Let's talk about sexism, baby

Last week’s release of  Princeton University psychology professor Susan Fiske’s findings — that men who viewed pictures of half-naked women reacted in the same way as they would to viewing pictures of objects — sparked a great deal of discussion. Sadly, most of that discussion has been about sex. I say “sadly” because, while talking about sex can be important and interesting (Salt-N-Pepa was really on to something), when we talk about these findings and we allow the conversation to become one about sex instead of about sexism, we’re having the wrong conversation.

The manner in which news outlets presented the findings immediately framed the conversation in terms of sex. It’s clear why: Sex sells. This is a seriously “sexy” story: A study that allows newspapers to credibly print the word “naked” or the phrase “scantily clad” in a headline makes for attention-grabbing news. Which is probably why most papers that ran stories on the findings couldn’t resist including a photo of a woman in a bikini, as though readers needed a visual aid to grasp the challenging concept of a half-naked woman.

The release of these findings is an opportunity to have a real discussion about the way men view women in our society. Instead, thanks to ubiquitous headlines about “girly pics” and the considerate inclusion of lingerie-clad visual aids, what should have been an intellectual conversation became simply a titillating one. But when we’re talking about the socially ingrained neurological responses that men have to women, we should be talking about sexism, not sex.

Many people who discussed the findings concluded that the assertion “men objectify half-naked women” was laughably obvious (a sad state of affairs in itself) and also that the study was proof that objectification is hard-wired, intractable and therefore the “natural” way for men to think about women. In other words, we’ve been talking not about gender, but about sex: not about the social and cultural characteristics that make us men or women, but about the biological functions that make us male or female.

The emphasis on the biological is misleading. This kind of analysis — and its objectification-condoning conclusion — ignores the fact that human social norms regulate our hard-wired impulses all the time. When someone upsets you, you might feel a hard-wired, neurological urge to physically attack them. But social norms against violence keep you in your seat and keep your conflict limited to verbal argument. This kind of strict biological determinism also ignores the possibility that, as sociologist and critically acclaimed author Michael Kimmel puts it, “socially constructed responses take up residence in our brains and produce physiological responses.” But it also ignores the crux of the issue, which is not how our brains work, but how our society works.

Objectification — both the alleged neurological response and the social phenomenon — is one of the many ways in which women are treated unequally and unethically in our society. That our culture is so accustomed to objectification — so resigned to it that a statement like “men objectify half-naked women” elicits not cries of outrage but scoffs of “well, duh” — makes it perfectly, depressingly clear that our conversations need to be less about sex and more about gender.  We should be talking less about the neurology and more about how we can ensure that men treat women with respect in spite of that neurology.

Finally, the findings seemed to immediately lead people to discuss the act of sex itself, which may seem inevitable. But it is totally perplexing that sexism and the act of sex should be so closely linked in the public imagination: In my mind, sexism is least sexy thing in the world. Sexism is never really about the act of sex, because sexism, like objectification, is deeply dehumanizing. To be sexist is to strip away a person’s identity and to view all members of a gender, male or female, as uniform and indistinct. The act of sex, on the other hand, is about individual experience and individual desires. Thus, as I see it, the act of sex is the opposite of uniform.

Instead of asking about the act of sex, we should be asking about acts of sexism: rape, discrimination in the workplace and any act that relies on the assumption that all women and all men are the same. If we start having this conversation instead of the one we have been having, maybe we will learn something about our society and about ourselves. Maybe that knowledge will lead us toward a more just, less sexist society.

It pains me to say this, but in this case, Salt-N-Pepa got it wrong. When it comes to examining how men and women relate to each other in our culture, let’s stop talking about sex and start talking about sexism, baby.