The Body As Symbol: Sex, Objectification, and the Self
Uniting Being and Doing
This week, Mary Stanford expounds on Edith Stein's philosophy of the human body as symbol. For men and women to properly understand ourselves—and avoid our weakest tendencies—we need each other's complementary perspectives on the body.
Fairer Disputations
The Body as Symbol: Sex, Objectification, and the Self
MARY STANFORD
In general, women don’t feel the need to prove that they are women. Instead, that sense of identification with the body makes itself felt in the countless occasions when women experience physical imperfections as personal imperfections, and in the nearly universal experience of feeling an emotional thrill when complimented on their appearance. Perhaps it is clearer now why women are more prone to exercise addiction, crash diets, or becoming slaves to fashion. Their innate sense of who they are is wrapped up tightly with the body. And while this close association is fraught with risk for women, we must ask: what is the upside?
This Week's Links:
Up first, featured author Helen Roy calls for a truce in the war between the sexes, suggesting "we all log off and live a little."
Align
Reject the Poison Pill, Embrace One Another
HELEN ROY
When searching for the truth in the wild, failing to carefully parse these categories of reality and fantasy means unwittingly making oneself a foot soldier of an ideological narrative. However appealing narratives may be by offering a myopic explanation for one’s suffering, they colonize the spirit, making their foot soldiers into shells of people, shooting their prefabricated talking points into comments sections like an algorithm. Red-pill bros have not only become the anti-marriage feminists that were the original object of critique; they’ve become NPCs with a software update.
Next, featured author Mary Harrington proposes "digital modesty," a practice needed to protect our relationships—and ourselves—from the ravenous, prying eye of the internet.
Reactionary Feminist
Behind Closed Doors
MARY HARRINGTON
In the smartphone age it’s difficult enough, as a parent, to avoid the temptation to stop colouring or pumpkin-carving or whatever with your kid and take a photo of what you’re doing for the grandparents. So what happens when it’s not just grandparents, but an audience of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands? What is it like to have a marital argument, in full knowledge that your heartfelt feelings might form the basis of your spouse’s viral post the following day? What would it be like, as a child, to do pumpkin carving with Mummy, while intuiting at some level that you’re not just making memories but also sponcon? Is it even possible to have intimate relationships, when the all-pervasive incentive at every moment is to expose intimate details of those relationships for clicks
Finally, Victoria Smith takes on guidance from an LGBT "Allies Pledge" telling people to "be comfortable with the uncomfortable." Such guidance, she argues, seeks to control female behavior and make women ashamed of their natural responses to dangerous situations.
The Critic
Trust Your Discomfort
VICTORIA SMITH
The “be comfortable with the uncomfortable” messaging doesn’t distinguish between irrational discomfort and valid fear. Not only does it conflate the two, but it then allows all of the work of suppressing discomfort to be offloaded onto the group — women and girls — whose discomfort is valid, whilst homophobic men have to do nothing. There are no signs in men’s toilets saying “please don’t beat the crap out of someone because he makes you feel insecure in your manhood”. If anything, the comfort of bigoted men is accommodated more than ever, now that anyone who makes them feel a bit funny can be categorised as a non-man and sent off to the ladies.
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