Fashion Mags Fail to Empower

A few weeks ago American journalist Noah Berlatsky set off a firestorm of controvery by defending highly eroticized fashion magazines. To build up his case, he claimed that homoerotic attraction between women was a “normal” component of female friendship in Victorian England.

With a final brandish, he made a clarion call to revisit the question of feminine desire, shifting women from “the looked at” to the “looker” to make women feel powerful.

How ignorant he is of real women.
The reason images in men's magazines often look like images in women's magazines is that, despite the different audiences, they are both doing more or less the same thing. They are making women sexual objects, and serving them up to satisfy, or more likely to provoke, the desires of their readers.

Although in this case:

Women get to be in the position of power, looking at and consuming bodies displayed expressly for them.

The article, which garnered hundreds of comments and thousands of shares, leaves much to be desired. For example, didn’t our feminist fore-mothers fight against such exploitation when they resisted patriarchal systems? Or perhaps women have bought into this flawed standard, eager to play with the boys.

Either way, philosopher Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative affirms that man is a rational creature that must never be used as a means to an end. Until very recently, we understood this, and a shroud of secrecy cloaked the objectification of women (there is a reason why X-rated videos were sold in paper bags and men hid Playboy under the bed.) The attempt to hide such practices alluded to a common societal standard that agreed upon the moral shortcomings of objectification.

Read more at Mercator.Net.