How Women Objectify Men

[–]kanuk876[🍰] 7 points8 points9 points 14 years ago* (0 children) | Copy Link

Let me help y'all with the secret inverse-of-what-they-say-is-true decoder ring:

Just as men are prone to treating women as objects, it’s also possible—although much less talked-about—for women to treat men as objects. Are the effects of this sin as devastating as the effects of porn? ~~Maybe not.~~ The effects are worse because they undermine the fundamental emotional foundation for the love she feels for her partner.

...

Even while women can certainly struggle with lust, and are capable of reducing a man to a body she covets, most of the time that sort of objectification is a man’s struggle, not a woman’s. Women lust after status and power instead.

...

a woman who loves a bad man is a miserable woman, and that’s certainly ~~his fault~~ her fault for seeking out, choosing and staying with him. She is a grown woman and has the power to stay or leave at will. ~~He should want to make her happy, and he should try to figure out how to do it.~~ She is responsible for her own happiness, for she is the ONLY person who can make her happy. Putting the onus of her happiness on him is both unfair and doomed to failure.

...

that the Church encourages ~~men to treat their wives with respect~~ women to treat their men with DISrespect —but let’s not take more than we’re entitled to.

Fixed that for ya.

As a side note: if articles like this are making it into the mainstream, you know things are bad. Why? Because one of the great laws of female culture is, "Thou Shalt Not Hang Out Female Dirty Laundry Where Men Might See It."

[–]rantgrrl 2 points3 points4 points 14 years ago (20 children) | Copy Link

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point2 points 14 years ago (19 children) | Copy Link

[–]rantgrrl 0 points1 point2 points 14 years ago (18 children) | Copy Link

Of course misandry and misogyny can't co-exist.

It's umpossible.

in order to make their message appealing to female parishioners

That's interesting. Because the church congregation has been female dominated for centuries.

Did you ever conceive that maybe this alpha male of the flock thing is actually attractive to women, and not so much to the large number of men who are inevitably not the alpha male?

Also the man being the head of the family means, in practice, that he's made responsible for his wife's actions in a way that is frankly abusive. To him.

Another thought is this. If men need to be superior to women but women do not need to be submissive to men, then that's just another need that women provide men and men can be controlled through. When he does the right thing, he gets a submissive wife... when he does the wrong thing... He's going to be made responsible for her behavior regardless. Which actually, if you really think about it, gives her a hell of a lot of power.

And if men don't need to be superior, then, well, it sounds like a lot of a hassle for no reward.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point2 points 14 years ago (17 children) | Copy Link

Prior to the 20th century, women were considered legally subordinate under men, such that crimes they would commit would reflect on their husbands, debts they would incur would be the responsibility of their husbands, and property they inherited would become their husbands' property. Some women had a bit of freedom and agency to act on their own behalf, but those were relatively few, and mainly poor. In fact, the farther up the social ladder you go back in history, the less agency women had--noble women would practically be promised away at birth, to solidify family ties and continue royal lines and whatnot.

The Church came out of that societal milieu; they combined practical family issues (divorce, inheritance, etc.) with high-minded philosophical concepts (celibacy/chastity, institutional patriarchy, etc.). Remember that in the early Church, priests were married; it wasn't until one of the later councils (Council of Trent? I can't remember) that priests were made celibate. That decision itself split the priesthood off of normal manhood; instead of being productive members of the community, priests "retired" from the community and withdrew into monasteries and celibate endeavors. In some sense, they were a bit of a third gender, at least until the Protestant Reformation.

So all those rules about males heading up the house as God heads up the Church were simply ways of codifying what was already the practice of the land; only certain men could own land as property, but almost all men could have wives as property. There was serfdom, slavery, genocide, and violence all through the Dark Ages, along with witch-burnings and Inquisitions even into the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. I'm not saying that the bible's right, I'm just saying that the institutions explicitly favored men. Not implicitly, not suggestively, but actually legally made them superior to women. You might say that among nobles, men had to work hard and fight and die while women got to stay home, but nobles were like 5% of the population; the vast majority of European peasants lived lives that were "nasty, brutish, and short," both men and women.

[–]rantgrrl 0 points1 point2 points 14 years ago (16 children) | Copy Link

You are mashing up all sorts of stuff here.

Are we talking about Common Law marriage, are we talking about Coverture? Are we talking about the Renaissance? Are we talking about Victorian England? The High middle ages? What?

Did you know that it was coverture that instituted the idea that a woman's person becomes subsumed into that of her husband? And that was after common law that held men and women, even in marriage, to be somewhat separate legal entities?

I'll address one massive factual error. Women were never property. At worst they were wards like children are today.

I want you to attempt to prove your assertion that women were property with first order sources. For example, you could attempt to find bills of sale from 'white female slave markets' in Europe (don't mistake this with the folk custom of wife 'selling' which was a consensual form of divorce for those who couldn't afford a legal one.)

Go forth. Support your assertion.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point2 points 14 years ago (15 children) | Copy Link

You are mashing up all sorts of stuff here.

Are we talking about Common Law marriage, are we talking about Coverture? Are we talking about the Renaissance? Are we talking about Victorian England? The High middle ages? What?

Of course, you would be confused by the progress of human and individual rights over the course of two thousand years of human interaction in the West.

I'll address one massive factual error. Women were never property. At worst they were wards like children are today.

The general tendency of human rights since the fall of the Roman Empire has been (with a few exceptions) towards more individual and human rights as time progressed. If you look back to marriage and family law of ancient Rome, a wife certainly was property, along with her children, to the extent that a husband could in certain instances be judge, jury, and executioner to his entire family. Did that statute remain static for 2000 years afterwards? OF COURSE NOT. But the foundational precepts of Roman law have remained a cornerstone of western marriage tradition.

I want you to attempt to prove your assertion that women were property with first order sources.

What?? Are you high? I think you mean secondary sources here...

For example, you could attempt to find bills of sale from 'white female slave markets' in Europe

Oh. No--you were trying to be serious. Well, let me just hop on a plane to Avignon, take a few high quality pictures of some incredibly rare medieval French manuscripts about femme sole vs. femme covert, write a scholarly article about it, get it published, and then shove my personal copy of that article up your ass and light it on fire. I'm not here to do your work for you.

Frankly, I'm boggled by the fact that you actually dispute the concept that women were property in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, when practically everybody except the pope was somebody's property. It's so obscenely widely held that vassalage and peerage, apprenticeship, the Church, political leaders, the slave trade, witch-hunting manuals like the Malleus Malificarum, and other institutions had vastly restricted human rights for women, even below that of men, that you trying to deny it is an exceedingly extraordinary claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so the onus is quite clearly on you to prove that women weren't property to be used at the behest of men, in the same way that men were property to be used at the behest of their noble lord, and later their state.

Please, tell me that Lady Radegund wasn't taken as a legal hostage and duly married in accordance with the Catholic Church in order to substantiate Frankish Catholicism in Thuringia in the 500's. Please, inform me why the ancient tradition of Turkish enslavement of Eastern European women ) (hey--they were white, too!) lasted until the 19th century, when those women obviously weren't being treated as property for the 2000 years prior. I mean, it's not like we even get our term "slave" from Slav, the group of haggard Eastern European tribes that were routinely pillaged for slaves, both male and female, during the Roman Empire and later Medieval courts.

And please, provide me with some rationale for explaining why medieval marriage laws, vassalage, and peerage somehow did not apply to women, seeing as they were both bound by law courts, required to serve at the behest of their lords and ladies, and beholden to their guilds and nunneries. I'm not saying that men didn't also have these same restrictions--they did. But you're insane to think that the extreme dearth of individual freedom and self-determination that marks the slow crawl of western society out of the Dark Ages somehow managed to completely miss women, all the evidence to the contrary that has been piled up over decades of primary and secondary research.

Go forth. Support your assertion.

[–]rantgrrl -1 points0 points1 point 14 years ago (14 children) | Copy Link

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point2 points 14 years ago (13 children) | Copy Link

[–]rantgrrl 0 points1 point2 points 14 years ago (12 children) | Copy Link

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point2 points 14 years ago (11 children) | Copy Link

If bride prices are buying a wife then is a dowery buying a husband?

Actually, if you even bothered to look up dowry, even if just to find that you had misspelled it, you would know that it's an added monetary incentive that the bride's family pays to the man so that he will take the woman in marriage. Men were seen to have inherent worth and status that women were not, and so did not have to bring forth anywhere near as great a marriage gift.

Child marriages to boys or girls?

The average age that a man married in the Middle Ages was from 25-40; the average age that a "woman" married was 12-18, quite clearly in order to inculcate the husband's values on the impressionable girl. For more on that subject, see Georges Duby's The Knight, The Lady, and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France.

Hell, few people married prior to two centuries ago.

You obviously don't know what you're talking about, so stop making it worse. Marriage was enshrined as an institution in canonical and secular law as early as the 1100's in Europe, and shortly thereafter in England. Prior to that, common marriage law (like Salic law codes) held both women and children to be property of their husbands, as per the Roman tradition that people in the early middle ages carried on. I just got done with a course on this last semester, so you're really not going to get one up on me.

[–]rantgrrl1 point 14 years ago [recovered] | Copy Link

[–][deleted]1 point 14 years ago [recovered] | Copy Link

Nothing in your link supports your interpretation of dowRY. Did you actually read what you linked to?

I don't know--did you?

A dowry may also have served as a form of protection for the wife against the possibility of ill treatment by her husband and his family.[4] In other words, the dowry provides an incentive to the husband not to harm his wife.

Sounds pretty spot on to what I was saying. Men were only tangentially benefitted by having a wife--certain political positions were not open to bachelors. Women, on the other hand, literally had no say in the disposition of their own inheritances without either a father, a maternal uncle, or a husband. Women whose families either couldn't afford or didn't see fit to marry them off usually ended up in nunneries, if they were of noble birth; if they were poor... well, there are socio-economic reasons why witch-burnings were so much more prevalent than warlock-burning. It's even in the latin of the term Malleus Malificarum--hammer of female witches.

So this wife-as-property ended prior to the 1100s. That's quite a bit different than your strong implication that wives were property till the end of the 19th century.

And again, for you, if a statute or cultural practice doesn't remain completely static after 2000 years of human history, the rise and fall of multiple empires and regional/national powers, then obviously that statute must not exist at all!

In parts of world today there are still arranged marriages, child-bride marriages, violent sublimation of women by legal restrictions both inside and outside of marriage, and the ritual murder of women and wives for abrogating these rules. Are you going to tell them that that whole "wife-as-property" bit was just a myth?

And I'm not even focusing on the insanity of the developing world; here in the west, women had to legally change their names to their husband's name in order to be recognized on legal documents as late as the early 20th century. Even freed slaves got to live under their own chosen names before women did. In various arenas--law, culture, religion, etc.--women have been given the rights duly accorded to men far slower, and are only now, after 2000 years, able to exercise those rights in any meaningful way. That's not to say there aren't exceptions to that general principle of female sublimation under wifehood; but exceptions aren't a rule.

So again--I'm looking for that convincing evidence that literally decades of scholarly study on female sublimation in marriage is wrong. I'll take anything you got--primary sources (maybe those bills of sale for white female slaves under the Ottoman slave trade that you so cheerily forgot about?), secondary sources (please tell me how eminent scholars like Georges Duby have just been mistaken all these years), tertiary sources (got a website you can link to? Maybe a series of tubes?), quaternary sources (hell, at this point, I'll even take common sense)...

Come on. Go forth and support your assertion. I'm waiting.

[–]rantgrrl1 point 14 years ago [recovered] | Copy Link

[–][deleted]1 point 14 years ago [recovered] | Copy Link

[–]rantgrrl2 points 14 years ago [recovered] | Copy Link

[–][deleted]1 point 14 years ago [recovered] | Copy Link

[–]rantgrrl1 point 14 years ago [recovered] | Copy Link

Sounds pretty spot on to what I was saying.

This is what you said: "Men were seen to have inherent worth and status that women were not, and so did not have to bring forth anywhere near as great a marriage gift."

Here is the first 'function' of dowry:

One function dowry to may be to provide the husband with "seed money" or property for the establishment of a new household and to help feed and protect the family. Another to provide the wife and children some support if he were to die. Still another function may be as compensation for bride price.[3]

The reason why dowery was given was to help the husband support his wife and family. It was expected to benefit her and her children in case he couldn't.

Women, on the other hand, literally had no say in the disposition of their own inheritances without either a father, a maternal uncle, or a husband.

Here is where the issue of when and where becomes pertinent. A femme solo certainly did have control over her own inheritance. So what time period are you talking about?

Women whose families either couldn't afford or didn't see fit to marry them off usually ended up in nunneries, if they were of noble birth; if they were poor... well, there are socio-economic reasons why witch-burnings were so much more prevalent than warlock-burning. It's even in the latin of the term Malleus Malificarum--hammer of female witches.

This sounds like complete nonsense. Feel free to cite on this one. Yes female heretics were burned at the stake, and yes female heretics were more often referred to as witches then male heretics. But while female heretics(witches) were being burned (and one third of 'witches' were men) there were also male heretics being burned. A lot more of them.

Maybe they burned male heretics for socio-economic reasons related to them being poor and unable to support women?

Even freed slaves got to live under their own chosen names before women did.

And children still have to bear the names given to them by their parents! That must mean children are owned by their parents! Maybe most children today are being treated the same as slaves!

Look. If you want to talk about how being legally treated like a child(or ward) is bad, that's fine. But women were not property (You could make the argument prior to 1100s) and they were not treated like property (Amistad vs. Titanic).

In various arenas--law, culture, religion, etc.--women have been given the rights duly accorded to men far slower, and are only now, after 2000 years, able to exercise those rights in any meaningful way.

Women neither had the benefits nor the detriments of citizenship. And they usually got the vote a generation or so after universal suffrage for men. The process of winning the vote for men was a long and bloody one; this is quite different then the process of women winning the vote.

Also this 2000 year shit makes no sense. 2000 years you could make a reasonable argument that women had no legal rights. In fact over the last 2000 years women gained progressively more and more rights. (The witch burnings actually represent a turn around in women's rights in the court room. In that they ended up getting more of them.)

[–][deleted]1 point 14 years ago [recovered] | Copy Link

The reason why dowery was given was to help the husband support his wife and family. It was expected to benefit her and her children in case he couldn't.

... and if the husband died, that dowry would revert to the control of the widow's father or maternal uncle, along with any lands and titles the husband brought to the marriage. I'm not saying that some women didn't exert control over their own estates in contrivance to this cultural practice (especially among the nobility), but contrivances don't make the practice, just the rebellion thereof. Not convincing.

Maybe they burned male heretics for socio-economic reasons related to them being poor and unable to support women?

Actually, they did--if you'd ever researched the practices of the Inquisition, you'd know that those convicted of heresy and witchcraft had their lands and businesses confiscated by the Catholic Church. Black widows who were suspected of poisoning their husbands were burned as witches so that the Church could use their land; unwed girls and women who had inherited land but couldn't use it were immediate sources of monetary and real estate increase for the burgeoning Catholic Church in Europe and the Protestant churches in America.

That's also why heads of nunneries like Urbain Grandier during the Possessions of Loudon were targeted--not because they were men, but because ridding the parish seat of a wealthy and politically-connected person was of advantage to the Church. From the Albigensian crusade on down through the witch-trials and Jewish persecutions of the Inquisition, the goal was always money and power. Look at the trial of Jeanne d'Arc--she was burned at the stake because she refused to wear women's clothing. The fact that she helped France to several military victories in the Hundred Years' War and almost single-handedly re-established the French monarchy. If anybody deserved to not be burnt at the stake for wearing men's clothing, it was Jeanne. But her example is, unfortunately, very far from exceptional.

And children still have to bear the names given to them by their parents! That must mean children are owned by their parents!

Actually, children ARE owned by their parents. Legally, children cannot make any agreements, join any compacts, and even their physical and financial rights to self-determination are reduced. I don't see how you comparing women prior to the 20th century to children under the dominion of their lawful guardians hurts my case any.

The process of winning the vote for men was a long and bloody one; this is quite different then the process of women winning the vote.

You're saying no women died in the French Revolution? That women didn't storm Versailles and acquit themselves with just as much bravery as men would have? And what did they receive for their troubles? Not the vote, certainly.

Edit: This last statement of yours is quite hilarious:

The witch burnings actually represent a turn around in women's rights in the court room. In that they ended up getting more of them.

Please explain how getting burnt alive represents an increase in women's rights. I'd love to hear that one.

[–]rantgrrl1 point 14 years ago [recovered] | Copy Link

From the Albigensian crusade on down through the witch-trials and Jewish persecutions of the Inquisition, the goal was always money and power.

I don't doubt that they were about money and power. That's one reason why the Knights Templar were burnt as heretics, and, no doubt, a considerable number of other men and 'heretical' groups of men.

I don't see how you comparing women prior to the 20th century to children under the dominion of their lawful guardians hurts my case any.

Children are not owned by their parents. Unless you can buy and sell your children they are not property. They are wards.

Wards are under the supervision of their guardians, but guardians are not given carte blanche to do whatever they like to their wards. In fact the behavior of a guardian is more policed by the state then the behavior of their ward. Child abuse and neglect are illegal; is there even such a thing as parental abuse and neglect while the child is under the guardianship of the parent?

As far as I can tell Coverture as practiced in the 19th century was a form of 'paterfamilias' that was employed specifically to benefit the woman materially as much as possible. There were a number of limitations on how the man could act towards his wife--he could not physically assault her(and since he could not physically assault her, this prohibition would have covered violent sexual assault as well), he could not use her dowry or inheritance to benefit himself as he was legally obligated to keep her in the same state as he kept himself and also legally obligated to minimum upkeep(even if he couldn't keep himself fed, clothed and sheltered, he was still obligated to provide for her needs, up to ending up in debtors jail if he couldn't), the husband was also punished in his wife's stead for her criminal behavior(up to treason or murder), and he was obligated to the state for the draft.

And what did the man get out of the situation? As you said, men were expected to make considerably more then a woman brought to the marriage in terms of a dowry. So what did the man get?

Nothing.

Ask a parent of a severely developmentally delayed child what kind of 'benefit' it is to be someone's ward for the rest of your life. It's actually a horrible thing to face and feels like, in a very real way, a life sentence.

Men got nothing from this situation.

Now, if you want to talk about how being viewed as a child and having that view legally and socially enshrined, let's do that.

I don't really think much has changed for women on that front. (Except women are no longer legally children.)

Not the vote, certainly.

Did the women who took part in the revolution request a vote?

Please explain how getting burnt alive represents an increase in women's rights. I'd love to hear that one.

Most of the people accusing women were women. In order to allow their testimony, laws against women testifying in court had to be repealed or revoked.

Like a lot of situations involving the increase of men's rights, it involved the physical sacrifice of some men to benefit all men. (In some countries universal suffrage for men only happened due to their sacrifice in world war one.)

[–][deleted]1 point 14 years ago [recovered] | Copy Link

Unless you can buy and sell your children they are not property.

Well, technically adoption is buying a child; although I see your point--you couldn't sell them if they were your child; however, child/orphan slavery in mines, factories, and chimney sweeping was quite prevalent during the 19th century, so perhaps comparing women to children even then is not a very useful move.

Child abuse and neglect are illegal; is there even such a thing as parental abuse and neglect while the child is under the guardianship of the parent?

Child abuse (and spousal abuse) statutes are exceedingly recent, to the point that up unto about 50 years ago, paddling schoolchildren was considered an acceptable form of punishment. There is no denying that male familial rule was not only enforced legally, but up unto the last couple of decades it was also enforced physically with no legal repercussions. I am still not getting your disconnect on this--it's as if you're seeing the last 20 years of legal changes in America as being symptomatic of the prior hundred. Hell, 100 years ago, girls were being fitted for corsets to make them shapely and boys for penile restraints to curb their sexual impulses. Life has simply not remained static during these many centuries we've been alive. How many different ways do I have to say it before you will understand?

Men got nothing from this situation.

In your discussion of coverture, you are combining rights and privileges being bestowed upon women that formerly were only the province of men (the right not to be abused, the right not to be taken advantage of financially, etc.), and somehow saying that men also should have gotten something out of the bargain (as per your quote above). They already had too much out of the bargain--yet you are saying that women being treated as equal partners in marriage was too much? And you wonder why I can't treat you seriously. I mean, seriously--take a look at Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England that I linked to you. Is there ANYTHING in that document that you would not wish both parties of a marriage to have?

Did the women who took part in the revolution request a vote?

One does not request one's civil rights unless one has to request them from a dictator. People are naturally possessed of human rights, and civil rights are (or ought to be) accorded to them equally. Where that is not the case, inequality exists. Nothing you have said has changed this fact.

Most of the people accusing women were women. In order to allow their testimony, laws against women testifying in court had to be repealed or revoked.

Not hardly--even in the Salem witch trials, the main prosecutors were male, clerkly, duly-appointed witch-finders who used the wild ramblings of children to kill and punish at their discretion--a flimsy excuse at best. Remember that either the Inquisition or, later, the State brought charges of heresy and witchcraft; they were not civil charges brought between individuals--of which there are many examples in English common law texts where women brought suits against other women. These were trials of sedition against a religious rule, a form of supernatural treason. The witnesses were not the prosecutors. We have the full text of numerous witch trials going back to Jeanne d'Arc--I've read several of them. Nowhere does a woman claim to be the main prosecuting agent. Witch trials were a state-sanctioned show-trial and execution, and as such are not as useful in determining the broad social categories into which the daily lives of husbands and wives persisted.

As it stands, I don't think we're going to convince either of the other's position, so how's about we just agree to disagree on this one?

[–]madmartian 0 points1 point2 points 14 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]LAMFF -1 points0 points1 point 14 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]spagma -1 points0 points1 point 14 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

Title	How Women Objectify Men
Author	indpndnt
Upvotes	7
Comments	25
Date	August 30, 2011 1:30 PM UTC (14 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/jz1aa/how_women_objectify_men/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/how-women-objectify-men.1035243 https://theredarchive.com/post/1035243

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