On October 12th, Playboy announced that it would cease publishing photos of nude women from its print publication beginning in 2016, after having already done so on its website the previous year in order to return to the lifestyle and culture publication that it was founded as. This was a major victory for feminists, who had lobbied for years against what Playboy stood for, as well as arguing against the general objectification of women. Objectification is rampant for both males and females and must be addressed equally for both genders.       

I’d be remiss not to mention that objectification of females, usually from males, is more prevalent and arguably worse than objectification of males, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I’m a guy, so I’m going to talk about the objectification of guys because it’s the only angle from which I can speak personally.

I haven’t had many personal encounters with being objectified, fortunately, but I was enticed to write this piece by something close to all of us: multimedia literature put out by companies that attempt to entertain teenagers. Some examples of this are Seventeen magazine, which has a monthly “Hot Guys Panel” and Buzzfeed, the popular pop culture website that is famous for its lists, many of which rank famous handsome males. Buzzfeed also has the “Dude A Day” newsletter, which, according to the website, will “slide a super-hot dude into your inbox every weekday — emphasis on the super-hot.” It’s plain to see that there’s no malicious intent– all of the writing is positive and nobody’s ever called ugly or anything of the sort– but that’s not the point. The point is that these males should be represented by more than just their looks, in these articles they’re reduced to the concept that too many people care about: outer beauty.

To be clear, there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with sharing opinions; in fact, I’m an advocate for it. However opinion-sharing should be restricted, within reason, to the topic of things and not people. And if you’re going to share your opinion about a person, which is bound to happen, it’s obviously best to keep it positive, and if it’s going to be negative, it should at least be in regard to someone’s character, not how they look. Yes, both are negatives, but the massive caveat here is that someone can control their personality far easier than they can control their looks, and calling them out for a bad personality trait could lead to future reform that benefits everybody.

What’s important here is the lack of awareness that female-on-male objectification receives. It’s not as bad and it’s far less sexualized, but it’s still something that deserves to be addressed. But how? Objectification is tied closely with domestic abuse– the two are often associated as things that trouble women in today’s culture, and rightfully so– but what is often ignored is that almost 40% of domestic violence victims are males, and that doesn’t get the attention it should.  Attention definitely shouldn’t be taken away from the abuse that females face, but the news should probably spend less time talking about the drama surrounding the Kardashians and more describing the parallels between male objectification and abuse, and that of their female counterparts.

And that shows up in Deerfield as well as in the media– often, males at Deerfield are reduced to their looks as well, as I’ve heard many a conversation about how guys look and who’s the “hottest guy.” Is it a byproduct of the media or is it people’s own preferences in partners that cause them to prefer good  looks over other qualities or use looks as a deal-breaker? We’ll never know for sure since we obviously can’t run an experiment forcing people from birth to avoid Buzzfeed, but I’d lean towards assuming that the media’s goal is to influence people to believe in the petty things in people, and it appears to succeed in doing so.

So what do we do to get people to focus less on looks and more on everything else? To me, communication is key. If you don’t know somebody well, it’s much easier to only look at their outsides and not their insides. But as time goes on and you get to know them, that’ll hopefully all go out the window. We have to try as best we can to change ourselves for the better, but I know it’s not feasible to be a universal change. What I’d say is this: view people however you want to, but don’t make assumptions if you don’t know them, and especially don’t judge someone based on their looks. Get to know them, and maybe the looks won’t matter.