Are We Allowing Ourselves to be Exploited?

We all know insipid magazines like Cosmo and Redbook give men the impression the women are all about “Impressing Them in Bed!” and “Finding That Position That Makes Our Orgasms Last for 78 Minutes!!” and “Shoes!!!”

But have you ever wondered what guy mags like Stuff and FHM say about us? One women thinks they teach dudes to objectify us.

How groundbreaking.

Rosie Boycott, a former editor for Esquire magazine and freelance journalist for the Daily Mail says that men’s magazines are becoming more and more sexually explicit, and the women allowing themselves to be photographed are partially responsible.

“The Nuts website has a page called Assess My Breasts, in which readers are invited to rate the breasts and bottoms on display.” Boycott writes, “Every one of these has been sent in by a young woman.”

According to Boycott, the increasingly “cold and cruel” sex portrayed in men’s magazines is teaching males that women “are there to be used sexually for [their] pleasure and all women – secretly or not – are longing for rough sex and plenty of it.”

None of this could be possible, however, without the thousands of eager and willing girls who allow photographs of them splashed across the pages.

Arguing against the fact that men’s magazines exploit women is stupid, because they do, but saying that a lot of the blame rests in the hands of women is also a little skewed. Women (for the most part) aren’t the ones who are buying this stuff. They’re not the one’s proving that smut sells.

Are more girls than ever deciding that being outwardly and overtly sexual is cool? Yes. Is that trend a little disturbing? Yes. But we’re not making these decisions in a vacuum.

Instead of blaming one gender more than the other, how about we look at society as a whole, and figure out why everyone’s so obsessed with showing strangers not just their bodies, but their wallets, diary entries, and their little black book of bedfellows.