Media Gives Men Sexual Fantasy and Female Nudity

DON'T WOMEN DESERVE BETTER THAN REDUCTION TO OUR SEXUAL BODIES AND LITTLE ELSE?

It seems to me that women have an obvious conundrum.

We live in a society that promotes freedom in general and freedom of expression. Businesses have the freedom to create and sell whatever products they want and the public has a right to buy or not buy them.

We live in a society where men make lots and lots of entertainment products that show women in ways that men enjoy fantasizing about:  they like imagery and language of women as “whores,’ they like to see female nudity and scanty clothing, and they like putting themselves in the sexually dominant role, with women as weak, sexualized objects that men are superior to and can fuck, harm or discard as they see fit. 

Yet women are, by and large, very much into accentuating the positive. We try to be pretty, nice and polite. We try to keep up with the fashion trends and pop culture trends and be good mothers, girl friends and wives. We volunteer, we go to therapy, we are spiritual, we count calories.  Overall, we try to do good in the world. And in our spare time, we are not watching naked men in our video games or in our TV entertainment. We are not watching penises get erect when we earn enough points or find a secret tool that we can rub on an image in a game.  We don’t even want to see games where we would be killing men and mutilating them, after sexually dominating and humiliating them. 

And yet women do want social equality and equal rights.  We want to be respected as more than just our body’s sexual viability to male assessors. And many women want to end domestic violence and sexual violence against women.

But how can any of those things happen in a society that lets men regularly buy and consume the media that they like, with all the stuff they get to see done to women? Particularly in a world that does not ever show sexual stuff being done to men in a graphic, erotic and/or humiliating and degradading way?

Here is just one little example (there are countless, thousands, millions of examples):

NOTE: The following is copied from the imdb.com parental guide description.

Dishonored (2012) (VG)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2322244/parentalguide

Sex & Nudity

2/10

The game depicts some sexual/suggestive dialogue (e.g., Hey sweetheart, you want to play with me? You're a lot cuter than my regulars, Sell your wife into prostitution and I'm sure I can get you a good price.)

One level in the game is set in a brothel and this includes sight of scantily clad women.

There is a sequence in which the player encounters an older man sitting in an electric shock device blindfolded, he apparently derives some pleasure from the shocks, which the player is able to administer during interrogation.

The character will explore brothels where women are dressed suggestively and occasional moaning can be heard through walls and they are referred to in the game as "whores".

During some downtime between missions, Corvo comes across a loyalist who is peeping on a servant girl who is taking a bath. After confronting the man, Corvo can walk right in on the woman and have a conversation with her while she is naked, no private parts are shown however.

<end of IMDB parental guide excerpt of that video game>

There is not one single video game made like that for women like me to enjoy. I would love to be able to make a male video game character’s penis grow erect by earning points or by having him tied in a chair where I have tools to manipulate his body with my game controls.  I would love to be rewarded by images of men undressing, and if I am doing really well in the game, I get full frontal and maybe the option to go into a room with him and make him do whatever I want… bend over, put a broom handle in his butt, or whatever. Not because the images turn me on, necessarily, but because the power and dominance of being able to does. That's my fantasy. And if guys can buy games that let them fantasize about their sexual prowess over women and let them fantasize that women are just stupid whores and sluts, why can’t I buy a video game that lets me fantasize about men in a similar way?

But they don’t make games like that for women, for two reasons:  1) They are probably right in assuming that not enough women will buy it, so it’s not economical to produce and try to sell a game like that;  and 2) Men are the ones making the games. Why would a group of men in the business of making video games ever want to produce a game like that?

The answer to women’s rights is also two-fold:  1) women have to be willing to want to see guys naked and sexualized.  Until women start understanding that having access to male erotica for female enjoyment is one of the BIGGEST things keeping us from social equality with men, men will continue to have entitlements over women, thus making them higher up the social hierarchy than women, just based on their sex alone. Until women drive demand for male erotica and nudity, it will always remain that women are the “sex” of the planet while men are valued for other things outside of their sexuality.  And by extension, that makes males superior and women inferior (yes, ladies, when men think of women as whores and bitches, it’s not a compliment).

and 2) Women need to be the entrepreneurs creating this stuff.  We need to drive demand and create the stuff. No on is going to do it for us. And, we can get rich doing it too, just like the men do, if we drive demand and encourage girls and women to see how much this sexual divide keeps us from our true power and real social equality.

Women deserve sexual fantasy in our video games and other media entertainment too, don’t we? And yet, our society only panders to male sexual desires, which sends the message loud and clear that what women want doesn’t matter, and that no way in hell are we allowed to sexualize males for our enjoyment. That would upset the balance of power and the perceived hierarchy that men have over women. And yet, we still have the conundrum.  Women don’t really want to focus on the horror of humanity. We don’t want to humiliate and degrade men.  So we probably never will focus our work lives on doing that.  And in our free time, we like to do yoga and lift ourselves up, not degrade ourselves by watching nasty things done to men in porn and video games.

And yet, we continue to allow men to have these things.  And when you look around you at work, and on the bus, and on the street, and in the opera house, men look so civilized, don’t they? The dark entertainments of men don’t show up in the light of everyday society, other than in the huge amounts of women being abducted and harmed and by domestic violence.  On the surface, men seem so nice, funny and smart. And normal.  And yet, we know from the reported statistics that most boys access XXX hardcore porn by age 11, and that video games are a multi-billion dollar industry, and that porn is still one of the biggest businesses on the face of the earth. The only way all that happens is if a very large proportion of the males on our planet are engaging in these media diversions. And their wives and girlfriends and regular female citizens are letting that happen by being tolerant with it and allowing it to go on without so much as a whimper about it (although there is plenty of female moaning and whimpering going on in these very sexualized video games and porn on TV and the Internet).

We live in a society that encourages women to always strive to be better than we are, and we are provided with a great many ways to do so.  Men on the other hand, are seldom told to challenge themselves to give up their misogyny attitudes, or to stop watching porn for the sake of their families, or to lay off the horribly sexual and violent video games and to stay out of strip clubs.  No, instead we teach the mantra, “Boys will be boys.”  All that is is a license for men and developing young men to accept their disposition and indulge in it however they want, and tells women that it is pointless to try to change anything.

And yet, you watch how fast men will retaliate and respond if women ever start creating media that sexualizes, demoralizes, and humiliates men, all for female empowerment and entertainment/enjoyment purposes.

So what’s it going to be, ladies?  To save the human race and to have the quality of life and respect that women deserve and have earned for centuries and eons, are you willing to sexualize men as much as they do us?  Or, are you so complacent that you will just sit back while the next generation of sons start playing games like Dishonored and watching XXX porn that show what women are “really like,” which is what the aggregate of how women are in media would obviously look to an impressionable, searching young male. Why don’t we address the truth: that one of males’ biggest fears is that women are whores. That is such projection, since it truly is men who are “whores” although yes, some women do make their living that way, but it is not like any woman really wants to do that.  But men fear that ALL women are whores, which is why so many are controlling and rage-out with women, or have the need to see it in movies and games, to comfort and validate their world-view belief.

There is now a sequel to that video game, Dishonored 2.  The commercial for it, which I saw this morning, is what led to this blog post, after I looked up the description of the game on the IMDB parental guide.