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Don’t heed this maxim
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Here’s a great article on the soft near-porn of magazines like Maxim, which convince men that they’re only admiring the aesthetic of the feminine form, rather than stewing in their lust.
[These magazines] exist to allow men to look at women’s bodies sexually but not pornographically. With the emphasis on suggestion rather than revelation, the women in their pages are slick materialistic ideals, as current in their smooth plastic forms as the Prius or iPhone.
The downside to such manufactured people is that they’re all the same. If you were mugged by any one of the women in the top 10, you couldn’t pick the perpetrator out of a lineup. They’re all white. They all have long hair and they’re almost all blonde. They all have the same high cheekbones. They all have the same nose. Each woman is allowed exactly one deviation from the norm, and the deviation is immediately remarked on - her tattoos or her extra-dark eye makeup or her curves. The girls of FHM are obviously products of a fundamentally icky consumerist objectification, but their engineered homogeneity also reveals an incredibly limited imagination.
Ah, and there it is. Sin is almost always the result of a weak imagination. Unable to imagine a better way of doing something, unable to imagine a God who’d care, unable to imagine a richer experience, human beings follow the path of least resistance. A good article.
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Soul searching
‘Sin is almost always the result of a weak imagination.’
I think this sentence is profound. Well done HSK.
The only sin here is substituting manufactured, antiseptic uniformity for real beauty.
STEVEG,
I think you meant the other way around. Your substitution is going the wrong direction. Freudian slip, perhaps?
“The downside to such manufactured people is that they’re all the same. If you were mugged by any one of the women in the top 10…”
If the author was mugged by one of these “manufactured people”, it wouldn’t be by a manufactured picture in a magazine, but a living, breathing, soul containing human being. That’s an important distinction. It’s so easy, in this case, to step into this world view and criticize it, the author appears to be ignorant of the fact that he is objectifying women in the same way he accuses boys and the magazines of doing.
Anyway, motes and logs…
Wiglaf - Good point in #3.
My 19-yr. old niece gets on her soapbox about the objectification of women in our society, all the while wearing a very low-cut top, exposing much of her ample cleavage.
“Objectification of women in our society.” Is there any society or culture that doesn’t do this in some form or other?
All these rags like Maxim are is “entry level porn.” It teaches little Johnny to like the idea of a woman without having to know a woman, and he soon learns to satisfy his sexual urges himself with this image. Once a scantily-clad one doesn’t fit the thrill, he’s off to Playboy, or more likely these days, the internet.
Sexuality is so distorted in todays culture, it is really…amazing.
Oh, and a half-naked woman isn’t the only one that can be objectified. Look at the thousands of Muslim women covered head-to-toe, yet also treated purely as objects….again by selfish males,
“Sin is almost always the result of a weak imagination.”
Care to expound on that a little? I’m not sure I buy into that…
Wiglaf: No, I said what I meant. The images of women in Maxim and similar magazines are “manufactured, antiseptic uniformity.”
Those magazines are offering that in place of genuine beauty.
An excellent book on the subject is False Intimacy by Harry W. Schaumburg.
SteveG is right. And not only are they substituting for beauty, they’re subbing for relationship. These women, though not really available, are kind of available and really safe.
STEVEG says: “The only sin here is substituting manufactured, antiseptic uniformity for real beauty.”
This statement means that you are saying the sin is replacing antiseptic uniformity with real beauty. That’s incorrect from what you meant. You should have said:
The only sin here is substituting real beauty for manufactured, antiseptic uniformity.
I suppose semantically and logically it can be confusing. If you replace “substituting” with “exchanging” or “replacing”, then your statement definitely looks like you didn’t mean what you said.
Wiglaf - If your statement was substituting real beauty with manufactured…, then I’d agree. But your statement is substituting one for the other, so in that case, I agree with Steve’s version.
Wiglaf: I said FOR, not WITH. They could show real beauty but they substitute this manufactured facade FOR it.
Your “corrected” version is the one that says what you think my wording says.
I suppose semantically and logically it can be confusing. If you replace “substituting” with “exchanging” or “replacing”, then your statement definitely looks like you didn’t mean what you said.
Well yes, IF I had said “exchanging” or “replacing” you’d have a point. But I didn’t.
When you substitute A for B, you take out B and put A in its place.
When you exchange A for B, you give away A and take B instead.
They are different words with different meanings, and I said what I meant to begin with.
Gotta love the English language.
How any foreigner learns to speak and write English well is beyond me.