Lad mags, porn and objectification

I understand and sympathise with the Lose the Lad Mag movement and the people who support it, but their efforts are misdirected.

Any man will tell you how tempting the lure of naked or half-clothed women is because of lad mags, internet porn and the average billboard. Emotionally and physiologically, we know they appeal to our deeper, reptile brains.

But intellectually, most educated men in the western world know the poses, the big hair, the clothes painstakingly crafted to look like they're falling off and all the digital manipulation that goes on after the picture is taken is a carefully constructed artifice, presenting a cypher no real woman could possibly represent.

Consider the reason we have such trouble staying clear of sugary, salty and fatty foods. In nature (unaided by human ingenuity, that is), deep fried chicken, ice cream and crackers slathered with cream cheese are as rare as eternally teenaged, 36-24-36-shaped women who are constantly sexually receptive and have blemishless skin, gravity defying breasts, heavy lidded eyes and a sultry pout.

But photography, printing, Photoshop, mass-produced corn starch and the refining of sugar have let us surround ourselves with everything that gives us our drives but which nature provides only scarcely. From the genes on up we know how bad it is for us but it just... tastes... so... good.

The image presented by lad mags, porn and their economic cousins are similarly an oversupply of a very rare quality we're programmed to spend our lives seeking but were supposed to find very rarely – surviving instead on real food and real sex appeal.

The objectification path

Here's what the anti-porn and anti-lad mag crowd have right. Whether it's the hardcore kind anyone can find online or the (almost innocent, by comparison) coquettish looks and colour-corrected breasts staring out of lad mags, porn across the whole spectrum provides a big step towards letting men objectify and dehumanise women. A big step, but not the first one.

That first step is as much a part of nature as breathing and sleeping, something that goes back to our grunting, hairy, stone-tool beginnings. It's a woman looking at a powerful, socially worthy man and imagining babies with him. It's a man looking at a young, fertile woman and imagining sex with her.

Of course that's a very simplistic generalisation, but as both visual and sexual creatures our first interaction with a member of the opposite sex in our natural state is to look at them. The factor that restricted further objectification used to be that – long before you could move on to sex with them – you had to navigate the delicate social process that preceded it, whether it was offering her food with soft, assuring vocalisations or taking her to the movies.

Going through that process meant you had to get to know and accept the whole person, which by its very nature removes any trace of objectification. As human society has become more complicated, that process of familiarizing ourselves with potential mates sometimes convinces us they weren't worth pursuing in the first place, no matter how visually attractive we first found them.

Porn (and the technology that enables it, from cave paintings to computers) has always been about taking that step away. As porn says to its consumer; 'here's a stand-in for a real woman; just a body part in some cases, and she's the perfect mate – as receptive as she is attractive. There's no social groundwork to lay to win her over and she doesn't care how fat your are or your social status'.

That means when a man looks at a naked girl in a lad mag or a porn video, he is absolutely objectifying and dehumanizing her. The reason that can be harmful is because as any psychologist will tell you, men who dehumanise women are more likely to harbour a whole spectrum of detrimental intent – from holding negative or sexist attitudes to rape.

Often in sexual assault a woman is reduced to a vagina, a set of breasts, a body, maybe even a stand-in for someone else her attacker really wants to hurt – from his suffocating mother to hatred about his own 'impure' desires. In some ways it's the ultimate in objectification because her heart, mind and the rest of her humanity aren't even considered to exist as she suffers for the object her attacker has made her.

And when internet porn, suggestive billboards, multi-million dollar advertising campaigns for jeans and fragrances, lad mags and beauty sections in womens' magazines also exist, we don't just have the opportunity to objectify women, we're encouraged to.

Looking too closely

So if objectification is the problem, lad mags are certainly responsible. Problem is – as the above paragraph suggests – they're just one head of the hydra. The hearts of those who want to ban them are in the right place, they're just targeting too slender a locus of the whole issue.

But they're easy targets. Stopping online porn is probably impossible at this point, so the next likely offender on the scale is porn in print, produced by highly visible businesses in our own legal jurisdictions against whom we can lobby and protest. It's an effort to show society that objectifying women is not okay, and a worthy one.

But where's the line? Do we ban womens' underwear in department store catalogues? High school dance dresses? Make-up? Do we forbid women from showing an inch of skin like the extreme elements of Islam do, restricting their freedom altogether instead of objectifying them?

There's actually only one place the line can be drawn, only one potential preventative measure to stop the objectification from hurting women as individuals. Broad-strokes institutional measures and blanket bans isn't it.

The line rests with every individual man who might be tempted by a lad mag or porn site and might enjoy himself using them, but who can turn off the computer or close the magazine and go back to his life where women are his family members, co-workers, bosses, children, lovers or friends. He might fantasise about some of women in his life, but it's impossible for him to objectify them by virtue of the fact that he knows them as people, not body parts or fantasy figures.

A well-adjusted man knows a woman in a magazine seemingly begging him for sex is a carefully constructed and empty symbol, and he probably knows very well he's objectifying the real woman who forms its basis by being a consumer of it. It doesn't mean he's going to go out and rape the next woman he sees.

Of course, we have to acknowledge that there are men who will do that, and porn/lad mags/department store catalogues aren't helping – they're making it worse. But it's also why our target to combat the objectification of women can't be one slender facet of its propagation like lad mags (or jeans billboards, or the catwalk model industry), and neither can it be about top-down blocks or bans imposed upon them.

The answer; there's no simple answer

What should we do as a society? That's far less clear – it's probably got a lot to do with healthy sexual education in childhood, exposing young boys to representations of strong women in their lives, breaking the cycle of domestic violence, punishing and judging rapists instead of their victims and making feminism a conversation for (and about) everyone.

Boys are going to grow up seeing naked girls in magazines. They're going to see a consumer culture that places a woman's physical attractiveness as her most important value. They're going to see women in porn videos who say yes to anal sex every time and let their partners ejaculate on their faces, and they're going to think all women do that (girls are going to see that and think so too). Those ships might have well and truly sailed.

The answer is to use information and education to promote the kind of respect well-adjusted men grow up with, and use it early when objectification starts to take effect.

A lot of people die in car crashes. But instead of banning cars, we try to influence behaviour in individuals and change culture – make drink driving something to be ashamed of, educate drivers about road fatigue, etc.

I know – cars provide far more benefit than detriment to society so in cold statistical terms. The same can't be said about lad mags, which merely contribute to a publishing company's bottom line and as critics claim, might do more harm than good socially.

But the point is that banning lad mags is both looking at the problem too narrowly and enforcing top-down measures that will just enhance the effectiveness of every other potential trigger out there. The solution is to be found much farther back in the objectification pathway. It's far more complicated and nuanced than blanket bans, and it should be preventative instead of reactionary.