Being GEA is an attempt at walking in each gender’s shoes. It is driven from a position of empathy and from an understanding that humans are foremost creatures with biological and evolutionary norms, which are then influenced by societal and or cultural pressures. In short, it is an attempt at balancing ‘issue’ vs the fact that we are all just people, no matter what gender you are.
If you ask a Gender Equality Agnostic why Celebgate happened and why the male victims were ignored as part of the incident, the answer would be this:
Media promotes men as perpetrators. When ‘men’ are seen as perpetrators, male victims remain associated with the perpetrating group and not the victim group, and therefore receive no empathy.
Women are primarily the objectified gender. In the human species, women are the sexually pursued and men are required to pursue them—if the gender norms of sexual pursuit were reversed, most likely, men would be objectified instead. Despite this norm, acts of objectification on their own are not harmful, and reduce stigma by normalising sex and sexuality. If you believe this, you will be of the opinion that the Celebgate articles are focusing on the wrong enemy, they are focusing on objectification instead of sexual stigma.
Sexual stigma is primarily a hangover created by the religious permeation of most cultures; religions that stigmatise sexuality by promoting the ideal that sex must mean more than just sex… otherwise it’s immoral.
Consider that most pagan religion revolved around fertility, deified women, promoted sex and sexuality as positive while objectifying both men and women. A few thousand years ago we didn’t have cameras, but it was very common in fertility religions to have idols with massive breasts or penises, with these relics being considered holy. All that really is, is the promotion of objectification without stigma.
If you think individual acts of objectification are harmful, picture this scenario:
A woman sees a man cross the road—as he walks she thinks, ‘hmm, great butt’. This woman has reduced the man to a single feature of his anatomy… but has he been harmed by this? No matter how many times a person chooses to objectify a person or persons the target of the objectification does not become an object; they retain will, choice, self-awareness, and autonomy.
When these celebrities took photos of themselves and passed them to their partners, they were self-objectifying themselves and then their partners objectified them also. Do you think either partner was harmed by this process? Do you think either partner did not enjoy the exchange?
The crime here is invasion of privacy; the fallout however is completely attached to sexual stigma. Had photo’s been boosted of celebs eating dinner, how many people would be embarrassed or judgemental?
In western society we objectify and then add stigma.
The same media portraying these celebrities as victims, spends every other day of the week creating a celebrity obsessive culture that promotes negative objectification—objectification with stigma—of specifically the women that were leaked.
When celebrities have a ‘wardrobe malfunction’ it is again this same media plastering pictures and headlines of these women’s privates. This same media uses long range lenses to invade the privacy of these celebs, or waits till someone exits a car to shoot pictures up their skirts. After invading their privacy, it runs commentary articles that in any other instance would be considered character assassination.
As negative objectification of celebrities is a media norm, and that norm has permeated our culture, why would it be unusual for people to use computers to do what photographers and media outlets have been doing for years?
If this is a result of ‘male rape-culture’, why is it that the dominant subscriber demographic to celebrity news, is women?
No one is hurt by objectification that happens on their terms, when it is objectification by ‘choice’. But a societal norm of sexual stigma, no one wants to be the subject of that.
Which perspective would you like to see next?