy-eight university students (41 men, 37 women; mean age = 20.5 years, SD = 2.7 years)

This suggests that, at a basic cognitive level, sexualized men were perceived as persons, whereas sexualized women were perceived as objects. Future research should examine why people perceive sexualized women as objects. One may expect that object-like recognition of women could be explained by a lack of identification with sexualized women among female participants and by sexual attraction among male participants

our findings showed no differences related to participant gender, which suggests that cultural beliefs that women are sex objects are shared by both men and women at a basic cognitive level."