[image is from here]
Queen Bee, one of many commenters over at The Experience Project has made what I consider to be a perfectly appropriate statement to introduce this post. It is from here and an excerpt of it reads as follows:Posted on December 14th, 2009 at 7:33 PM
I got a man who thinks I am strange
i got another who thinks I am game
[...] Ever wonder why you see me with no make-up and my crazy curly hair,
because I want someone to see past it...
see past my body, my face, my hair....
see me,
because I try so desperately to show you... just f.ucking LOOK
* * *
What follows immediately is from The Experience Project, online. Note that the BEST answer was flagged and removed. Hmmm. Isn't THAT called censorship? Hey all you anti-censorship dudes: go after THIS group, not women who are trying to pass civil rights legislation making it actionable to turn women into things that are harmed because they've been turned into things by white hetero men. After this bit, some thoughts and analysis by me, and then "THE STUDY"!!!!
 | Resolved Question Is it me or does PLAYBOY have really good articles?Posted 3 months ago |
FlagSorry, this best answer was flagged and cannot be displayed.
Other 5 Answers to Is it me or does PLAYBOY have really good articles?
 | Posted Aug 21st, 2009 at 3:37PM Playboy has articles?! Rated: +1Vote for this!  |
 | Posted Aug 21st, 2009 at 5:29AM it's not just you. Rated: +1Vote for this! |
 | Posted Aug 21st, 2009 at 4:02AM Of course it does... among other things. |
Among other THINGS, indeed. And to the first commenter: nice photo... NOT. But that image he posts, presumably of himself, just goes to show ya that white heterosexual men do not have "beauty standards" for themselves. Pull up images and video footage of ppl on beaches and you'll see the same thing over and over: images--moving or still--of women who are struggling to conform to narrow standards of very oppressive patriarchal Western beauty, and men who are not struggling to do anything comparable along those lines. Your honor, I submit as piece of evidence #1 the photo above of "acoguy"--yet another white-privileged middle aged man who things ppl will be interested in seeing the latest hijinx he can display, while also displaying to us that white men have no socially mandated beauty standards recognisable to THIS gay whiteboy! Honestly, when we say WHM have no decency, what we mean, in part, is that WHM do not hold each other accountable to how grotesquely they present themselves to the rest of us, in appearance and behavior! (Not that I find Photoshopped and otherwise altered images of objectified and pornographised men any more attractive!)
Apparently, from the language used and consciousness undisplayed in the pdf file below, students at the Harvard Business School learn narrowly within their majors. "Harvard Business School": that's supposed to make us non-college goers, and even non-Ivy League colleges goers, exclaim inwardly or not: "Ooooh, that's one of them SMART schools, ain't it!?") are required to learn very little about who humanity is, normally or usually. And they are not even required to even know what Playboy is when they do studies involving it: what the magazine does, which images it shows, what is done to the almost always young non-disabled women presented as sexxx-things in the magazine, sometimes sexxx-things that go to college, sometimes sexxx-things with a favorite color or musical artist. This is a full-on critique of Playboy, not the women who pose in it. For those people ARE people, fully. But what Playboy DOES to those women is where the dehumanisation and oppression comes in, the patriarchal uses and abuses, the white hetero male supremacist alterations, acquisition, and abuses of her being--physical, emotional, spiritual, political--to produce images of people who are not really those people at all. Many times in dominant media I've listened to women speak about what they think of the images of them in Playboy. What is often said is something to the effect of "Wow, I sure don't look like that in real life!" Why would that be???
Once you airbrush an image, the old-fashioned way or with Photoshop and other programs designed to alter images in myriad misogynistic and racist ways, it is no longer an image of the person; it is something else. It is an altered image of a person, designed (literally) to appeal to pornographic het men's "preferences" for what they "consider" beautiful and pretty and sexy. That het men who look at online and offline pornography believe they are looking only at "scantily clad women" is one of the biggest lies white het male conservative and white het male liberal society tells itself. For a better understanding of what REALLY is in Playboy, see here.
This particular research, with various studies done and described, is worded in ways that make me really angry: discussing looking at Playboy magazine as an issue of "morality and doing things that may be deemed perverted" is among them! Referring to non-disabled people as "people" is another. Referring to heterosexual men as "men" is another. To what degrees are we made aware of any person's race, class, and other factors? Well, clearly this study assumes "the normal human" to be a white, class-privileged, heterosexual non-disabled male of a certain age". Yeah, right.
The ACTUAL global norm for HUMAN is women of color of many ages; women living in poverty by U.S. standards, women living in what is termed the Third World--NOT the "First" [read: Last] one; women neither very, very young nor very old, due to death in infancy and early life--including death of women giving birth as well as to not living long due to life-ending illness and disease; women living in places where there isn't sufficient clean water, nutritious food, or adequate health care; women disabled by capitalism, racism, and patriarchy, at least, if not also medically/physically or by depression and PTSD due to surviving men's traumatic behavior against women and girls. With that in mind, let's move onto our study of why "people" do the things they do, and with what degree of consciousness and justification. And please note, a far more in depth analysis of the ethics at work in some of the study are described here in Yurugu by Marimba Ani, far more brilliantly. (Dr. Ani obtained her BA degree in philosophy from the University of Chicago, and MA and Ph.D. degrees in anthropology from the New School for Social Research in NYC-- which is an excellent university--far better than Haahvid.)
The Harvard Business School Study: “I read Playboy for the articles”: Justifying and rationalizing questionable preferences
by Zoë Chance and Michael I. Norton
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