Overcorrecting: the Objectification of Men

[ARCHIVE POST: 08/22/2019]

I saw Alita: Battle Angel with a couple of male friends when it came out in February. As someone who’s hyper-aware of the objectification of women on-screen, I was much more satisfied with this film than I expected - I definitely went in prepared for anime action heroine Alita to be a fetish girl, but was pleasantly surprised to find that that wasn’t the case. Somewhere in the middle of the film, there was one scene which love interest Hugo spent mostly shirtless for no apparent reason. That scene came back up in our discussion after the movie, and I was surprised when the two guys agreed that a) there’s definitely been a trend of male objectification in cinema and b) they’re “weirdly here for it.” After six months of mental incubation and dissection of that conversation, I’ve arrived at a number of interrelated conclusions about the big picture subtext. The central conclusion: male objectification, while it’s always been present, has shifted - not in who it's done by, but who it's targeted at. Until recently, it was an appeal by male filmmakers to male fantasy; now, often, it's an attempt by male filmmakers to appeal to female fantasy. Before we get too far into this, let’s talk about cinema’s history with male objectification. I think we can all agree that women have taken the brunt of on-screen objectification and sexualization (women are partially or fully nude on screen three times as often as men). However, just because it happens to women more doesn’t invalidate the fact that it also happens to men. Your standard action flick will feature at least one look at a shirtless male body: think Adam Driver in Star Wars: the Last Jedi - Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible - Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, Chris Pratt, Robert Downey Jr, Sebastian Stann, and all the other Marvel darlings in their various superhero films. The list could go on. It’s easy to identify the cause of longstanding on-screen female objectification: decades of male-dominated filmmaking, before our society began to become self-aware and the male gaze was no longer PC. These days, if filmmakers want to objectify women without being eviscerated by all the frothing proponents of equality such as myself, they have to disguise objectification as empowerment - but that’s an issue for a different article. The question is, if women have been objectified all along because men were in control, then why have men also, albeit less frequently, been objectified? Male high school classmates of mine - who believed that the hot male leads are the only reason any girl could ever be interested in action movies - would answer that men have been objectified over the decades to appeal to the female portion of the audience. I postulate, though, that it’s actually to appeal to men. Allow me to elaborate. Interestingly enough, it’s the same reason that stunning female love interests who are way too good to get together with loser male heroes reliably end up with them anyway. Many a loser male hero comports himself with less-than-model behavior toward said love interest, and is rewarded with the trophy girl’s affection as if he's earned it like a prize (a la The Breakfast Club, Kickass, etc). The fictional male hero is a stand-in for the real-world male filmmaker and/or audience member; so the fictional male does, gets and is all the things about which the real-world male fantasizes. Either he’s a dumpy loser who gets the hot girl, or he’s a shirt-busting hunk - or, for bonus points, he’s a shirt-busting hunk of a loser who gets the hot girl. That objectified male body, the sculpted Marvel superbody, is another expression of male fantasy. It is indeed a common thread, but not because it’s what women want to see; rather, because it’s what men want for themselves. Or rather, that has been the case for a long time. Recent cinema, however, believing itself to be on the cutting edge of progressiveness and equality, has begun to objectify men for women instead of for men. The easiest way to tell the difference is that this new and improved take on male objectification usually does not coexist alongside female objectification, as it always did before; where Mission: Impossible’s Ethan Hunt and Jane Carter once took turns being sexualized and objectified, now films like Star Wars: the Last Jedi and Alita: Battle Angel spare the female lead and only put her male counterpart’s body on display. There are two driving motives behind this surge of male objectification intended to appeal to women. First: to dull women’s aversion to seeing themselves objectified, and second: to nurse the guilty feelings of “woke” men who have recognized that their sex is responsible for objectifying women on-screen since the inception of film. To the first - if on-screen sexual exploitation can be transmogrified into an expression of equality, where men are exposed and objectified for the pleasure of women as much as women are exposed and objectified for the pleasure of men, then the same progressive camp that has long decried the sexualization and objectification of women as a reprehensible symptom of patriarchal societal dominance somehow stumbles into avid supportership of this indiscriminate objectification. Now objectification happens to everyone, men and women alike - if that doesn’t satisfy you, are you really interested in equality or are you just looking for something to complain about? With this tactic, male filmmakers have begun to successfully spin female objectification as empowerment. If Token Strong Female Character throws her attitude around and doesn't take shit from men, and also wears a really sexualized costume, it's because she's a badass empowered woman who chose that sexy outfit for herself, right? Not, you know, because the filmmakers who conceived, designed and directed her decided to put her in that costume, while putting all her male counterparts in more practical costumes with less sex appeal, right. Right? And to the second point - an ever-growing number of men recognize the longstanding disadvantage at which a male-dominated entertainment industry has put women. Even if they aren’t personally responsible for it, there’s often an attached sense of guilt - survivor’s guilt, as it were, or the guilt of the privileged. Often, that guilt translates into support and approval when the injustice that has been inflicted on women for so long is inflicted on men, as if objectifying men the way women have been objectified will be a satisfactory way to even the scales, and will somehow be empowering for women. Perhaps there’s something comforting and guilt-relieving about a solution as simple as punishing men. But any woman in the trenches of the battle for equality knows that kicking men down to the depths we've fought to escape is deeply counterproductive to our equality-centric cause. The real solution is not to punish anyone, but to demand better treatment for everybody; achieving cultural recognition and celebration of human dignity and individual personhood is a much less comforting, more difficult road. As a side note, an interesting spin-off of these two motivations for the objectification of men is the careless bestowal of sexual power upon women. In a society where the balance of sexual power certainly does not favor women, it is perceived as harmless and even humorous when women on screen are allowed to act in ways that are (rightly) seen as gross or predatory in men. As a general example, even up to very recent cinema, sexually inappropriate behavior from men ranging from crude speech to threatening behavior was tolerated, laughed at and even rewarded. Now, as we as a society finally come to the realization that that’s actually not acceptable, there’s an inclination to over-correct; women can engage in everything from crude speech to threatening behavior, and that’s alright - because in a society that feels bad for doing that to women, but is still catching up to the fact that men can be victims of sexual violence, too, the widely accepted reaction to women harassing men is amusement instead of disapproval. ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON THE IMPACTING CULTURE BLOG