:: netwoman's blog ::

Orkut Objectification

Yesterday when I checked my Orkut mail there were strange emails from people I don't know. I am receiving them because of the friends-of-friends email system. It was a bit disturbing to me:

"ok, you guys have now knocked .danah off my top-nine friends view on my dashboard (why can't we order and sort other wys?), so now it's nine guys. i may have to drop one of you guys, no hard feelings, just to improve the scenery on my orkut home page."

They are talking about Danah Boyd and how they want to see her pretty face and fuzzy hat when they open Orkut. I was immediately struck by the poster-girl notion of this email, and was bothered by it. It made me uncomfortable that she was being objectified in this way.

When I checked Misbehaving today, Danah blogged about this experience as well.

"The joke hurt because it made me feel like an object, like the baseball card that Orkut encourages you to collect. If a person has more friends than all but 8 other people on someone's list, they end up on their front page. Apparently, to this guy, the aesthetic of my fuzzy hat and False Profit T-shirt is more important for his front page than his actual friends. He barely knows me; he wants me there so that i can improve the scenery of his home page. That makes me feel genuinely gross and sad. "

People (and I mean men and women here) often just don't understand how this is demeaning. See this discussion about it here:

"I think Danah is getting worked up over nothing. Women are the fairer sex. That's a fact of life. For a straight man to express that is not to objectify women or demean them, but rather more simply to say that he appreciates beauty. Using the terminology "improve the scenery" does not equate a woman with wallpaper but is a round-about way of saying that someone's face is pleasant to his eye. It's not the most elegant phrase, but it's obviously not used with misogynistic intent. To appreciate beauty is not the same as appreciating objects, and I don't think the two should be confused."

I often wonder how men can comment so freely and unsympathetically to how women feel about men discussing their beauty (and sometimes lack thereof). To appreciate women as something to be viewed, to be looked at - is this not objectification? The male gaze?

Xian responds with this in the comments:

"Well, the "scenery" crack didn't help, as it did imply a dehumanizing kind of objectification, twisting what was meant as a silly joke and comment on the predominant maleness of my network to sound much more like old-fashioned sexism. I think I've learned a bit more about the context of social software and friends vs. "friends," unfortunately at the cost of potentially losing a possible friend."

More of Xian's thoughts here :

"What I crossed over into was that "unwelcome gaze" issue, not unlike in one of danah's earliest posts to misbehaving in which she wrote about being invited to a coed hot-tub party by a professional colleague and finding that uncomfortable as well." He made a public apology.

See more unsympathetic comments here.

Danah comments more about it here and other comments in the blogosphere here .

I am not going to lighten up about it either, as some commenters have suggested - that would be trivializing and minimizing her feelings about the situation. Some might have reacted the same or different - but the point is that Danah felt the way she did and that should be validated. Some jokes just are not funny - and yes, feminists do have a sense of humour.

posted by Netwoman @ 12:37 PM