There are a lot of reasons I love the World Cup — the spirit of friendly international competition, the ability to watch a sport I love nearly all day every day, and the excuse for a little harmless nationalism.
And for the most part, the American media have taken to it with a fervor that we’ve never seen before. For the first time, a variety of major media outlets are recognizing Americans’ potential interest and trying to exploit it. It’s been a long time coming, but that’s a rant for another time.
Buzzfeed’s coverage of the World Cup has been particularly interesting. Most of their articles I’ve seen shared across social media have focused on the appearance of the players.
It was a little jarring to me the first time I saw “The 50 Most Important World Cup Bulges That Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity,” or whatever it was, but it’s definitely part of a trend I’ve seen recently, where men are unabashedly sexually objectified in the media.
I first noticed it in a commercial, where the camera and female protagonist repeatedly ogle a man’s butt. I was shocked at first. Not really offended, but more confused and unsure of how to react.
It took me a while to understand the reason I didn’t know how to feel was that it was simply something I’d never experienced before. Soon after seeing that commercial and some of the Buzzfeed lists, I did feel a little angry that men were being objectified so openly.
But you know what I learned? It turns out being objectified doesn’t feel good.
That said, I don’t think this trend is necessarily a bad thing. There is a history of sexism, sexual assault and male entitlement that makes objectification of women threatening and scary. Because that kind of context doesn’t exist with regard to the objectification of men, you can’t compare the two like they’re equivalent.
The reaction I had — shock, confusion and eventual outrage — is a reasonable reaction to seeing someone objectified in a public setting. What men like myself need to understand is that some women go through this on a daily basis, only with the added implications of physical or sexual violence.
Not only is the perceived threat greater, it is constant and pervades all media. Every female video game character wearing “armor” that wouldn’t protect her from a toothpick attack, every Carl’s Jr. ad, every Michael Bay movie adds to the constant barrage of imagery telling us women are for sex, and that’s the normal way to think.
It takes an exercise of empathy to realize this, and it was never something I even considered before a 30-second commercial for a candy bar or something had a surprising effect on me.
The danger here is that we get sucked up into a squirt-gun fight of one-ups-manship, yelling, “You did it to us, so we’ll do it to you!” to the other side of the playground. Men in this case need to accept that we’ve been wrong about this for a long time and that it’s part of a system of degradation ingrained in our culture.
Then, we can have a conversation about where things go from here.
Gordon Brillon is a 21-year-old mass communication senior from Lincoln, R.I.