Western society and degradation of women

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No western mothers are burning the breasts off their daughters.

Good point, Fuzzy.

My thing is, I'm a big believer in "natural order" when it comes to sex and gender roles, yet I'm not particularly old-fashioned about it. I think of the sexes as equal-but-different, complementary rather than competitive. And thus I think women are due high regard from men.

I really don't think women should have to resort to pornography, prostitution, and "exotic dancing." It's truly sad.

And no, we don't force female circumcision. But in the US, we live in a kind of culture and society that already has most of us elevated to a certain status (compare with the third world). That women are involved in human depravity at all in the western world is beyond my comprehension.

Why do we live in a world of slu*ty binge drinking lost women?

Why is modern music so degraded and degenerate?

In the past we had love songs about true love and tenderness and marriage. Now all the songs on MTV are depraved.

But does that make us bad? Our western heritage is about love and family. One man, one women.

Did we ever bind our woman's feet like the Chinese?
Did we make them wear bags over their heads?
Did we cut off their clitoris?
Did we make them stretch their necks or ears or lips like the Africans?
Do we stone women to death for being raped?
Do we have harems of women?
In our society can a man rid himself of a woman just by saying "I divorce you" but women don't have the same right?
Do we "lend" our wives to a visitor like the Eskimos.

Don't try to put me on some damned guilt trip. We Europeans have always been been more "women friendly" than any other culture on earth.

I was thinking if the objectification and degradation of women in the media actually PREVENTS worst acts such as rape and sexual assault.

You see, some people have trouble controlling themselves and they "need to" satisfy their desires one way or another. So, if they are able to view porn, then they feel good. If no porn is accessible, then they still have an "unsatisfied" feeling and they are more likely to resolve to violence in order to "satisfy themselves".

Of course, there is the viewpoint that porn causes objectification of women and it could cause people to be desensitized and then things like rape happens.

I agree in turn. And it doesnt matter much if individuals want to step outside that formula.



I have had many acquaintances give dancing a try(which could be termed live soft core porn, right?) and several (different individuals) entered the nasty field of prostitution, sometimes mixed in with drug sales.

None of them were victims, per say.

It wasnt uncommon for some of the young women hanging around the bars to give the dancing pole a whirl, and I knew several that did it full time. Outside of their job they were pretty normal folk.

Prostitution:
This one "lady" told me later that she liked screwing, and if she could get paid for it, why not? She was sleeping with lots of men anyway. I'd like to add I had known her for a few years prior, and after pursuing that career it gave her a very unwholesome aura and I no longer wanted to be in her presence. She had no drug habits. I dont even recall her drinking.

One of the waitresses at the bar I worked at was servicing clients sexually AND selling drugs. It was revealed in a most nasty way one morning when the bar staff went for after hours breakfast. She whipped out her cell phone and proceeded to drum up some business(both types at once!). No victim, she was fully in charge of what was going on. Since she was pulling in several thousand a week at the club, she certainly did not need to sell drugs nor herself. She LIKED doing it. If she had any expensive habits, they didnt show.



One mans vice is another mans virtue. While I am not interested in prostitutes, apparently pursuit of the all mighty buck indicates that not everyone has a problem with it. Certainly they havent lacked for clientèle in the last 2000 years, have they?

When I was a boy there wasn't any porn except the occasional copy of Playboy.

Did we go around raping girls? No we did not!

We put girls on pedestals and almost worshiped them.

At school dances we gritted our teeth and crossed the floor to ask a girl to dance.
We were afraid that we might be rejected and laughed at.

It isn't easy being a 14 year old boy.

Don't mix your personal morality with morality in general. To consider porn a modern invention is to be incredibly naive.

You are conflating that there is more rape today than in your days. Worse, you are suggesting that there was no rape in those days. This is false.

At the age of 84 I lived in those old days and know from experience of friends that the police regularly denied rape on the basis of accusing the victim. That probably still goes on but perhaps not quite so routinely.

1 in 5 women have been sexually abused, but based on the large number that goes unreported, it is more like 1 in 2 according to some estimates...we live in a preditory society that is fueled by the media. As far as women getting justice when they are raped...my mother was drugged and raped. The police said, "I dont see that a crime was commited here"
Justice here is propaganda.

Let me totally agree with you here. Much of police decision in rape cases is to blame the victim. I know from personal experience with a friend.

Natural order? What do you mean? And, what do you mean by "equal-but-different"?

As far as "resorting to" porn, some women make a lot of money that way, more than I make. I wouldn't necessarily want to make money that way, even if I were younger and had a Barbie-doll body, as I am much too shy, but if someone else wants to, what's the big deal? Prostitution, because it's illegal in most of the US, can be dangerous, both from the standpoint of violence and diseases.

~Kate

'equal but different' means that you're not a real man if you're not stereotypically masculine, and you're not a real woman if you're not stereotypically feminine.
If you are stereotypical for your gender, great! You're equal.

Modern Western culture IS better than many, probably better than most.
Still, pressure to be attractive is strong; women and girls literally starve themselves to be attractive (and I'm not just talking anorexia nervosa; more than one model has died from starvation), they wear high heels that deform their feet over time (look at your grandma's toes sometime when she's barefoot if you don't believe me), they voluntarily go under the knife (risk of major infection) while under general anesthesia (risk of death) to be thinner, prettier, whatever. They inject poisons into their faces to paralyze the muscles for fear of wrinkles. And, no joke, some women are now voluntarily undergoing genital cutting ('labiaplasty') in the west so that they look prettier 'down there'! I've seen several interviews with Iranian women (note that Iran isn't one of the cultures practicing genital mutilation) who say that one of the problems that they see with the West is how abusive it is towards women, requiring them to be sex objects for men!

Women are now expected to work as well as taking on the majority of the burden for childcare and household maintenance. I hate Sarah Palin, but when she was running, people were asking 'who will take care of her children if she wins!?' No one asks that question of a man who has small children while running for office.

Men still routinely use their physical size to intimidate women with whom they are arguing. Men can walk alone at night without being told 'they were asking for it' if they have the misfortune to be mugged.

Men can see themselves reflected on television and in movies with complex characters and attributes that they can look up to; If there is a token female main character in a movie, as often as not she's there almost exclusively as a love interest for the male main character to 'win.' The exception is in what men call 'chick flicks,' where there are multiple women, but they most often talk about nothing but men, clothing, and makeup for the entire movie.

I won't get into the list of what women went through in the past (girdles!) in Western culture; suffice it to say that we've improved.

Don't get me wrong: I like men. I just find it laughable when a bunch of men get together to talk about how good women have it (note that I'm not claiming that everyone here is doing that).

Western society is degrading to women? In comparison with what? Eastern culture? Middle-eastern culture? The current western culture has been the least degrading to women ever... Sure improvements have to be done.

It is ridiculous to think that the fact women are a more successful form of porn means the western culture is more degrading than say... a bunch of religious freaks that think women'sole presence is offensive and thus must hide their faces and hair when in public :/

The women being treated publicly as objects took their jobs by their own will. If society ever found out they were forced to do that, people would instantly go to jail. These women are making tons of money and thus gaining independence by doing all those things that for some reason some people think are "degrading" . If anything I feel more offended as a man when a half naked women is used in advertising because it underestimates me. The woman in question is most likely making a respectable living out of it at the expense of perpetuating the generalization that men only think of sex :/

There has never been a culture or country that wasn't full of human depravity.