“Two novels built around the same contrivance. Will a trivial woman surrender her virtue to a wealthy master?”

In Slate magazine's Low Concept, Steven Metcalf writes-- 

“Good morning,” he said, then sniff-laughed, smiled, and, poking eyeglasses up the grade of his nose, corrected himself: “Good afternoon.” Professor M. looked around the room. 

 The preening,  pedantic Professor M nailed it.  

The history of the novel is, in fact, itself a kind of novel, an inner history of the middle class from its inception in the 18th century, through its consolidation in the 19th, its utter dominance in the 20th, and through to its unfortunate fate in the early parts of this century...as professor Watt once said—the ‘unplanned aggregate of particular individuals having particular experiences at particular times and at particular places.’

The salient point here is not that stupid people loved Fifty Shades or that smart people deplored it. It’s that the educated classes were drawn to it in spite of themselves. Drawn to it just as they were to Pamela. In Fifty Shades, they found what the literate middle classes always found in novels: the drama of who they are, who they must become next, as it works itself out in the marriage plot. How do sexual power and social power map—or fail to map—on one another? Just as in Pamela, a middle class might be born, so too in this supposedly inconsequential little virgin, something like a middle class might yet survive; might yet hold onto its self-respect. This is why otherwise intelligent people were drawn to a manifest idiocy.

In 1740, the virgin must convert the licentious aristocrat into a middle-class individual, capable of companionate marriage. In 2011, the moment has arrived in which the master once again has everything—not only money, but comportment and dress—while the young middle-class virgin—without skills or talents or ambitions—has nothing left to bargain away but her self-respect. And it was into this sad proxy that middle-class readers lost themselves, in one final ecstasy of total submission.

 1,380,000 Google Search results for "he lifted her as if she weighed nothing"

Photo illustration by Slate. Painting by Joseph Highmore via National Gallery of Victoria/Wikimedia Commons, film still courtesy of Universal.

the Pornographic eye does not view women like "objects," it views women as a favored species of animal.

Pictures were taken by a professional photographer and tightly controlled for posture, expression and lighting – only the presence of clothing varied between them. The ‘sexualized’ photograph showed the unclothed model with a border indicating she was starring in an erotic movie.

Participants were asked to rate the photographs “Compared to the average person, how much is this person capable of X.” In the place of “X” were 6 agency-related words (self-control, acting morally, planning, communication, memory, and thought) and 6 experience-related words (feeling pain, feeling pleasure, feeling desire, feeling fear, feeling rage, feeling joy)

When the photographs showed clothed models, participants described the models as professional and competent. When the models were shown unclothed, participants’ ratings became less professional and competent, and relatively more tied to experience and sensation. The sexually suggestive photograph was linked to decreased perceptions of agency but increased perceptions of experience, suggesting that sexualizing people does not lead to objectification, but instead to a redistribution of mind.

In other words, when the body was made more salient, people decreased their ascriptions of agency, but they actually increased their ascriptions of experience.

In short, it doesn’t look like pornography is leading men to treat women as mere ‘objects’ (like a table). Instead, we seem to be getting something that might be called animalification—treating a woman as though she lacks the capacity for complex thinking and reasoning, but at the same time, treating her as though she was even more capable of having strong feelings and emotional responses. The “mind” category contains one particular part of the mind, the capacity for thinking and reasoning; the body category includes both the body and a second part of the mind, the capacity for more visceral emotions and passions. Hence, if one focuses on a person’s body, one becomes simultaneously less inclined to attribute to that person a capacity for abstract thought and more inclined to attribute seething desires and feelings. one study found that the more an entity was perceived as capable of feeling pain, pleasure, fear and desire, the more it deserved to be protected from harm



http://my.psychologytoday.com/blog/experiments-in-philosophy/201111/does-pornography-treat-women-objects

http://pantheon.yale.edu/~jk762/mind-body.pdf
#psychology #gender #objectification