Work? What work? Mull over socio-political abstractions instead!

1. I suggest you go over to Feministe and check out the discussion of personal choice versus collective responsibility. This is the issue as I understand it: although women with children may want to leave the workforce, this generally reduces the number of working women and makes men less likely to introduce the kind of working conditions that would make it easier for women to remain at work in the first place. Should women make personal decisions based upon their larger political implications? Granted, both women and men (at least those with a social concience) make this kind of choice all the time, but this goes slightly beyond having a Cingular cell phone because their employees are unionized. I haven't decided where I fall - comments?

2. Browsing the archives of this very blog, I realized that men are heavily objectified; treated as little more than a collection of parts for the purpose of sexual gratification. I got to thinking - what are the political implications of objectifying men? Is it 'right', not just to comment on the attractiveness of men, but also to speculate on how they might be manipulated into various sexual acts? I think there are three points of view one can take. The first is that turnabout is fair play, and because men have subjected women to this cold gaze for so long, they should be - deserve to be - dehumanized in this way. Perhaps it will teach them how harmful and hurtful objectification is. Although this strikes me as somewhat punative, I'd be willing to take arguments.

A second (and not necessarily mutually exclusive) possibility is the objectification of men OK because there is (in Twisty-ian terms) an intrinsic power imbalance between men and women. Perhaps sexualization is a tool that can be used to increase women's social power at the expense of men. Note that this requires equating social power with sexual power. As women, do we want to play into this game, or do we want to change the game itself?

Finally, one could argue that, just as women are not uteruses with legs, men are not sperm delivery systems, and have just as much right to be treated as a complete human being. Although this is a superficially pleasing, "why-can't-we-all-just-get-along" viewpoint, it requires one to ignore the weight of history, and some might see it as hopelessly naive.

I'd like to know what people, both women and men, think about the treatment of men as sexual objects. Am I an evil oppressor? A feminist champion? A girl-nerd who overestimates the social and political importance of her actions, and like legions of guy-nerds, is just bitter about her inability to get laid?