What does the above point to? Doesn't it indicate the bipolar way we approach issues. We react in ways that indicate that we either totally ignore abuse or we conduct witch hunts in order to punish every instance. But what if we didn't ignore past behaviors and offered help to those who were beginning to show the lack of necessary self-restraint when working with women? What if we caught behaviors and attitudes that would eventually lead up to sexual assault and then intervened in order to prevent sexual assault? Wouldn't more people be better off?
The all-or-nothing or bipolar way of dealing with issues is a carry over from Cold War thinking as well as our two-party political system. In the days of the Cold War, one was either a Communist (actually a Bolshevik) or a good guy. So that anyone leaning toward the left was demonized and was thus often severely punished. That is what the US interventions and sponsored coups in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Greece (1967) and Chilé (1973), to name a few, were all about. When we look at the post-WW II history of American interventions and sponsored coups, we see scores of actions that served our strategic or business (a.k.a., 'national') interests rather than the needs of the people there. For most of the time, we replaced democratically elected leaders with tyrants and military dictators simply because those tyrants and dictators served our interests.
But more important than the concern for the type of thinking we employ is the objectification of people that enabled some to go on and sexually intimidate and assault others. This objectification isn't confined to movies about sex or locker room talk. This objectification of people existed in other areas of life long before any of the sexual assaults now being reported on existed. This objectification has existed in our economic system and foreign policies for decades.
Martin Luther King Jr. explained one root of this objectification when speaking against the Vietnam War (click here for source):
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
What follows the valuing of things over people is the objectification of people. People lose all intrinsic value and can only gain importance when they can help us gain more of the things we want. While other people lose value when their existence infringes on our gaining of things. And we should note what King meant when referring to things: gadgets, profits, and property rights.
We have also seen the objectification of people in our foreign policies when we have either participated in coups or supported governments where the new leaders are tyrants. One could provide a depressing list of past American interventions to make this point, or one could simply point to our support of Saddam Hussein before he invaded Kuwait. Yes, our government supported Saddam Hussein while he was in power and was committing atrocities. According to many of our foreign policies, the people of a given nation do not matter to us, but the cooperation of a given nation's leader(s) in positively contributing to our strategic or national (a.k.a., 'business') interests do. And that is true regardless of the political party affiliation of the President.
How could we not expect the sexual objectification of women by men when workers are counted as disposable objects of profit? I saw people being made disposable when teaching. I saw adult students who lost their jobs or, to add insult to injury, who also had to train their replacements. And all too often, those job losses are there solely to increase the ROI for major shareholders. So while workers are expected to be loyal to their employers, many of these same employers see no reason to return the favor. That is because major shareholders do not see the intrinsic value of their employees. Nor do they care that when workers lose their jobs, communities lose their income to provide services for people.
Now if we don't care about the people who are objectified by our economic system or foreign policies, why should we care about people whose value is determined by how they can sexually please us especially when our appetites are aroused? After all, aren't the strong preying on the weak in the first two situations? And if we allow that, why shouldn't that also occur in sexual situations and relationships? Of course, we know that morally speaking, sexual intimidation and assaults must never occur. But when people are recognized as having only extrinsic value, then moral concerns are put aside.
The sexual objectification of people that preceded and led to the recently reported sexual assaults nor the assaults themselves cannot be tolerated. But can we really stop these sexual assaults and the sexual objectification that precedes them when we passionately embrace the objectifying of people for other reasons? Perhaps we can for some for the immediate future. But will that last? After all, if we objectify people for economic or foreign policy reasons, what is to stop us from objectifying people for other reasons?
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