objectification

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When My Body Wasn’t My Own

TW: mentions of SA, dissociation

Growing up in a conservative household, I was constantly told to cover up because of men’s “wandering eyes”. I was taught that if I were to be sexually assaulted, it would have been my fault, instead of the person who sexually assaulted me. Out of fear, I obliged, wearing modest clothes throughout my childhood, convinced that I could never be safe. My mother also told me to speak properly, to never talk back to elders or men, and to hold my tounge if I was uncomfortable. In Throwing Like a Girl, Iris Marion Young describes how women move with “inhibited intentionality”, we know we can act, but we feel like we shouldn’t. That was my childhood: constantly silencing and covering myself to make myself more palatable for men. These habits became ingrained in me, because for so long, they were all I knew to do.

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Objectification of Women in Anime

Last night I started rewatching an anime called “Soul Eater”. When I first watched the show in Middle School I easily fell in love with it and binge-watched the show over the course of 3 weeks. I found the show interesting with its storyline and also loved the two main characters, Maka and Soul. I just started rewatching the show last night and the way that I’m only less than 10 episodes in and the amount of fan service is actually ridiculous. I know you guys probably know what I mean by “fan service” but it’s basically the “material in a work of fiction or in a fictional series that is intentionally added to please the audience, often sexual in nature, such as nudity.” Fan-service in anime is really common and I feel as though it’s especially common in anime’s that are action based like Fire Force, Fairy Tail, One Piece, Seven Deadly Sins, etc. I think the reason why most action-based anime have a lot of fan service is because the majority of viewers are male.

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The Worst Hookup I’ve Ever Had (clickbait)

A screencap from Phineas & Ferb. Dr. Doofenshmirtz is pictured surrounded by robots and staring down a sock puppet of a dog. The captions have been altered to say "If I had a nickel for every time a hookup made situationally inappropriate comments about my body while I rejected them, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice."
The Phineas & Ferb Dr Doofenshmirtz “two nickels” meme. The text has been altered to say “If I had a nickel for every time a hookup made situationally inappropriate comments about my body while I rejected them, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice.”

Okay, so this isn’t actually about the hookup itself. Sorry about the clickbait, but I promise nothing too terribly interesting happened anyway. It’s about what happened after– not immediately after the act, but the part where I reject them and find a nice neutral way to say “yeah the sex was fine, I’m not super interested in continuing tho” and move on with my life. I would have titled this the worst breakup but it wasn’t really a breakup, it was just uncomfortable.

Anyway, last November I hooked up with a person, we had a short lived friends with benefits arrangement (what a stupid term, friend with benefits… but I digress) and then I accidentally-on-purpose ghosted them because they got clingy and I was not interested in a relationship with them. (I usually communicate with people clearly instead of ghosting, we ARE trying to heal after all. This situation was unique, I said I needed time/space and then I honestly forgot that something needed to be said. Oops.) Well, by the time I actually talked to them again, they asked if I was ready to date yet and I finally just said I wasn’t interested, at which point they found it appropriate to say “fucked around and caught feelings…p*ssy too bomb! haha” and a few more vague references to the hooking up throughout the conversation WHILE I was actively rejecting them (i cannot make this up, if i still had the screenshots i’d post them here.) I don’t remember the specifics of the conversation but that one line is BURNED into my brain because. Wow. I cannot believe it needs to be said but don’t talk about my body while I’m rejecting you? 

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“Boobs Don’t Work That Way”

Has anyone come across this tumblr? I really like it.

“Okay, so we want two sexy women on the front cover. Both with tops that don’t cover much and you know what? Maybe one of them is pants-less. Yeah! And have them pose in a really sexy way. Woah, woah woah! What is that? Did you just draw nipples? That’s too far man. Children read these things."

“Boobs Don’t Work That Way” is a “blog about tits and the impossible things artists make them do,” according to the homepage. And it delivers! Each of the 22 pages features numerous renderings of women and their breasts, or I should say, their impossible breasts. Because let’s face it, friends, Real Breasts Don’t Work This Way.

Conversations about our breast-obsessed culture are not new or radical. We know we love breasts, and it doesn’t take a lot of looking around to be reminded of this fact. Breasts are all over the place! On billboards, commercials, movies, magazines, and oh yes, on many of the women we encounter every day. For a lot of us in women’s bodies, we’ve experienced having a conversation with a man and noticing his eyes conversing with our breasts, rather than our faces. I noticed this for the first time when I was about thirteen.

What “Boobs Don’t Work That Way” does that I love is expose some of the absurdity of our breast obsession. Artistic depictions of women’s breasts are often realistic, but this tumblr gives us a cache of the ones that are NOT. And it is refreshing to see someone make fun of these pictures! I mean, they’re so ridiculous! If I were an alien from another world, what would I think if I saw all these pictures? Would I think women have globes of flesh attached to their chests, devoid of nipples? Would I think these globes are perfectly round and humongous compared to their waists? Would I think these globes were detachable? Some of these breasts look like they’re about to fall right off the women who possess them.

And what is particularly interesting about that point what it brings to mind about embodiment. Women who have breasts experience their breasts are part of their bodies, as part of their embodied selves. Women bring their breasts everywhere with them (maybe if they had a choice, they wouldn’t?). Yet pictures like this one obscure this reality. These breasts are for display and affect, and give no indication that they are experienced for any reason other than to tantalize the viewer.