If this is dehumanization, it is hard to imagine it any more enthusiastically embraced by the vast majority of liberated women. 

Hot isn’t she? One might almost say, “smoking”. And of course that is the dichotomy deliberately built into that British advertising campaign supporting a law change on the issue of sexual consent, pushing far beyond the old “No means no” to making it a criminal offence for a man to have a sexual encounter with a woman without eliciting an explicit “Yes” from her at every stage of the encounter:

The most striking of the ads features the face of Charlotte Proudman, the well-known feminist barrister and zealous anti-male advocate who once denounced a fellow lawyer for complimenting her LinkedIn photo. In the picture, Proudman confronts the viewer with a sexy, smoldering look and a slight half-smile. Her face is carefully made up to accentuate her feminine sexuality, with dark-tinted eyelashes and gleaming red lips outlined in vivid lip gloss. In order to object to men’s sexualization of women, Proudman has sexualized herself.

That commentary is from one Janice Fiamengo in a Substack article, The Curious Case of the Self-Objectifying Feminist, where she really goes after the strange and terrible situation that modern feminists have got themselves into (and Western societies); that being the effort to make men turn away from “The Male Gaze” they have always directed at woman – especially attractive woman – while at the same time woman are exhibiting themselves more than ever before:

@tiktokmediatoktik

♬ original sound – tiktokmediatoktik – tiktokmediatoktik

That’s supposedly just showing off the latest in nursing uniforms. Riiiiiggghhhtt:

Millions of women every day flaunt boob and bum, wearing tight tights and crop tops in all situations (even to flamboyantly fix a car), carefully positioning phone cameras to capture cleavage, curves, and crotch for all to see. If this is dehumanization, it is hard to imagine it any more enthusiastically embraced by the vast majority of liberated women. 

The following cartoon catches the vibe precisely:

Any man who objects—and some men do—will not be hailed as a proto-feminist or sympathized with about the over-exposure, but jeered at as a repressive prude or a frustrated sexual loser.

Which is the world in which I have grown up, and of course such licence made it easier for real scumbags to get away with shit against woman, sleazing themselves into the narrative as very much “not prudes”, and using that phrase to persuade a woman to get with the fun. Feminists and feminism supposedly got wise to that after the abuses of the Swinging Sixities (really the 80’s and 90’s as well), but the rational effort to reduce rape and sexual assault has now included the sidekick campaign that relentlessly attacks mens ideas of what is permissable in even looking at woman sexually (Miss Universe is out but fashion shows are still in) and the increasing number of woman seemingly doing everything they can to be noticed sexually.

Fiamengo grew up in the same times:

When I was a little girl in the early 1970s, I took it for granted that self-respecting women wanted to be appreciated for the qualities of their minds and characters. One of the first slogans I remember was the somewhat puzzling “Love me for my mind, not my body.” At the time, around six or seven years old, I thought it would be nice to be loved for any reason. Only later did I understand the implication: to be loved for one’s body was not truly to be loved at all, for the body was a superficial, mutable aspect of the self, destined to deteriorate with time.

The Trans movement is certainly trying to reverse that, with all the focus being the body, though supposedly trying to match it to the mind’s eye so that they’ll be loved for both body and mind.

But in the world of real woman in the 1970’s, behind those slogans, there were new feminist theories developing:

According to the general feminist perspective, the body was all that sexist men cared about, especially the sexual parts. This was objectification, the reduction of the whole woman with all she had to offer (her kindness, her wit, her unique thoughts) to a thing. It was shameful and degrading.

Not just “sexist” men but all men. Feminists have for decades claimed that such sexualisation has been forced on women by the fashion industry, movies & TV, advertising on TV and in magazines, as well as in daily life – but all of that driven by the massively powerful patriarchal society that men built. Men compelled women to advertise their sexuality as their primary power; to redden their lips, darken their eyebrows, assume sexual poses and flatter the voracious male gaze, becoming “object and prey for the man.” A degrading spectacle from which all women would be better off free and that actually goes back centuries even before the development of mass media.

Except of course that’s exactly what feminists like Proudman are doing, supposedly taking back that power, starting with her role in that advertising campaign:

[H]ere is a campaign designed by feminists to support alleged rape victims, with the same (objectionable) self-presentation by the ad’s primary subject, who is obviously not posing against her will and obviously has many choices about how to present herself. The only difference, it seems, is that in this case, the woman’s self-display is entirely of her own defiant volition.

The likes of Madonna have been pushing this claim for forty years, starting with her stage name, swirling around her rebellion against her Italian-American, Roman Catholic upbringing. But what was academic theory and then stage acts has become all encompassing:

It has become common in feminist activism to declaim against the alleged objectification of women by mimicking such objectification without any evident irony….It is not at all unusual for feminist women staging some sort of protest—the cause doesn’t seem to matter—to expose their bodies for attention. 

Funnily enough what drew my eye in the photo of naked Argentinian women in the article was not all the naughty bits (pixellated though they are) but the woman with her mouth open and upper teeth bared in a manner exactly like that I’ve seen with enraged chimpanzees! Evolution eh?

And of course that evolution has produced wiring that it seems feminists and woman in general are now trying to short-circuit as this whole thing moves beyond mere attention seeking for protest:

Though one can find women whose feminism has given them permission to look as hideous as possible, one can easily find at least as many who seem to go out of their way to be both “obnoxious” and “complicit,” to inflame male desire while pretending to object to it (see Bettina Arndt’s marvelous “The Politics of Cleavage” for a fascinating analysis of such women’s self-justification).

The lucious and praised actress Sydney Sweeney and her complaints about objectivication being a classic example.

But often coupled with a woman’s self-display is a vehement, accusatory denial that self-display is the point….As in the Proudman ad, the titillation of male interest is mobilized in order to make the claim that women do not want to titillate male interest and that the alleged titillation, in fact, is all in the man’s (misogynistic) mind.

Even to the point where blind guys have been confronted by such woman in gyms, and been booted from the gym as a result.

Invitation and prohibition have always made a sexually charged pairing, but the agression and consequences for the male getting it wrong have escalated beyond anything seen in human history (read Fiamengo’s description of nursing encounters where the nurses certainly have the power over old men). Once again, as with seemingly every Leftist theory nowadays, the fights over who is the oppressed and who the oppressor rage like an uncontrolled forest fire:

This is the standard modern perspective: women and girls are victims, and even minor male actions such as complimenting, looking, or making sexual remarks are violations of their dignity and safety. Girls’ and women’s own overt self-display, which often begins at an early age (even before puberty), is denied or, perversely, celebrated as a form of liberation while boys’ and young men’s responses to such display are harshly stigmatized.
…
Today, the natural reality of female sexual precociousness and male susceptibility are almost never openly discussed. According to feminist pundits, there is nothing natural, and certainly nothing benign, in male sexual attraction to women or in the male desire to look at, touch, fondle, and have sexual relations with a woman. In the now common perception, boys and men seek to use and abuse women for selfish pleasure.

Not for sexual pleasure it should be noted, because then it might be recognised as natural. No, it must be about something else, something more even than “selfish pleasure”; it’s about power, dominance and control. To show off one’s beautiful female body is all that: to have men notice it diminishes all that, and hence such noticing must be destroyed.

The enormous power of female sexual allure is not acknowledged; or if it is, it is presented as a power that women would prefer not to have. Thus, feminism has been successful in thoroughly demonizing one of the most enduring bonds between men and women: the man’s sexual desire, and the woman’s desire to be desired.

Fiamengo has no solution to this and I haven’t seen one from anybody else, but she does at least get to the literal heart of the matter:

The many contradictions and denials, projection and self-exculpation, the reflex misandry and vehement victimology all suggest that at the heart of female nature is a deep conflict about sex that cannot unilaterally, or even primarily, be blamed on men. 

But it is, and it’s going to be, at least until our societies collapse because too many young men and women are afraid of eachother and the future.