My starting point is that men and women have the same rights before the law. I think treating people in a gender neutral way regarding their legal rights is a completely valid position to take, and in those cases the term sexism makes sense. But many people try to apply an ideal of everybody being treated in a gender neutral way beyond the field of people's rights before the law, and here this ideal is not only unattainable but also undesirable.

For example, there are a lot of factors that come into play when judging a person to be sexually attractive, and those factors vary according to gender. This is not unjust and doesn't mean that the only just society would be the one in which men and women are objectified in precisely the same way.

A lot of factors come into play in the sexual objectification of people, but one in which the assimetry between the genders is particularly clear is how women's looks tend to be valued more than men's looks.

We see a lot of controversies in which this is portrayed as sexism against women, and as a sign of all kinds of evil things, but it is not necessarily the case.

For example the movement slut walk. I agree that women should be respected regardless of what they are wearing, and none of that justifies harassment or rape. But the movement goes further to claim that women are terribly opressed by the objectification of their bodies and that they are only worthy of affection if they conform to impossible standards of beauty. That is not the case. According to the dating site ok cupid, men consider beautiful a very wide range of women and have a much more realistic standard of beauty than women. According to the same site women judged 80% of men to be below their average standard of beauty.

Would it be nice if women valued male bodies more? Yes, of course it would. Does an assimetry existing regards to that means that women are not as sexually liberated as men? No, it doesn't, as this is not the only way in which women's sexuality can express itself.

Then some people take this data of women being valued more based on their looks and claim that women are only valued based on their looks, and that as long as this assimetry is in place this means that women are opressed, objectified and valued only as sex objects. Which is ridiculous.

It is hard to come up with a list of all the elements that comprize the sexual objectification of people and how this varies based on gender. And maybe we can talk about that later, as it would be a lenghty discussion.

My point is only that some differences between the sexes are not a sign of opression or injustice, and treating people differently based on their gender is not necessarily unjust. This is mainly what I propose to discuss.