Is sexualized the same as sexist? Or: sometimes I'm very concerned about feminist discourse. Or: If you're reacting to a sexualized heterosexual world the same way a fundamentalist reacts to sexualized gay culture, you're doing feminism wrong.

I think the Axe body wash commercials about the astronauts are pretty funny (Kate does too - she saw one before me and excitedly told me I would love it). Here's a sample although they've got a couple that basically go the same way in the end:

Today a female facebook friend - kind of a feminist but not usually one to post a lot about those issues (far, far less than I post on feminist/gender issues) called the astronaut commercials "sexist". I worry when I see things like this because I think overusing the term really twists its meaning (kind of like calling people who advocate policies that are in the end probably bad for minorities "racists"... we can say we don't like that but it's quite a stretch to say they are racists).

It's not even clear exactly what inspires this. My best guess is that it's obviously a super-charged sexual encounter. I don't say that because there's anything that explicit going on, but after almost being eaten most people are probably not going to be weighing which guy they want to be with. The concern may be that the guy is doing the rescuing but that seems like an even weaker case. It's a product for men so obviously the astronaut has to be a guy. The lifeguard could be a girl but for the sake of statistical frequency and ease of exposition I don't see anything especially wrong with presenting heterosexual relationships here (i.e. - the astronaut has to be a guy, if we are assuming heterosexuality for the reasons just stated that makes the victim a girl and the lifeguard a guy). Certainly there's nothing sexist or homophobic about that choice. We see female lifeguards on TV all the time too. There was of course the golden age of Baywatch, but check out any Syfy mutant shark/octopus movie. So I don't think it's that.

There's also, of course, that the victim and the lifeguard here have idealized body types - a perennial concern. There is good reason for this concern, for what the body types we see on TV do for body image, etc. There's good reason to want to see a change. Hollywood and TV go overboard and ought to be disciplined on this point, but this gets tricky too because people have preferences and are attracted to different things. Of course it's socially constructed and might need some tweaking on the extremes, but it gets very tough when you start trying to tell people what they ought to find attractive because then you're just substituting your views about body type for theirs. And who really has a right to scold me for my apparent tendency (completely subconscious - I'm just looking at the data) to like shorter women? In other words, (1.) it's not clear this is "sexist" because body image ideals are around for both sexes, and (2.) there are very real limits to how far you can push this one before you're scolding people for having sexual urges which is presumably NOT the direction we want to go.

So in summation, there are some things you could make some interesting and even important commentary on here (sexualization, body image, MAYBE gender roles but that's the weakest of all) but the case for "sexism" isn't really there at all. If you don't like sexualized advertising you are welcome to gripe about that (say something like "ugh - why does everybody have to be half naked and sweating on TV"). Some of us don't have as refined tastes (I thought it was funny and I found the people attractive). Say that if you want to. But it worries me that people tie their own prudishness/refinement/sense of what's "appropriate" to feminism and "sexism". What I am saying here is not the equivalent of people who say "if it's not overt racism it's not racism". Obviously there's a lot of subtle sexism out there, and some of it is very much tied up into sexualization as well. If you think I'm denying that, start from the beginning and reread. I refuse to play the game of being told I'm missing that. You don't have to convince me that sexism can come through sexualization. You have to convince me that the mere observation of a sexualized culture presents an instance of sexism - because that's not always going to be the case. We're sexual beings. We're going to act like it. Sorry. That means we're going to have thoughts and reactions that some people might even consider crude. Insofar as frustration with that is what feminism means to people, feminism is in trouble.

As a way of making that point consider that feminism is much broader than just male/female dichotomies and issues. A lot of feminism is about LGBT issues too and defending LGBT people when they have sexual reactions that bothers other people. That door swings both ways, feminists. ***If you're reacting to a sexualized heterosexual world the same way a fundamentalist reacts to sexualized gay culture, you're doing feminism wrong.***

This is getting long but I oughta say something about what doing feminism right means (because I'm a feminist, one of my fields is gender economics, and it matters to me. Feminism done right is about opposition to patriarchy (as a matter of historical circumstance), but more practically speaking its an opposition to power relations generally that threaten human capabilities and are organized around gender or sexuality. Since these power relations can emerge through the way culture is sexualized, of course that comes up as a subject to examine. But as a philosophical orientation the key point is the power relations and not the mere fact that we are sexual beings. As a theoretical/scientific orientation in the social sciences it involves a positive acknowledgement of and interest in studying the power relations that are of normative interest to feminists more broadly.

If you take your claim to its logical conclusion and that logical conclusion is that all people should be sexually attracted to everything equally (accounting for differences in sexual orientation, of course), then I think you're making a bad argument and you're missing what feminism is about.