The Objective Collective

Your source for slant;

Early October, I was laying in bed trying to ignore my alarm clock. I was too tired to walk over and push the snooze button, so I continued to sleepily listen to Chom, Montreal's classic rock station.
This was when I first heard about Mcgill being named one of the top party schools in North America by Playboy.
Then I heard that Playboy was coming to Mcgill to recruit girls for the magazine.
This set me off.
I tried to get something together to stop them from coming to campus, but before anything could be done ..Playboy decided to hold auditions off campus.
In a hotel room.

How did they recruit girls? Went to all the Mcgill-filled bars on the busiest nights and approached several drunk girls. They had recruiters on facebook.

And now the issue is out, and there are three pictures of Mcgill girls. I haven't had the chance to see the pictures yet, but I'm not very pleased regardless.


I really don't care if people call me a "fucking crazy feminist" for saying what I say, because if that's what speaking against gender oppression makes me, then I'll gladly take the title. Give me a jester as well, please.


In the West, it has taken women decades to get the education rights that we have today. Although we are formally equal in education (by law), it's still hard for many women to be taken seriously in academia. Not by men, but by everyone. People complain that there are not enough women politicians, lawyers, etc in the public and professional realm and blame it on the notion that these sorts of things just doesn't interest females. How will it interest them when they're conditioned to think otherwise? In our society, such a strong emphasis is put upon vanity for women.
I'm a part of a support group made up of entirely random girls from all walks of life. We had never met before, nor were any of us friends before hand. But we decided to embark on this idea of having a "support group" ..to talk about everyday life. It shocked me how much of our conversation, well over 85% revolved around our body and image.

And then I thought about conversations with my close friends. Many conversations revolve around being attractive, wanting to be attractive, losing weight, oh no I've gained weight, breast size, hair removal, hair bleaching, make-up, etc.

And why do we bother ourselves with this? Why do we wax every area of the body? Why do we pluck each hair? Pay hundreds of dollars for makeup, clothing? Diet?

To appear attractive.

This is not to say many women don't diet to get healthy. However for the most part, women do all of this to be attractive. I find it really hard to deny or refute this. Maybe as a woman I can say I don't make myself to look attractive for the sake of men, which is perfectly fine and true--but that doesn't mean I'm not trying to make myself look attractive. I'm trying to appeal to eyes--regardless of gender.


What Playboy has done has really set women back. I know it sounds like a HUGE statement, but take it in a small dose. What this issue signifies is that even in academia and university, where academia reigns, the areas of knowledge and intellectual autonomy and growth ..a woman is no longer safe from the bounds of objectification. How seriously will these young women who've now posed in this magazine, be taken at the workplace? How many times has the "past" comeback to haunt us? How many people, because of their pasts, have faced ridicule and sometimes even termination at the workplace? A good example would be from the show Grey's Anatomy. A young, very attractive RN comes to work at the hospital. The men around the place find out that she had taken some vulnerable pictures during her college years--to help pay for college. She was not nude in the pictures, just wearing lingerie. She was sexually harrassed over and over again by her fellow workers. What respect did she have left? What's worse is that this example isn't even that far from fact. Once sexualized, a woman (and in some cases a man) loses a large part of who she is.

The following is a quote from one of the young women who posed in this month's playboy.
If my “scandalous” streak wasn’t a good enough representation of a signature Albertan spirit, let me invoke a more “politically-conservative” comparison: As I am indeed politically interested, may I point to the footsteps that mark my political path. Correct me if I’m wrong but our country’s most historically significant female political leader was in fact a Tory, an interim PM and no stranger to posing in her birthday suit (albeit tastefully shielded). “Shamelessly” Yours, Phylis.

From this site.



And, where is Kim Campbell today?




So, what progress have we made?
Gender equalization progress does not lie within equal pay or in quantities. If we want gender equality, it lies within the social reconstruction of our positions and perceptions of the opposite sex.

Sure a woman's body is beautiful, I'm not going to say it's not. And hey, a man's body is pretty solid as well ..except for that little area to which the treasure trail leads.

But I can't help but think we've got our priorities mixed up. We give more attention to the physical, than the intellectual and emotional. The latter two, which are related to the most integral part of us ..our minds ..are heavily distorted when we put too much emphasis on the former ..or even too little (HYGIENE IS IMPORTANT PEOPLE).
We need a healthy balance of all, and we certainly don't have a healthy, balanced emphasis on all three in our society.
And if we do, it varies between the genders.
Physical attributes are given more emphasis for females, for instance.
I'm not at all denying that men don't have physical pressures, but in comparison ..women definitely have more.

While I say that women have it far harder than men--it's not to undermine what men have to go through. For men, there's a social ideal that they must live up to. Which is freaking hard. this turns into psycological hardships as well.

For women, we face social, economic, emotional, psycological, physical hardships and pressures on a daily basis.


You dont need to read Adrienne Rich or Andrea Dworkin to know this.




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