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From: aeq@pucc-h (Jeff Sargent)
Newsgroups: net.women
Subject: Re: Penthouse/Pageant
Message-ID: <954@pucc-h>
Date: Fri, 17-Aug-84 21:42:15 EDT
Article-I.D.: pucc-h.954
Posted: Fri Aug 17 21:42:15 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 19-Aug-84 02:27:49 EDT
References: <1841@stolaf.UUCP>, <946@pucc-h>
Organization: Tucumcari Divinity School
Lines: 37

It has been rightly remarked that beauty pageants such as Miss America give a
false idea of the optimal woman, by emphasizing the pulchritude of the physical
body (well, all right, the face too), with only a token glance at the mind.

But what about the men's pageants, Mr. America and the like?  As far as I
know, they don't even pretend to consider the guy's intelligence.  They hold
up as the ideal man a guy with 200 pounds of rock-hard muscle and zero ounces
of fat -- despite the fact that the guy may be (in the traditional phrase) a
macho asshole, or even (in the traditional semi-joke) a homosexual.  This is
not nice to those of us who do not boast a 60-inch chest measure and who do
have a tough time keeping a few superfluous pounds from accumulating around
the waistline, but who at least try to be considerate and sensitive (not that
I always succeed) despite being heterosexual....

Then, of course, in recent years magazines have come out giving men just as
much -- er, exposure -- as Playboy at least (I don't know if any mags depicting
men are yet as raunchy as Penthouse).  Again (at least so I infer; I've never
examined Playgirl) the ideal man is held out as one with a beautiful body.

It seems to me that the trend is in the wrong direction; no matter how much
talk there is about personhood, dignity, intelligence, and what not, now both
sexes are being subjected to objectification more and more.  I will give
Playboy this much credit:  Rarely, if ever, does it present parts of a
woman's body without her face also in the picture; and I will give myself
the credit for [when I yield to the temptation to buy it] actually looking
at the facial expressions of the women pictured, and evaluating their
attractiveness to a great extent on the person they seem to be, not only
on the body they obviously have.  I wonder how many purchasers of Playboy
et al. do that?  Do not many readers fall in with the objectification?

Struggling to be a real person, to be treated as such, and to treat others
likewise,

-- 
-- Jeff Sargent
{decvax|harpo|ihnp4|inuxc|seismo|ucbvax}!pur-ee!pucc-h:aeq
"We can build a beautiful city, yes we can, yes we can...."