Banning ‘unsuitable’ images or music is far worse than seeing the odd photo of a topless model
What do a students’ ‘pole fitness’ society, the song ‘Blurred Lines’, the Sun newspaper, a poster advertising a summer ball, and lads’ mags have in common? They’ve all been banned from UK universities on the grounds that they promote the sexual objectification of women. Suggesting that something objectifies women seems to be the No.1 justification for moral outrage among a vocal minority of student activists, and it nearly always results in campus censorship.
There’s a long history to arguments that women suffer from objectification – that is, that they are portrayed as reducible to just their bodies and presented as sexual objects solely for the pleasure of men. From the early 1970s, feminists challenged advertising that simply draped half-naked women over any product. Such arguments are now taken ever-more seriously: late last year, the UK Advertising Standards Authority banned an advert for Renault cars that featured Parisian cabaret dancers because it ‘considered that the ad objectified the dancers by portraying them as sexual objects and that it was therefore likely to cause serious or widespread offence’. This was on the basis of just one complaint.
Today’s student campaigners are increasingly alarmist about the consequences of objectification, rushing to draw direct links between images and psychological damage to women on the one hand, and changes in male behaviour on the other. Sexually objectifying images have been variously linked to ‘lad culture’, ‘raunch culture’ and ‘rape culture’.
At the same time, today’s feminists have massively expanded the definition of objectification. The word ‘sexual’ is often dropped, so even images of fully clothed women in non-sexual poses have been castigated as objectifying women. One such image, used on a poster to advertise an end-of-year student ball, was removed after the university’s women’s officer argued: ‘A lot of students, both male and female, find it quite disturbing. The picture was also used without the consent of the girl featured. It only shows her body, which objectifies her.’ To be clear, the image shows a regular-looking woman who is fully clothed. It is not sexualised and does not feature just a part of her body. The image shows only the woman’s body in the same way photos reduce everyone to their physical appearance; unless we all start carrying around cardboard speech-bubbles, photographs will always be just a picture of our external selves.
If showing any image of a woman stands open to accusations of objectification, and therefore grounds for censorship, then fashion magazines will fold tomorrow and art galleries will lose many of their most famous works.
Some feminists go further and argue that the objectification of women isn’t simply a question of images, but is inherent in the language people use. It is suggested that, grammatically, women are often the passive objects of sentences rather than the active subjects and that this rhetorical style of speech and writing enculturates girls into accepting a lesser role in society. By the same thinking, children’s stories that portray either fewer female characters, or girls acting in a more passive way than boys, are also accused of objectifying women. How women of my generation, raised on Anne from Enid Blyton’s ‘Famous Five’ books – with her fondness for washing-up – and Susan from Swallows and Amazons – with her propensity to make cups of tea and scrambled eggs – ever made it out of the kitchen is anyone’s guess.
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