Just in the nick of time, it’s the last day of National Eating Disorders Awareness Week. The aim is – as the name suggests – to raise awareness of eating disorders. You can read more about them on the beat website, which is dedicated to helping those with eating disorders recover.
Obama and the ‘Conscience’ Rule February 28, 2009
One of the last things the Bush administration did back in December was bring in legislation which cuts funding to healthcare providers who refuse to accommodate their employees’ religious objections to providing certain kinds of care. Typically – although perhaps not exclusively – this revolved around denying access to contraception, emergency contraception, and abortion to women. The Obama administration is now looking to rescind the legislation, thus preventing heathcare providers from refusing to provide certain kinds of care. Unsurprisingly, the proposals are kicking up a storm. I understand there is a thirty-day period when the public can comment on the proposals, which may then be modified. Read more here.
Policing and Crime Bill – Prostitution February 28, 2009
I’m a bit late with this, but better late than never… Back in November, we reported on the Policing and Crime Bill, which has clauses that provide for someone to be prosecuted for rape if he (or she?) has sex with a sex worker who is ‘controlled for gain’ – such as a trafficked person. The Bill has since been making its way through the various stages of the legislative process. I think the most recent hearing was on January 19th 2009. Trafficking people is an evil that needs to be eradicated. But it’s not really clear that this Bill will help. The English Collective of Prostitutes is not in favour and says that the Bill will make sex work even more hazardous and drive prostitution further underground. They have produced a Briefing, which details the problems they have identified with the Bill, which are many and various. The Briefing also includes statements from some sex workers, whose voices don’t tend to get heard much in discussions concerning their trade. The English Collective of Prostitutes also emphasises the need for feminists (amongst others) to pay attention to what sex workers have to say about the issues that concern them, and to theorise with that in mind.
US Online Porn Consumption February 28, 2009
New Scientist reports on a survey carried out on internet pornography consumption. The survey was based on data collected from anonymised credit card records kept by a large online ‘adult entertainment’ provider, plus an earlier study on religious attitudes. It turns out that there is little variation between online porn consumption across the states. However, the most online porn was consumed by the more conservative and more religious states. The survey also revealed that church-goers buy less online porn on a sunday, and states where a majority of residents agreed with the statement “I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage” bought 3.6 more subscriptions per 1000 people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference also showed up for states where a majority of residents agreed with the statement, “AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behaviour”. Quite what this shows is up for debate. But it seems interesting.
Helping Fathers Get Involved February 25, 2009
The UK has decided to overhaul a variety of policies with the goal of getting fathers more involved in parenting. A laudable goal, and much needed. When I was pregnant, I was deluged with information about how to care for babies, while my male partner was offered nothing. Worse yet, I was told that it was essential to do things which would in fact impede his participation– like holding newborn baby against my bare skin as much as humanly possible. I had a caesarean and my partner wasn’t allowed to stay with me for the first two nights in hospital. So my introduction to parenting (a deeply unpleasant one) was being on my own with a baby after major abdominal surgery (and no, the staff were not much help). Looks like these policies are being changed. But what’s not being changed? Fathers still only get 2 weeks’ paternity leave, compared to mothers’ 52. (I know that sounds like a blissful fantasy to US readers, but it’s still obviously very unequal and definitely perpetuates the idea that parenting is women’s work.)
Thanks, HA!
Two women in the UK media… February 24, 2009
First up, Cerie Burnell, a presenter of a children’s TV programme. The good news: high profile and aspirational woman with disability being broadcast into children’s living rooms. A positive move for inclusive attitudes! The bad news: complaints have been lodged, by parents, who worry that the fact she only has one hand might give their children nightmares. Sigh. Hopefully her presence on the small screens of the UK’s households will help towards avoiding these kinds of attitudes in future…
Second, Gail Trimble, top contestant on university challenge. The good news: awesomely intelligent aspirational woman being broadcast into the nation’s living rooms. The bad news: Amongst the comments about her, we find things like ‘the female Stephen Fry’ and ‘ tasty trimble’. She notes: ‘I don’t feel I would have been treated the same way were I a man.’ …
What happened? On video games and sexualized violence February 23, 2009
Two recent posts on video games and violence – particularly violence toward women in one – sparked discussions that prompted quite similar assessments.
The first came from Rachel McKinney on Video Games: the good and the bad
I have been pretty quiet recently, but after reading the comments on this post (and the previous one on Rapelay) I find myself feeling very frustrated, and I think it’s important to vocalize why. Apologies for the directness/aggressiveness of tone here.
A description of the dialectic that seems to be at work:
JJ presents an article to generate critical and reflective discussion about the role that video games might play in leading to or reinforcing violent behavior in men. The immediate response is a cacophony of aggressive skepticism from (male) video game consumers (who don’t usually comment here) offering anecdotal evidence — “Take myself, for example” — that of course video games don’t lead to violence and, silly alarmist, men who are violent are just predisposed to violent video games. JJ then responds by providing more information about the pool of data at issue, and that the researchers took care to control for such pre-existing personality traits, only to be met with more unhelpful skepticism at even the possibility of the truth of such a hypothesis.
This dialectic should be familiar to anyone who has taught feminist criticisms of pornography to straight college-age men. The same dismissive incredulity at the very idea that people might not be in total introspective control of how they perceive and act toward others. The same air of defensiveness at the suggestion that their consumption of culture artifacts might influence how they think and feel about and value human bodies and relationships. The same aggressive skepticism, the same unresponsiveness to methodological nuance in the empirical evidence.
It’s a fucked up aspect of boy culture that conversations meant to generate critical and reflective inquiry into such practices as the sale, use and consumption of these artifacts — video games, pornography — are consistently met with this sort of attitude. I just want to say how much I admire JJ, and all the bloggers here, for their patience and their ability to offer their interlocutors much more charity than they receive from them.
And the second from The Claw on Rapeplay:
So I did a Google search for feminist responses to RapeLay and I came across this discussion thread – what the??? So far on this page, some men are defending video games from supposedly unfair attacks, another man is arguing that the game (once again, named RAPE-Lay) is really more about sex than rape, yet another man is suggesting that perhaps the game is an example of ironic black humor, and yet another person is saying that censorship is bad. THAT is the feminist philosophers thread on RapeLay??
Video games in which the player takes on a male character and rapes women (and yes, I have visited the game website, seen extensive screen shots and read several reviews) are a disturbing and disgusting phenomenon, bottom line. Some of the descriptions of the game here seem to leave out the fact that you, as the protagonist, “deflower” the two young girls, as evidenced by their blood. And you are raping a woman and her two young daughters, using handcuffs or other restraints. The women also cry (and there are nice quivering anime tears), and the final shot of each rape is a naked woman (sometimes on a subway platform or bathroom stall or in a park), covered in semen. Sound consensual, anyone? And what about the function where the protagonist can get his guy friends to help – more consensual fun, huh?
And no, there is no big leap from Grand Theft Auto, which glorifies crime and violence (including violence against women) to rape fantasy games. Our culture is steeped in violence and dehumanizing imagery and storytelling, from movies to television to videogames – look at the recent movement in “horror porn” movies that revel in the idea of kidnapping, torturing and murdering people (especially nubile young women) in vividly graphic ways.
For the men on this thread who are equivocating about whether or not RapeLay is offensive, ironic, more about sex than violence, etc., etc. – as a woman, I can tell you that this kind of game (and its part in a larger cultural movement) makes me feel sick and tells me that I am living in a culture that is hostile to me and fantasizes about assaulting me – that in itself is violating. This kind of game tells me that women are objects to be degraded and hurt for fun, objects worthy of both hostile contempt and destructive lust. Ask yourself honestly, how would you feel if there were a bunch of glorifying castration fantasy games, with big, strong female protagonists wielding knives and reveling in cutting off every phallus they could find (in full-color detail)? What if everywhere you turned, there were billboards advertising movies and other media about the powerlessness and gleeful torture of men? Meanwhile, in real life, what if you feared walking down a dark street alone, or jogging in a park, or finding your car in a deserted parking garage, because of the real threat of sexual assault? Given that we as women live with the real threat of sexual violence every day, how are we supposed to feel cavalier about a game that clearly revels in rape fantasy?
Or, to consider another analogy, would we all be OK with lynching video games, where the objective would be to hunt down young black men in the South, beat them, castrate them, and hang them from trees? Or a gay-bashing game? Or a fun Holocaust game, where the player gets to take on the role of a Nazi, torturing Jews? Despite all the indignant cries over the censoring spirit of “political correctness,” the truth is that each of us does have a point where we say, “That’s not acceptable.” And we should not be shamed by the fear that we are being “politically correct” if we stand up for ourselves. So you may try to tell yourself that a rape video game is “not that bad” or “ironic” or possibly even entertaining in its over-the-top nature – but I can guarantee you: no woman is going to be laughing. C’mon women – stand up for yourselves!!
(Sidebar: Jim, did you ACTUALLY try to soft-pedal the coersive nature of the game by paralleling the “vaginal insert” function with a kid saying, “I want some candy?” Good lord.)
And regarding the question of whether rape fantasy games encourage more incidents of actual rape – it is very clear that violent videogames are part of a desensitized culture that does encourage more actual violence. Did videogames cause the Columbine killings? Of course they were not the sole contributor, and I don’t think any reasonable person is making that argument. But are violent video games part of a larger cultural movement that glorifies guns and dominance and obliterating one’s enemies? Definitely. So whether any one rape that occurs can be directly attributed to the existence of RapeLay, the fact is that there is a prevalence of violence against women in our culture, and RapeLay is a part of that. (If you don’t think we are influenced by imagery and media, then how do you think advertising works? Corporations spend billions of dollars to create little videos and jingles that persuade us to BUY goods.)
I really look forward to a day when there are not assaultive images of women everywhere we turn. I urge a zero-tolerance policy on rape fantasy and other forms of degrading, dehumanizing games and other media. Good for Amazon for finally refusing to sell RapeLay. And by the way – it is NOT censorship to protest and boycott the sale of rape video games; it is collective action and freedom of speech. (People are way too careless in throwing around terms like “censorship” and “political correctness” when they disagree with another point of view.)
So c’mon, peeps – Si se puede! ZERO tolerance.
Rachel made some very kind comments, but in some ways the Claw’s is more telling. Arguably, feminist thought was overwhelmed by the indirection achieved by some commentators. The discussion became in some sense about their ideas, and not about the advertisements for rape and violence pervasive in many societies.
Here are two possible reactions to the comments on the comments. You might think of some others. let us know what you think.
1. This blog has hundreds of posts about media and sexualized violence; the point of comments is to engage with commentators.
2. The comments look just like the sort of take over that goes on in philosophy all the time, perhaps due to the fact that few men find women’s ideas at all interesting, at least when compared with their own. AND we let it happen yet again.
The second alternative is hardly fortunate!!
Is the second just me giving into a tendency to assume the blame? (In this case on behalf of others, perhaps I should be sorry to say.) Or could we have a problem? One we should address?
ADDITION: We have regretfully closed this post to comments. We are very happy to have visitors from the Philosophers’ Carnival, but somehow trolls are following in their wake, quite like scavenger birds following a fishing boat.
What philosophy and philosophers have to say about the topics of the posts linked to above are of interest to many of us. You are very welcome to comment on those posts, as indeed are other visitors, who may be even more interesting. Please, however, be aware that we have a policy of discouraging rude or obscene comments. And yes, that is an inclusive “or”.
Obama’s keynesian experiment February 23, 2009
This could get embarrassing. Economists please look away. Read on only if you’ve found some of the recent discourse over stimulus spending really very odd and even bizarre.
“Why in the world do so many politicians and commentators insist that we need to lower taxes when doing that seems to be part of what’s created the current fiscal mess,” some of us are asking ourselves. Commentators sometimes present the situation as an inability of Republicans to admit they were wrong. But that explanation is itself very puzzling. Of course, we know the lemming phenomenon, but is that really the best account possibly of the love of lower taxes?
One answer appeals to a fight between two very general economic stands: the keynesians and the non-keynesians. You add in that Keynes is considered somewhat discredited and that monetary policy for decades has largely been a matter of adjusting interest rates. You can find a very clear statement of it here. For example,
The Keynesians and anti-Keynesians fought some bitter battles through the 1980s. But by the time of the Clinton administration, most economists agreed on the basics: Some of Keynes’ ideas are useful, but in a post-Keynesian world, the interest rate is the most effective tool.
This view held sway until a month ago — Dec. 16, 2008, to be precise. That’s the day the Federal Reserve tried to stabilize the economy by lowering the interest rate all the way down to zero percent. The Fed can’t go lower, but the economy has kept worsening. The one effective tool seemed to have stopped working.
I can’t provide a critique of this explanation on my own. The most I can say is that some very distinguished economists appear to agree with the narrative, including this year’s Nobel Prize winner, Paul Krugman. And here’s the bottom line; despite what is said about Roosevelt, no government has tried to spend its way out of a recession the way Obama is intending to do, and the way Keynes recommended. We are watching a very grand experiment.
And it is scary. Which certainly does not mean that I-don’t-understand-economics McCain would be better.
If this looks all wrong to you, please let us know.
A contest: worst philosophical chat-up lines February 23, 2009
I thought it was about time for some light relief, so I bring you a competition for worst philosophical pick-up lines. (Since it’s meant to be light relief, the thought is to go for funnily bad ones rather than e.g. sexually harassing ones– that’s a different contest.)
They don’t have to be real, though it’s especially amusing if you or someone you know has either used them or had them used on them. They can be ones misguided philosophers come up with, or ones non-philosophers think philosophers might fall for. I’ll kick it off with two, one of which was tried on a friend of mine and one of which was tried on me:
“You’re a philosopher? Let me tell you my philosophy of lurrve.”
“You’re a philosopher? Say something deep.”
I’m *sure* you can do better than these.
Prize for the winner: everlasting fame (pseudonymous, if you like) on Feminist Philosophers.) Leave your contributions in comments!
A tonic for the soul? February 22, 2009
Mondays with Merce** has been up for 3 or 4 weeks. There are lots of scenes you’ll find very beautiful, if you like ‘modern’ ballet/music. There’s also quite a bit of fairly spontaneous conversation looking at the action and discussion it from a perspective quite foreign to much in ordinary philosophical academic life.
Enjoy!
**The blurb:
We invite you to join us in the Merce Cunningham Studio for Mondays With Merce, a series of webcasts available for free viewing. Go behind the scenes at the Merce Cunningham Studio to see Merce teach advanced technique class and conduct rehearsals. The episodes will also include interviews with Merce Cunningham and his associates, including current and former dancers, artists and musicians, and choreographers who have been influenced by his work. We will also feature occasional visits by surprise guests!
The Sunday Cat Does Bengal February 22, 2009
Warning: You might want to turn the sound down before viewing the video!
At a cat rescue place I recently saw a cat with a large amount of bengal in him; he was labeled “tabby.” I wondered whether the person adopting him would be surprised. Here’s why:
Clinton redefines job of secretary of state February 21, 2009
Or so the NY Times suggests. She is mixing the political with the personal in a way past foreign secretaries have apparently not done, at least in their public persona. (Madeline Albright certainly did share personal details, but perhaps not in her official role.) Thus:
In Indonesia on Thursday, Mrs. Clinton appeared on a popular variety show, “Awesome,” on which she told the young host, somewhat sheepishly, that her favorite musicians were the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. She politely declined to sing, saying it would empty the room.
None of this is especially new to Americans, who watched Mrs. Clinton show her personal side in countless town hall meetings during the presidential campaign. But it is novel to people outside the United States, who expect foreign ministers — even American ones — to stick to a diplomatic script.
As she neared the end of her maiden voyage as secretary of state with a two-day visit to Beijing, Mrs. Clinton said she was determined to make a connection to people “in a way that is not traditional, not confined by the ministerial greeting and the staged handshake photo.”
“I see our job right now, given where we are in the world and what we’ve inherited, as repairing relations, not only with governments but with people,” she said to reporters on Friday.
To do that, Mrs. Clinton is exploiting both her megawatt celebrity and her training during the presidential campaign. On Friday, nearly 3,000 female students packed an auditorium at Ewha Womans University in Seoul to hear Mrs. Clinton deliver a speech that ranged from North Korea’s nuclear threat to the challenge women face in balancing work and family.
Another standing-room-only crowd at the University of Tokyo listened to Mrs. Clinton discuss how the United States should rebuild its ties to the Muslim world. Toward the end, a nervous young woman, who said she played on a baseball team, asked Mrs. Clinton how to become as strong as she was.
“Well, I played a lot of baseball, and I played with a lot of boys,” she replied, to peals of laughter.
Of course, for a professional woman it is not all that unusual to find one’s audience can’t separate one’s official role from one’s personal details, even when they don’t have much trouble doing that with a man. So I would worry a bit about the personal questions. However, I’m overall relieved that HC is seeing this as a opportunity to repair relations, and hope the result eventually will be that mention of personal details will not be seen as reducing one’s credibility. When I was involved with university administrators and regents I used sometimes to try to defend someone’s mentioning something personal by saying, “Of course, men seem to think that someone with no personal experience of a particular problem is the best person to solve it, while women tend to think that view is highly implausible.” Perhaps not fair, but still … .
There is a possible problem with Clinton’s actions on this trip. She is explicitly addressing issues such as climate change and putting human rights concerns in the background. Amnesty International is understandably upset, but I’m inclined to think her record on advocating for human rights won’t make this seem like a policy shift. Not all problems can be addressed, and one hopes she and the Obama administration are clearly heavily concerned with human rights policies.
What do you think?
Video Games: the good and the bad. February 20, 2009
We covered at least a good example of the ugly recently. For the good and the bad, I’m going to draw on the Scientific American site. First, the good:
research has shown that video games can improve mental dexterity, while boosting hand-eye coordination, depth perception and pattern recognition. Gamers also have better attention spans and information-processing skills than the average Joe has. When nongamers agree to spend a week playing video games (in the name of science, of course), their visual-perception skills improve.
Then the bad:
[There's is] the popular theory that they are responsible for increasing real-world violence. A number of studies have reinforced this link. Young men who play a lot of violent video games have brains that are less responsive to graphic images, suggesting that these gamers have become desensitized to such depictions. Another study revealed that gamers had patterns of brain activity consistent with aggression while playing first-person shooter games.
This does not necessarily mean these players will actually be violent in real life. The connections are worth exploring, but so far the data do not support the idea that the rise of video games is responsible for increased youth violence.
As for gender differences:
Video games activate the brain’s reward circuits but do so much more in men than in women, according to a new study. … the men showed more activity in the limbic system, which is associated with reward processing. What is more, the men showed greater connectivity between the structures that make up the reward circuit, and the better this connection was in a particular player, the better he performed. There was no such correlation in women. Men are more than twice as likely as women are to say they feel addicted to video games.
Given the other benefits, one wonders if games could be made which women got more pleasure from, and what they’d be like. And of course we must forget another benefit for women we discussed before: 10 hours of video games virtually eliminates the difference between men and women in spatial acuity..
Children as Child Pornographers February 20, 2009
Following on from Monkey’s post a while back, it seems there’s quite a disturbing trend going on back in my homeland. Teenagers who take naked pictures of themselves are being prosecuted as child pornographers. When they text them to their friends, they’re charged with distribution, and the friends are charged with receiving child porn. I’m not surprised, on reflection, that the images they make are classified as porn. It’s harder than I’d initially imagined to find ways to exclude these images from a porn definition. (Intent? Well they intend to share them and they intend to sexually arouse. The fact that no money changes hands? Quite rightly, this doesn’t matter in other child porn cases. Content? No reason to think that’s any different. Who’s taking the pictures? Well, a paedophile could get a child to take the pictures.) But it seems really obvious nonetheless that the kids shouldn’t be prosecuted. As noted in the comments to Monkey’s post, one of the things about child porn is that the kids are legally unable to consent. Surely that also means they are legally unable to blamed for the act.
Hmm.. I’m having doubts now… Teenagers who shoot people are rightly held responsible. Any philosophers of law out there want to help out?
Maybe a better fix would be to define ‘child pornographer’ and ‘recipient of child porn’ in such a way that only adults could fill this roles?
Sexuality Studies targeted. February 20, 2009
From wmst-l (which I highly recommend, by the way):
Lawmakers in Georgia and Florida are beginning to use ‘budget cuts’ as an
excuse for targeting programs and courses on sexuality, queer and women’s
studies. Georgia State University is being forced to testify TODAY in front
of the state senate about ‘questionable’ faculty research and course
offerings on sexuality. At Florida Atlantic University, the administration
is trying to suspend the Women’s Studies program.Please help us by signing this petition, and forwarding this to anyone
else who may be interested in signing on. We have the support of several
hundred academics so far, we need more.McCarthyism is alive and well in these states. Your state could be next.
Is that cartoon racist? Yes. February 19, 2009
That’s the one showing the police standing over the dead chimp and remarking about how someone else is going to have to write the next stimulus bill.
We mentioned Harvard’s videos from the Project on Law and the Mind before, along with Jennifer Eberhardt’s 3 on racism. They have helpfully put her talk on the black-ape association up separately. Here it is:
That should answer the question of whether it is insight or paranoia that is behind the charges of racism.
The cartoon does employ a racial stereotype and to that extent it is definitely racist.
Fred Phelps Banned from Britain February 19, 2009
Don’t you love it when government–any government–does the right thing?! Three cheers for the home office. It’s as if they get it!
Quick Hits February 19, 2009
Time is tight, and there’s so much to post…
Fricker on Philosophy Bites: An interview with Miranda Fricker about epistemic injustice. It’s from 2007, but I hadn’t known about it! (Thanks, CR.)
Paycheck Fairness Act: A petition:
The Paycheck Fairness Act puts the burden on employers to show that the difference in compensation between two similar positions is based on something other than gender. It gives the federal government a more proactive role in preventing wage discrimination, prohibits employers from retaliating against employees who share salary information, and sets aside money to train women on how to negotiate salaries.
(Thanks, Jender-Parents.)
Study shows that racial profiling is no more effective than random screening. For more, go here. (Thanks, Mr Jender.)
The Orgasm Gap: Studies show women are less likely than men to have orgasms during heterosexual sex and suggest a shocking explanation: lack of male effort. (Thanks, Kalbir.)
First Woman Cabinet Minister in Saudi Arabia, and also other moves toward moderation. For more, go here. (Thanks, Mr Jender.)
Conf Announcement: SWIP UK at Joint Sessions 2009 February 18, 2009
Of interest to readers I hope! Get submitting!
SOCIETY FOR WOMEN IN PHILOSOPHY (SWIP) UK SESSION
AT
2009 JOINT SESSION OF THE ARISTOTELIAN SOCIETY AND THE MIND ASSOCIATION UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA, NORWICH, 10TH -12TH JULY
CALL FOR PAPERS At the 2009 Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association, there will be a SWIP organised session of papers devoted to topics in any area of interest to women in philosophy.
We solicit full papers (2,500 words), suitable to be delivered in no more than 20 minutes with a further 10-15 minutes for discussion. We encourage submissions from graduate students (As with all the open sessions, papers accepted for this session will not be published in the Supplementary Volume of the Aristotelian Society.) The closing date for submissions is *25TH MARCH 2009*.
We expect to make decisions on whether papers have been accepted by the end of April 2009. Please make sure that your submission is suitable for anonymous reviewing attaching a separate sheet with your name and contact details.
Email submissions are preferred; please send your full paper, with an abstract, as either .doc or .pdf attachment to: Dawn Phillips, at Dawn.Phillips@warwick.ac.uk or send a hard copy to: Dr Dawn Phillips, Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK.
For further information, please contact Jules Holroyd at jh671@cam.ac.uk
Science and sex objects February 18, 2009
A group of psychologists have discovered that when men (or perhaps I should say, the men involved in the experiment) look at pictures of scantily clad women, the pre-motor cortex lights up. This region of the brain has a role to play in action and lit up when the men looked at DIY tools. After looking at the pictures, some of the men had less activity in the pre-frontal cortex and other regions of the brain responsible for empathy and understanding others. Psychologists suggest that one explanation of the findings is that the men saw the women in the pictures as things to be immediately acted on, and that the pictures had an impact – for some of the men – on how they saw women afterwards. Rather than seeing them as humans to interact with, they were more inclined to see them as objects. This is pretty interesting stuff, but I have lots of questions about it. The first thing that strikes me is that the ‘mirror system’, which some theorists have suggested is what underlies our capacity to understand others’ behaviour is identifiable with/located in the pre-motor cortex. Neurons fire in the mirror system whether someone is preparing to act oneself, or watching another acting. The pre-motor cortex is thus – as I understand it – implicated in the functioning of at least certain forms of empathy. It is involved in seeing others as agents. The pre-motor cortex fires when people look at tools because they are objects for action. But the fact that it also fires when looking at people doesn’t in itself show that the perceiver also sees them as objects for action. The perceiver may be seeing them as an agent. Also, looking at a photo of a woman is not the same as looking at a woman. A photo is an image, it is not alive, it is not sentient, and one cannot interact with it. Even if the studies show that the men were reacting to the photos as objects for action – rather than people – this doesn’t show that they then view real live women in that way. But what do you think? Read the Guardian report here. Via Feministing.
