I love it: pithy, well-written and brilliantly satirical.
Oh, I think Jane Austen meant what she was saying, in the sense that I think she was representing a real stereotype that is still quite alive in the 21st century. Two stereotypes, in fact: the notion that men are helpless without women, and the notion that women really just want to spend men’s money.
Since “Pride and Prejudice,” women have exploded into the workforce, so the issue of spending men’s money isn’t as much of a concern now as it was then. But there’s still a prevalent conception that the one overriding concern in any guy’s life is sex.
I was offended by the conclusions of the recent psychology study led by professor Susan Fiske. To start, reports of the study and commentators on its conclusions were often careful to say, “most men” view half-naked women as objects, which is a very polite way of always excluding anybody involved in the conversation and implicitly damning everybody not in the room. If “most men” view half-naked women as objects then it is statistically probable that any given male — like yours truly — is going to view a lady in a bikini as an object more than half the time.
This is an insulting thing to say, but I was not entirely surprised when everybody — except, seemingly, Eric Kang ’10 — took it as evidence that women are the injured parties. As Chloe Angyal ’09 put it in her column, the statement “men objectify women” elicited “not cries of outrage but scoffs of ‘well, duh.’”
Call me contrarian, but I can’t help thinking it’s the guys who are being maligned in this study. Ladies, consider this: How would you like it if some sociological study showed that women are secretly hard-wired to marry men who make more money? I bet it wouldn’t be so hard to do: Round up 21 freshmen girls and ask them if they’d like to marry a starving artist or a New York lawyer waiting to inherit a chateau in France.
You see, another reason why I love Jane Austen is how she portrays Mr. Darcy. He is so refreshingly independent of the stale stereotypes of how men behave vis-a-vis “the fair sex.” He is not some impassioned sex maniac desperately driven by an insuppressible biological urge to get the girl to go all the way with him. On the contrary, we are given the strong impression that he marries Elizabeth only because he finds her to be a genuinely interesting person. He is calm, genteel, urbane and well-mannered. He defies the stereotype that a single man must be in want of a wife: He does marry Elizabeth, but we are given to understand that he does so because he falls in love with her, Elizabeth, not because he can’t wait to get his rocks off. Elizabeth, for her part, marries Darcy not because of his wealth — she rejects his first offer of marriage — but because she changes her opinion of his character.
While I suppose there’s nothing especially proud about the recent study — except that it seems to make sweeping generalizations about all men on the basis of 21 Princeton undergraduates — it is certainly prejudicial. It furthers prejudice. It strengthens the image that those with a Y-chromosome are really only a step above barbarians. They are pigs, driven by the need for food, sex and sleep.
I’m also not quite sure what the study means by “objectification.” We are told that there is some region in the brain associated with tools and that this region “lights up” when shown pictures of girls in bathing suits. To me, the difference between a tool and a person is that a tool is a means to a further end, the person an end in and of him- or herself. I do not want something of my best friend, I just want his company. I want my cell phone to make phone calls.
I think that, in our daily lives, gentlemen (and ladies) are not so likely to objectify the opposite gender — this man is my meal ticket or this lady is a sex object — as those who serve us. It seems to me that we are far more likely to forget to say “Thank you,” to a card-swiper or a janitor than to marry a guy for his money or a girl for her body. When was the last time we considered that our taxi drivers have an independent existence outside the front seat? These “utility friendships,” as Aristotle called them, seem to me the real objectification problem.
Brendan Carroll is a sophomore from New York, N.Y. He can be reached at btcarrol@princeton.edu.
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