Objectification

Self-objectification distinguishes us from our forebears. You might say we're in an era of hyper-self-objectification (someone probably has). Social media gives anyone the opportunity to package and broadcast oneself as a crafted image, to imagine themselves as a work of art.

Popular makeup and hair for women has gone from the attempt to fake youth to unmasked artifice--it doesn't matter if you notice it; you're supposed to notice it and it's supposed to convey a message--not about sexual availability entirely or even mostly but about identity, signalling aspirational class and aesthetic sensibility, philosophical, even political affiliation--blue hair.

The average woman long ago adopted open sexual objectification, what used to be reserved for the disreputable (it is said lipstick originated among ancient Egyptian prostitutes, not to recreate youthful lips but to mimic the vagina and advertising fellatio), again, as distinct from its role in enhancing sexual attractiveness.

Broadly the trend toward popular self-objectification it goes well beyond sexual signalling, is often asexual or even ironic, parodying sexuality or sexual vigor.

What remains is the vanity, the vanity of the individual indulging the experience of objectification, which is not necessarily dehumanizing, or, the fact is "dehumanization", literally interpreted, isn't necessarily unpleasant. The high-concept fashion adopted by the serious (or obsessive) self-objectifier is an attempt to transcend physicality and biology, to de-humanize.

I thought to contrast "dehumanization" with "commodification", with the latter as a negative, but it occurs to me it that people are enthusiastically commodifying themselves, and in a wold of money worship the only concern is to be too cheaply priced a commodity--which doesn't mean people aren't selling themselves cheap. Self-commodification, quite literally, is widespread. Online an attractive woman can package and sell her image to men she never has to see. She's taken the sex out of prostitution; indeed, she seems to have transferred the degradation in the sexual transaction to the John, who is legion, anonymous and sexually frustrated.

Nobody is supposed to believe the thick eyebrows presently in vogue; they're taken up like a style of dress, off the rack. Likewise sexually enticing but outlandish effects--thick eyeliner framing rather than accentuating the eyes, ridiculously long lashes; sharp-angled effects in hair and makeup mimic the mechanical, the designed object or, I like to think, the palette, which is how the individual sees himself.

The world champion objectifiers of women are of course drag performers. Naturally the trans movement, which seeks a political identity for pathological self-objectifiers, places them in the forefront. The feminists are right about one thing: men tend to objectify more than women. What they won't or can't see is that, naturally, women seek out this very objectification--and who do they go to? Gay aesthetes. Men. No one objectifies women more than fashion designers.

The enthusiastic adoption of objectification is changing the way we live. Now the humblest specimen can find someone who will objectify her--and it is far more often her. Notable however how many men seek it now too--trans men are the biggest self-objectification whores on the planet, turning the same masculine tendency toward objectification upon themselves, belying the feminist notion it's inherently degrading. It is the highest honor.

That doesn't mean it doesn't cause trouble for women. It's dangerous. To be honored in this way can be fatal. The feminists are wrong here as they are everywhere else primarily in assigning to biologically-determined human behavior a socially constructed origin. As if the guys decided to play this trick on them one day--but of course the whole silly idea of a "patriarchy" existing as a social construct or pathology has this problem of origins. Patriarchy was born of primitive necessity, a necessity we haven't really shed, despite conventional wisdom.

The way women live now contradicts feminist theory identifying the objectification of women with misogyny.

Women seek out objectification--and they aren't alone. The profusion of self-objectification through media is human nature meeting the open-ended indulgence of capitalist technology. Indulging vanity is Who We Are now.

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Night Stream

New York Times op ed features comedy bit based on racial slur:



Fatal Type II error.

Another example of the "Dead Becky" phenomenon or what happens when you don't call 911 on suspicious, dangerous blacks—the 2008 murder of Anne Pressly by Curtis Lavelle Vance.

Pressly was a news anchor for KATV Channel 7 in Little Rock, Arkansas, who was raped, tortured, and murdered in her Little Rock home.

Here's what Nicholas Stix wrote about it here on VDARE.com in 2009:

Lori Garner, a personal trainer at the Pro Fitness club in Pressly's Heights neighborhood, reported seeing a man whom she and a client are now sure was Vance stalking the gym three times during the pre-dawn hours. Twice, Garner was accompanied by the client. The last time, in September, the man was crouching outside of the gym exposing himself. But they never called the police.
If the reports are true and the charges hold up, my conclusion is that Curtis Lavelle Vance apparently is only interested in raping and murdering white women, with robbery an afterthought.

In an earlier time, such bravado on the part of black felons in white neighborhoods was the exception. But after some 45 years of authorities and the MSM terrorizing whites in the name of “civil rights,” it is the rule. No matter how many white females are raped and/or murdered, whites fear being treated like "racists” by police and reporters if they demand action against black strangers acting suspiciously in neighborhoods where they have no legitimate business

Does biting your tongue out of political correctness count as a Type II error? It clearly isn't the same as someone making an objective call and getting it wrong. It's compelled from without. The inner slap of self-regulating non-racists is a result of deliberate social conditioning.
It's not enough for the Current Year though. The BBQ Becky campaign seeks to intimidate whites outright into not calling the police ever on blacks. It's the outer slap.

I think we need a Type III error. An objective judgement finds a threat--real or not--but is superceded by the "inner slap" of conditioned masochism or the outer slap, the threat (there's that word again) of sanction for getting it wrong. You could be the next BBQ Becky. Or, maybe putting down the phone is itself a risk assessment--of the risk of social sanction. That certainly is the intention of the BBQ Becky cultural campaign--which has to be viewed alongside the real threat of violence evidenced in interracial crime statistics. On one end whites are criminally trangressed upon the more they come into contact with blacks, at the other political and cultural action seeks to limit what they can do about it.
That's why I say BLM and offshoots like this are sinister.

Associated Press:

The alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks was angered when he learned he had to undergo security screening between flights on the morning of the suicide attacks, a former U.S. Airways ticket agent says. 

Michael Tuohey of Scarborough said he was suspicious of Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari when they rushed through the Portland International Jetport to make their flight to Boston that day. 

Atta’s demeanor and the pair’s first-class, one-way tickets to Los Angeles made Tuohey think twice about them. 

“I said to myself, ’If this guy doesn’t look like an Arab terrorist, then nothing does.’ Then I gave myself a mental slap, because in this day and age, it’s not nice to say things like this,” Tuohey told the Maine Sunday Telegram. “You’ve checked in hundreds of Arabs and Hindus and Sikhs, and you’ve never done that. I felt kind of embarrassed.”

Error Prone

Black Lives Matter, by fabricating a crisis of racist police brutality, seeks to shield blacks from the law at the same time a true crisis of black criminality grinds on. To the extent it succeeds people will die.
Black street violence is the sword, political agitation is the shield. This is revealed in its silly but sinister offshoot, the "BBQ Becky" fad, fabricating a national crisis out of a handful of anecdotes of white people calling the police on harmless blacks. The New York Times:

The phenomenon of white people harassing African-Americans going about their day is nothing new, but with the ubiquity of smartphones and social media, everyone can now see how these injustices are played out and lead to anxiety for and material harm to people of color. And this problem is bigger than a few unreasonable white people. Racist stereotypes are baked into our society.    

Has someone called the cops on you when you were doing nothing wrong? Email your story or video to The New York Times Opinion Video team at 844WYTFEAR@nytimes.com. Below is a list of 39 known instances just this year when someone called the police to complain about black people doing everyday activities:

Steve Sailer:

After all, these kinds of false-alarm Type I errors—false-positive calls to the cops to investigate a person who turns out to be law-abiding—happen countless times per day in this vast country of ours. So do Type II errors: false negatives of failing to alert the police in cases of a genuine lawbreaker. 

Thirty-nine false positives in a country of 320 million or so is nothing, of course. But as Sailer points out

Our ability to think statistically about the trade-off between Type I and Type II errors seems to go on the fritz when race is involved. When the participants are all white, everybody more or less intuits that if you want the cops to question fewer innocent people (fewer Type I errors), you’ll have to put up with more guilty ones committing more crimes (more Type II errors), and vice versa.

You have to wonder to what extent the necessity to think illogically about race infects our ability to think logically in general.

But the real crime of course is the lives lost to Type II errors, failure to recognize a real threat. Type II errors are encouraged, practically demanded.

So now we have what Nancy Pelosi might call Collateral Damage Cathy. The white person who is victimized because he failed to respond to a threat from a black person. How much you want to bet that number's a little higher than the Times' roll of hurt feelings?

Another example of the "Dead Becky" phenomenon or what happens when you don't call 911 on suspicious, dangerous blacks—the 2008 murder of Anne Pressly by Curtis Lavelle Vance. 

Pressly was a news anchor for KATV Channel 7 in Little Rock, Arkansas, who was raped, tortured, and murdered in her Little Rock home. Here's what Nicholas Stix wrote about it here on VDARE.com in 2009: 

Lori Garner, a personal trainer at the Pro Fitness club in Pressly's Heights neighborhood, reported seeing a man whom she and a client are now sure was Vance stalking the gym three times during the pre-dawn hours. Twice, Garner was accompanied by the client. The last time, in September, the man was crouching outside of the gym exposing himself. But they never called the police.

There is an unquantified toll in white lives sacrificed to forced desegregation and forced desensitization.

But the single most fatal case of political correctness overriding the survival instinct comes from 9/11

Michael Tuohey of Scarborough said he was suspicious of Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari when they rushed through the Portland International Jetport to make their flight to Boston that day.  

Atta’s demeanor and the pair’s first-class, one-way tickets to Los Angeles made Tuohey think twice about them. “I said to myself, ’If this guy doesn’t look like an Arab terrorist, then nothing does.’  

Then I gave myself a mental slap, because in this day and age, it’s not nice to say things like this,” Tuohey told the Maine Sunday Telegram. “You’ve checked in hundreds of Arabs and Hindus and Sikhs, and you’ve never done that. I felt kind of embarrassed. 

Consider we live in a country where it's morally reprehensible to be suspicious of a black person but missing the chance to stop a 9/11 terrorist because you didn't want to be racist is entirely understandable.

Back to the unlucky ticket agent:

A few weeks later, another investigator showed him a large number of pictures and asked him to point out the men he had waited on that day. “I went right to Atta,” Tuohey said. “It’s like the skull on a poison bottle. There’s no mistaking that face.”

There may be no mistaking it, but be warned: there will be absolutely no noticing it!

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Triggering Point

"Excuse me. Is your baby a boy or a girl?"

Despite having prepared for this for nine months, it came as a shock. My child was being gendered--and by a cis-hetero white male.

I collected myself, realizing we could be in danger. Cradling ____ protectively in my arms I turned away from the assailant's penetrating gaze.

"Ze hasn't assigned zirself a gender."

He stared, confused. So confident in his privilege that he'd never been challenged before when engaging in gender-aggression; he didn't even know how to recognize it.

"Well," he said after a pause, "ze sure is cute."

Rage and terror vied in my breast.

"That's look-ist." I could barely get out the words. Again, the look of confusion, again the confident privilege unable to navigate a world in which white cis-hetero normativity is not centralized. And again the pause, as he formulated a new line of assault.

"What bright eyes! Looks like a smart little critter!"

The elevator doors opened, finally. He looked at me, expectantly, concealing his privileged aggression under that smug mask of goodwill. I stepped out and turned, not knowing what I would say but knowing I had to say something.

"Well, ze has shown signs of giftedness..."