I was watching an afternoon television show that very day. It showcased men tagged as hot, showing off their body and dancing sexily. Everyone was cheering on them and squealing. Keep in mind that this is live national television. They were almost half-naked and gyrating their pelvis. Everyone was still squealing.
This is the common trend I see on television shows. Men are purposely shown as sexy and as sex objects- making their body more valuable than their characteristics or traits. If not their body, they are charismatic to stir a love team. To make this short, men are objectified, and no one bats an eye, and if women are objectified, everyone gets angry. Hunk actors are even fantasized openly and publicly lately.
In comics, for example, no one seems to be bothered by the pose of Captain America and Spiderman in the cover of Amazing Spiderman No. 323 by Todd McFarlane, wherein the spandex-clad heroes’ muscles were bulging and then a variant cover of Spider-woman No. 1 by Milo Manara gets published, everyone gets stirred by the erotic posing of Jessica Drew. In the least talked about scene in Batman and Son, Batman gets drugged and sexually assaulted by Talia Al-Ghul resulting in the creation of Damian Wayne, and the Dark Night has to swallow it all. While everyone knows of the Killing Joke scene, Barbara Gordon is attacked and paralyzed, and the Joker takes her nude pictures. Both are terrible fates in their own sense.
Apparently, objectification and double standards do not just happen in media or literary pieces. There have been cases wherein men get sexually assaulted by women, and they cannot fight back because they should be, and they like it. Albeit the lower statistics men, 2.78 million male got raped (RAINN.ORG, 2019). They cannot make a case because, “They got lucky, didn’t they?”. In a study of University of Michigan (2019), men experience the same psychological trauma as women, and they tend to resort more to alcohol and drug abuse in order to cope up. The severity of the situation is also minimized since they are manipulated that they like what is happening because of their response.
I do not wish or intend to outweigh the former to the latter but to pave the way that both sexes are victims and can be victims. It’s not just a fight of one sex, but it is a fight for humanity. Although it is not a way to disregard the battle of Feminism, I do not want to be a hypocrite, they have come so far. Male objectification is the least talked about issue.
By Jeanne
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