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Loyal Vassal · 7d

Hi, I’m the person who asked about the ‘misogyny miasma’ thing in porn about a month ago, and I found something that troubled me— https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-big-questions/201106/the-sexual-objectification-spillover-effect?amp . This article seems to claim that the perception of women is hurt every time a sexualized image of a woman is viewed. I’m trying to make sense of my views (which are that sexualization in media is rarely a bad thing) with these studies (that seems to imply misogyny is imparted onto the viewer). Do you know of any material that might address this?

Sexuality will always be a force in art and media etc etc, just because it is a fundamental part of human culture and society and experience, regardless of one's specific relationship to sexuality itself. However what is deeply harmful is when in media there ends up being a default, objectifying assumption of what the visual language of sexuality etc MUST Look Like, along with assuming who the default audience MUST be (hence what stuff like Laura Mulvey and John Berger have talked about wrt gaze, male gaze etc).

This thread https://x.com/celineorelse/status/1058145289561882627 is an oldie but goodie, and shares a lot of articles and books, videos (including John Berger, which I mentioned above ) which I think speaks to your concerns. It's long but around this part https://x.com/celineorelse/status/1059022892481032193 it talks about the harmful impact of sexist/sexualized images of women taken for granted in public and society.

I think the important takeaway is that the misogyny isn't being "imparted" necessarily bc of the inherent power of the sexualized images themselves, but the context in which the images are presented, and thus the messages being communicated through that presentation. Are they being treated as "default," are fantasies being /presented/ as an objective desirable reflection of reality? Whose fantasies, demographically, are treated as important and Real and unassailable, natural and whose are degraded and denounced? These are

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I would add my own extra experiential commentary that, as someone who grew up with a LOT of say, Christian material around what women should and shouldn't look/act/be like, obviously pornography and sexy bikini images etc were greatly frowned upon to look at, for men and women. And so my exposure to sexualized women in media was fairly limited as much as one could be in the modern age. However, this culture also granted a fetishistic power to the Sexualized Woman Image(tm) that was both lusted after and despised–the Sexual Woman Image was both a symbol of Weakness of Willpower and Shame for Men (that they must learn to Conquer) and a symbol of Warning for women (that they must not represent, lest you become that Symbol of Weakness and Shame). In thosw cultural context I feel it ended up making the act of seeing a generic sexualized woman image more harmful, and caused more unnecessary guilt and gendered resentment, than it would have been if young men and women had simply been allowed to see stuff casually and learn how to behave themselves and not act up around it.

*Ofc there's the distinction between like Literal Pornography and just like. A woman standing around in a swimsuit or low cut shirt--something that the oversexualizing culture likes to flatten together

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