Let’s begin by examining Jackson’s point and my response to it: Jackson said that women are objectified by society; I agreed, and added that that the objectification of women is the exploitation of men, follow by my proclamation that capitalism is “satanic”. To be clear, the latter statement is hyperbole. I simply meant that capitalism is bad. Now, if you excuse that clunky and utterly unpoetic opening paragraph, I’ll elaborate on my statements.
So, we’re all in agreement that women are objectified by society. Where does this attitude come from? It can’t be Christianity, as Christianity teaches that lust is sinful. How can women be objectified when a society’s dominant narrative is that it’s morally wrong to even fantasize about about carnal knowledge? Well, if the church isn’t to blame, who is? I say the media is. Human behaviors and beliefs are shaped by the social environment they’re born into. Our social environment is dominated by capitalism and the state. Advertisement and mass media, the main source of information for us modern Westerners, is an arm of capital, and it is run for capital’s own interests. My contention is that capital objectifies women in mass media as way of exploiting men (and women as well). Our natural urges towards sex are colonized by the media; instead of it serving the ends of procreation and love, we learn to associate sexual pleasure with consuming media and products. I do not mean that the objectification of women is unimportant; in fact, I think I care about it MORE than most feminists, as they excuse such blatant exploitation as “free choice”. What I mean is that this process is not acting on behalf of men, as men are directly exploited by it. It only serves the interests of capital.
I mentioned that feminists actually excuse female exploitation. This is not a one off thing. Now, many anti-feminists, such as some students here, are purely reactionary. That is to say, they just believe whatever the opposite of what feminists say. If Emma Watson or Hillary Clinton says that men are naturally good, then men are naturally monsters. My contention is not of this sort. I believe that feminism’s main purpose is to excuse the suffering that women are subjected to under our political and economic structure, to make women complacent. This sounds like a strange statement; after all, feminists think of themselves as serving the exact opposite role in society. However, history seems to seems to agree with me. Prior to the industrial revolution, most families lived on farms. After industrialization, the factories needed workers, so fathers were coerced into leaving their families. This created the dynamic of the father who works and the mother who stays at home. However, the factories wanted more workers, so they convinced women to leave the house and join the factory. They accomplished this by promoting the early feminist narrative that the home is a place of oppression, and that women need to be able to make their own money (by wage labor, of course) to be free. Here we see feminism used as a post hoc justification for the movements of capital. Another example is the sexual revolution. Behind the libertine fantasy of consequence-free promiscuity, the sexual revolution was telling women that they ought to put off having children. The reason for this is that, if women aren’t have kids, they can consume more and focus on their jobs. In other words, capital framed its own interests as the interests of women. Clever.
Now, why is this oppression? Perhaps capital is a good force, one that destroys oppressive social structures. The issue with this view (which, by the way, is the *actual* view that Marx had of capitalism) is that capital corrodes our abilities to control our lives. Before industrial capitalism, women raised children, farmed, made art, repaired household items, lived in large villages and extended families, and so forth. Theses skills allow someone to affect the world around them, and to shape it in their image. Under industrial capitalism, the prescribed path for women is wage labor - an activity which does not in any way allow you to affect your immediate surroundings. They’re allowed to live in a preindustrial, precapitalist mode, but unless you join the Amish, the cost of entry is extremely high. Women have been forced under the boot of capital, and feminism is the justification for it.