Quote of the Day

[Trigger warning for dehumanization.]

"To be a gazer, some say, is to place oneself superior to the gazed, which works fine as a tenet of film theory and feels notably more dubious as a premise of girl-watching analysis. The girl may be an objectified being, but it is practically a subclause of the social contract that we all objectify ourselves in the mirror every morning. Meanwhile, the girl-watcher is subject to the absolute rule of his powers of vision and carries a distinct whiff of comic pathos. Figure, carriage, finish, charm, flesh, cool—these are omnipotent. It is the nature of beauty that the girl-watcher is helpless before the wonders of nature."—The concluding paragraph of Troy Patterson's " A Dandy's Guide to Girl-Watching," a treatise on objectifying women published in Slate and subtitled "Checking out girls in shorts…tastefully."

I remember when Slate used to be worth reading. Now it's just another smelly internet receptacle into which garbage-brained writers can dump embarrassingly florid exposition waxing romantic about the dehumanization of women, justifying it with some yawn-inducing codswallop about how women "girls" are really the ones holding the power because men are just goofballs who can't resist looking, and a well-rounded ass reduces them to comic helplessness, or similar nonsense that boils the blood of every woman who's ever been sexually assaulted, harassed, cat-called, or ogled by a man who considers that shit some kind of goddamn compliment and blames his victim for being so irresistible.


[H/T to Shaker Julie. Related Reading: The Magical, Mysterious, Mighty Power of Uncovered Meatdom, Rape Is Not a Compliment, Today in Rape Culture.]