OBJECTIFICATION OF MEN by Harry McAvinchey

What’ s with this current objectification of men? I thought this kind of behaviour was outlawed long ago. Wasn’t there a hue and cry about Page Three Girls flaunting their nipples  in the tabloid  Sun newspaper, only a mere few months ago?.Many deemed it unworthy , even unseemly and misogynistic  that bare -breasted women should appear on the third page of this newspaper. Of course no -one asked the obvious question, which was , why would anyone bother to buy the long-standing “redtop” at all , if they  were not prepared to be offended by its contents? There are many more things besides naked ,human ,  female  mammals to be offended by …in the conscious  act of  buying “the Sun”. Now , instead of men objectifying women for years in pinup magazines and body-revealing  swimsuit , beauty pageants, women are playing the same game .

There’s an obvious double-standard, though. Liberation for women appears as a two-edged sword. On one hand , many women  clamour to expose their bodies in ever-more outlandish degrees of nakedness and display , like  enticing birds of paradise. They appear as pop stars exposing ever more buffed, plucked and painted  flesh.Even the evergreen Madonna’s preference is for revealing   body-displaying ,outfits that do her ageing body no real  favours .They demand the right to run tastefully  naked through the pages of fashion magazines and glossy, perfectly photographed adverts for perfume, but many women  also feel threatened and demeaned  by the  naked exposure  of their sisters in a daily newspaper. They  go out of their way to compare themselves to an airbrushed and Photoshopped  ideal  and then  feel inferior to that demand.

There is an argument ongoing about breast-feeding babies in public places . This perfectly natural act is both enthused over and  appalled ,in equal measure, by both men and women across the sexes .Some see it as the natural order of things , but others find it a distasteful act to indulge in it,  in a public place. We’re  still only wee mammals , though, with a need to feed babies as nature intended.it really should not  come as such a shock.

Into the mix we  now  have  women , no longer hiding their light under a bushel . They now ape the perceived lustful behaviour of their male counterparts.There are herds of  these  multi-hued  parties of “hens” clicking and skittering  their massed high- heels like jittering muntjacs across the cobbled streets of Liverpool, Manchester, Belfast  and Dublin , in search of greased , stripping “Dreamboys” or latterday “Chippingdales”, prepared to offer the Full Monty to the delight of their whooping,  cheering , raucous  demand.

The current obsession  for females of every age ,is the young  Irish actor  starring in the rebooted  television series “Poldark”.Apparently , across the land  women of every age-group , from nine to ninety ,tune in to gaze in the hope that thespian Aidan Turner  will take off his clothes and expose even more of his baby-oiled  Irish flesh than they lusted over on the previous week’s  episode . So far, the programme makers have managed to tease  this lusting mass of femininity along with the gradual exposure of  his bare chest, his naked back,  while swimming and so on .It’s only a matter of time before they are demanding, en masse , a full- blown scene of his entire  nakedness in all its natural glory. Nobody has ever mentioned his acting skills.Mr Turner is  still only one scalp on an ongoing lust list .

Pandering to this international desire have been the ex-footballer David “Goldenballs ” Beckham  and the model David Gandy  and their  eye-watering ,bulging underpants adverts. The actor Colin Firth was  also the recipient of much desire as the  soaked -shirt wearing, Mr Darcy of Jane Austen fame.Such was the commotion that a career was built on that transparent  shirt and the body that wore it . Of more recent vintage we’ve had yet another Irishman disporting his body in the filmed version of the erotic, sado-masochistic pulp of  “50 Shades of Grey”.

Again …no one ever mentions acting or modelling skills. It’s all about the body and sex.

So what is it that women and men want? Do they want to objectify the human body or not? Or is it just a case of the women  now saying to themselves, if you can’t beat ’em , you might as well join ’em  and  play them at their own game?