Pornography: Men Possessing Women, by: Andrea ... - Feminish

The whole world outside man himself is viewed as the objectworld, a series of things to which man/men must learn to relate.This project of learning to relate to objects outside himself is,needless to say, awesomely difficult but nevertheless necessarybecause, as Ernest Becker, a so-called humanist in the realm ofpsychology, puts it:. . we know that man needs objects in orderto come into being as an organism, and subsequently in order toprovide for continuing action and experience. The organism needsobjects in order to feel its own powers and presence. ” 2 Man, theorganism in question, uses objects—women, children, animals(cattle are still important—the myth of the cowboy), sensate beingscalled objects as a matter of course—to feel bis own power andpresence. The use of the word object to characterize persons who arenot adult men is considered normative and appropriate. Psychologistsdo not make a distinction between men who relate to personsas such and men who relate to persons as objects. Instead, theyconsider it appropriate to relate to some persons as objects,inappropriate to relate to other persons as objects, and inappropriateto relate to some objects as sexual objects. One of the reasonsthat male homosexuality is so disreputable in the realm of psychologyis that it is deemed inappropriate for a man to relate to anotherman as an object, the only sexual response possible in the malesexual system as it now stands. A man must function as the humancenter of a chattel-oriented sensibility, surrounded by objects to beused so that he can experience his own power and presence. Hemust not reduce himself to the level of women, for instance, bybecoming an object for another man. This degrades the whole malesex, which is inappropriate.The notion that appropriate responses to appropriate objectssignify the mentally healthy male enables Becker to write:. . . the schizophrenic, who relates to people only on the basisof their sex, is not showing a hypersexuality so much as apoverty in the behavioral range: he reduces the object to thataspect with which he can cope. 1Though Becker suggests that viewing women merely as vaginas isnot wonderful, the nearly universal reduction of women to sex