I
have a lot of respect for the scantily clad good looking people.
It takes much more than
a good genetic pool to consistently have a beautiful body that you are
comfortable with and unembarrassed of. The debate on love-the-way-you-are
versus achieve-what-you-love is a no brainer, you are essentially choosing
between let-it-be and let’s-do-something. Achieving a fit and healthy body is a
feat- it takes regular rigorous workouts, correct eating habits, will power and
immense self love to shape up. Self love can sometimes over come physical,
psychological and physiological events that a body goes through and when it
does, it is worthy of greater respect. Few people would look better without
clothes than with them. Across all genders there is no part of the body or a
bodily phenomenon that is worthy of shame or secrecy.
Weather conditions’ not
withstanding it is anything but inappropriate to leave the choice of clothes to
a one’s own aesthetic sensibilities. The fuss in my country over why women
dress up the way they do is rooted in patriarchy and steeped in primal
psychology. I wonder why it is so unfair. Why are we conditioned to be
conscious and ashamed of our body and are made to feel guilty, even unsafe at
the breach of an imposed protocol. I think a gender debate is not only pertinent;
it is worth all the time and research. Feministic agendas can be benefited only with a thorough understanding of what makes it relevant. To understand the
tenets of patriarchy, male violence and untoward occurrences like rape we need
to look into the research done in evolutionary psychology. I did spend a while
doing just that and here is what I understood.
Human beings can
think, that makes us complicated. Many feministic
scholars, evolutionary psychologists, and evolutionary feminists suggests
that the fact that physical attractiveness is so
highly valued by men in mate selection, does not imply that the emphasis placed
on it is not destructive to women. They concur that the value people place on
female beauty is likely a key cause of eating disorders, body image problems, have
contributed to a kind of destructive run-away female-female competition to embody
the qualities men desire and of potentially dangerous cosmetic surgery. It can
lead to the objectification of women as sex objects to the relative neglect of
other dimensions along which women vary, such as talents, abilities, and
personality characteristics.
Many
men and women choose not to act on their sexual desires for a host of reasons,
including personal values, social reputation, fear of sexually transmitted diseases,
cultural norms and many others. If the hypothesized functional underpinnings of
male mate preferences are correct, they imply that men view women primarily as “sex
objects” in short-term mating, but not necessarily in long-term mating. Second,
they imply that women view men as “success objects” in short-term mating,
whether it be in the form of monetary generosity or superior genetic quality. Women,
although, can be construed as viewing men as “success objects” in long-term
mating as well.
One
cannot, however, justify a horrid act like rape that is demeaning and
exploitative to the victim based on research that essentially says “that is how
men are”. The evidence, many believe, is not even close to sufficient to
warrant the conclusion that rape itself is a facultative adaptation in the
human male. The research in context, though, does form a sound ground for
recognizing problems and addressing them. Many researchers acknowledge the
importance and centrality of sexual motivation in rape which is typically
downplayed or disregarded by many feministic scholars, while many believe anger
and hostility toward women as central psychological motivations of (some) rapists.
Amongst reasons for anger and hostility one is a history of rejection by women,
triggered when men aspire to mate with women who are outside of their
mate-value range. As Jim Morrison of the Doors noted, “women seem wicked when
you’re unwanted”. Second, a subset of men seems particularly prone to the
confluence of hostile masculinity and a short-term mating strategy—psychopaths.
By focussing attention to this subset of males, the interventional efforts can
reduce the frequency of sexual assaults.
All
I wanted to do in the beginning was to voice my opinion, maybe just micro-blog,
that people should be allowed to wear what they want and that respecting the
other person should be a given in a society. It occurred to me eventually that
it couldn’t after all be that simple. The problem is so widespread and
recurrent that its connotative psychology should not be ignored. A desirable
outcome of our efforts I understand will be to achieve a gender balance between
“sex objects” and “success objects”, to pursue the idea of beauty that you
believe in or desire, to identify psychopaths and restrict sexual motivation to
consensual sex. It is an onerous albeit rewarding task. Let us embark.
