Rank used cars, not women

One sign depicted a nude female body dissected by marker lines into different beef cuts, labeled appropriately as “rib,” “flank,” and so on. “If you want meat, go to the butcher!” another proclaimed. “Welcome to the Miss America cattle auction!” cried one more.

Unfortunately, I’m afraid the message of the 1968 Miss America protestors has been lost on us — or at least a lot of us.

I’m sure those women hoped that more than thirty years later we females would no longer be subjected to impossible beauty standards or objectified as sexual playthings.

In some ways, we’ve made a lot of progress. But in others, like the recent Odyssey column “Rating Girls,” we definitely haven’t.

If you’re unfamiliar with The Odyssey, it is “a weekly lifestyle newspaper focused on the Greek community at Indiana University,” according to its Web site.

In “Rating Girls,” Yale Reardon details different categories of women, from a “one” (“Lucky enough these girls hardly ever go out in public”) to a “ten” (“The Holy Mecca of girls” who “can have the personality of a cardboard box” but are still the most desired).

My goal is not to berate Mr. Reardon for his disturbing lack of morality or his absent sense of political correctness — authors all across the blogosphere have already taken up that cause. Mr. Reardon is not the first to attempt to determine a woman’s worth by her thinness and breast size — nor will he be the last.

Perhaps more troubling than the column itself was the reaction; it was embraced and even praised by some. “Rating girls. Spot on,” read one congratulatory Facebook wall post, “Funniest shit I have read in a while… The whole house is reading it and lovin it.” “I’ve never been so proud to be called an 8.5 in my life,” another declared.

Don’t get me wrong. If you enjoy being evaluated and ranked in a similar fashion to, say, a used car, by all means be my guest. But the idea of ranking women, whether meant in a satirical fashion or not, has serious repercussions for all of us and absolutely does not belong in any kind of newspaper.

Not only is it unpleasant and humiliating to imagine a bunch of guys critiquing your body and criticizing each flaw, you don’t have to look far beyond the dehumanization inherent in a ranking system to find ties to domestic violence and rape. In fact, Mr. Reardon’s own Twitter bio reads “Yale is my name and raping is my game,” and he’s a fan of the Facebook page “I Don’t Like Chicks With Tans. It Means They’ve Been Out Of The Kitchen,” which depicts several scenes of domestic violence including an image of a bloody woman with her mouth duct taped and a gun to her head that reads “my girlfriend has a learning disability.”

The idea that women are purely sexual beings whose personalities are dispensable is inextricably linked to the idea that they don’t necessitate humanitarian treatment, which leads to the acceptance of violence and rape. All actions, including violent ones, begin with an idea. A ranking system effectively takes away a female’s humanity.

On a college campus, where one out of four of our peers will be the victims of actual or attempted sexual assault, we should be absolutely ashamed to promote the sexual degradation of women by ranking them.

I hope I will never again pick up a publication with my university’s name on it and be subjected to a column that makes me feel, as a woman, like less of a human being.

 
E-mail: akames@indiana.edu