What’s the difference, why does it matter? Isn’t love just that: love? Who cares? Oh, wait, yes – I should not want to be objectified! Is that it?
Well, yes, that’s it. You’ve got it. Are you woman? Cause we care about that. Are you man? You may not be sure what the fuss is all about, and thus you may get blindsided. And that hurts. Read on, please.
I do not objectify women. Because I’m a peanut, by the way. I do not know much about objects or subjects or what the fuss is all about.
Lucky you. Spares you a lot of real pain. It’s hard to be a man, I tell you. Especially in a woman’s world.
Come on now, I do not make it hard on men, do I?
Oh yes, you do. You have a way to drive us crazy. And you know it.
So, what is the deal between being objectified or not. Can we get to the point, please?
The ancient Greeks are accused of not loving women. As philosophers, we are said to have loved beauty as an object of our desires. Who it actually was being the beauty did matter little to us. It was about beauty in itself. Most of us Greeks loved younger men, even though we had women and children. Obviously, we weren’t eunuchs. But women had no standing in our society. They were objects, perhaps of beauty, perhaps more of necessity as they gave us children. Our poetry did not honor women much at all.
I see. An object is of utility, is it not? Like in ‘I love my new car or my new high heels.’
What are cars and high heels? But yes, objects do not have or need to have much of a mind for the objectifier. We use, we worship our objects of love – the beautiful, even the divine – but get on with our lives regardless. Pathetic it is, yes.
Who is saying that I believe that I am the only subject and all others are my objects? Am I really that careless?
James, I want to be treated as a subject, like in having a mind, a heart, an opinion that matters. When you say that you love me, you desire me for my beauty. What kind of love is that? Yours is not real love, ours is not real love even though I might actually love you for who you are – for better or worse.
You see, a lot of fans love their favorite celebrities. But fans and celebrities never even talk to each other. Of course, no celebrity can talk one-on-one with all his or her fans. But these fans objectify their celebrities, they love me as an object, so to speak. It is a one-way, non-reciprocal love. Celebrities enjoy that, it makes the money for us. But I am tired of being an object, I want a real life. Do you actually care for me for who I am, or do you just care for me because I excite your imagination?
Shit, I am just a worthless piece of junk. Gonna have a drink now and kill a bad guy.
Hi all, please read my books and watch my movies. For over two hundred years now, I have influenced the notion of what love is. Because of me, more women are unwilling to marry someone they do not love.
So, real love is between two subjects? But is it not that two subjects repel each other, like the two + ends of magnets? I do not know, I am just a peanut. But it seems that subject/object is a better metaphor to characterize the successful workings of an amorous relationship?
A subject/object relationship looks perhaps coherent on paper when drawn with circles and arrows in a diagram, But please, grow up from diagrams and formulas and principles and other kinds of stereotypical clues. Real life is a dynamic, a transcending process. Do not try to conform life and people into someone else’s schemata. Many people have come to bitterly resent that.
As Zeitgeist says, the times are a-changin’…
It’s complicated. Historians have said that whenever women are allowed to esteem themselves by a still male-run society, the cultural conventions for love are also changing. What will women tell us in a hundred years from now about love? Will they still have reasons to be aggrieved then?
A hundred years is not that long in the historical context. That is just four generations, kind of. But yes, Neanderthals probably did not recognize that faint and feeble sensation of love for each other in their hearts and minds. They may not have had a fine perception and the explicit words to go along. Even today, people suffer from such a lack of perception and words.
Thanks, Zeitgeist, I know you are speaking of me.
You are the next I am going to kill.
Hehehe…
What then about the subject/subject thing?
A constant negotiation, the recurring art of enchantment and surrender, acted out alternately, by both male and female. No, there is no merging into one as a permanent, a static kind of state, as Plato and friends imagined, There is coming together and moving apart – just a bit, just enough, not too far – and finding each other anew again. Repeat in delight.
I want to get married…
The author of this blog, Tom Froehlich, is a graduate of the Unification Theological Seminary (Class of ’83) and is infatuated with musing about the phenomenon of lasting erotic love in human affairs.
