Matt DeCoursey

 For those who may not know, Girls Aloud is a British singing group. It consists of five young women, all (obviously) very beautiful, with not much in the way of clothes on stage. Their songs are very sexually charged. Indeed, they cover a song called “Push It Good.”

My comment for this blog has to do with the male dancers. They are all very good-looking, too, and their costumes are very sexy, too. They never sing or speak. The (all-male) band is introduced by name to the crowd, but the dancers (at least on the DVD) are not. On one song, “Sound of the Underground,” the women literally use them as furniture. The men get down on all fours, or similar, and the women sing from a seated position. On one song, they get rejected one after another with lyrics like “You with the terrible hair, hands off.” And so on.

I don’t mean to complain about any of this, actually. Those young men are getting a big break in their careers. They’re playing a part, as if in a play. They need not take the role personally.

I find it all irritating enough, though, that I can reflect on what women must feel about the much wider presentation of women in these ways in similar acts. If many acts presented men in this way, with sexually powerful women at the centre, I would quickly get to feel kind of incensed about it.

I think the feelings of women on these matters are very understandable.

The furniture thing leads me on to the notion of objectification. Are the men being objectified? Besides being represented as furniture, they appear onstage as object and context of female desire, which is the real topic of the songs.

In a sense, of course they are, but I think the use of the term leads on to a sort of model of what happens in people’s minds and imagination that is very questionable. It is not at all clear to me that female fans are being encouraged to treat men badly in real life. To think that they are is to link fantasy and reality too directly. Some of the songs clearly are about a fantasy of female domination over men, but is a woman who indulges such a fantasy necessarily dominant or coercive in real life? I don’t think so. All depends on how she wilfully receives such a fantasy, and how it relates to the rest of her psyche, her construction of the world around her.

It seems to me that the notion of objectification was formed in the sixties and seventies, when there were two models of persuasion around. One was B. F. Skinner’s behaviourism, which posited that repeated exposure to a stimulus leads to a response, following laws like those of physics. The other as the Marxist model of Louis Althusser, which posited that the “Ideological State Apparatus” addresses each one of us individually and “constructs” us. Both of these would support a notion that exposure to objectification in representation must lead to objectifying behaviour in real life.

Today, the intellectual world has changed. Many researchers are working on a phenomenological model, taking consciousness seriously, and people’s own accounts of their interior reality seriously.

It sometimes seems, though, that popular discourse on gender issues is stuck in the past, still working on models that the professionals abandoned a long time ago. The thing is, the professionals now have a subtler, more humane model than the large public has, and this was not true back when the idea of objectification originated.