this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
257 points (93.3% liked)
Technology
59582 readers
4252 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
When you say “Physical sexual characteristics,” do you understand that the word “sexual” refers not to the act of sex but to a person’s biological sex? Physical sexual characteristics include anything that expresses differently due to differing amounts of gonadocorticoids, like a person’s height, their body and facial hair, their body shape, the sound of their voice, their ease with developing muscle mass, etc..
A woman’s (or femme presenting person’s) nipples are not sex organs any more than a man’s mustache is.
I agree with all of that. I don't see our two comments as in conflict, except that when I said "societ[al]... standards on the rejection of nudity", I didn't draw the line at sex organs. But I don't think Twitch is going to ban short people any time soon, if you're worried about a slippery slope.
My original reply was in regards to the word "sexist". If your definition of "sexist" is so morally neutral that it includes literally any kind of discrimination between sexes, then that's fine; this is "sexist", and so are all of us. But since most people use "sexist" to refer to a moral transgression, it seems silly to me to pretend that male and female nipples are the same, and I don't see any moral hazard in saying so.
Whether or not society should care so much about titties isn't a question I was trying to address, only that it's not sexist to do so.
It is sexist to treat men and women differently without a good reason, and it doesn’t seem that there’s a good reason in this case, which means that doing so is sexist.
Regardless of morals, from a biological perspective, treating male and female nipples differently is irrational, since male chests are also physical sexual characteristics. To be clear, I’m differentiating from the perspective of “these two body parts are shaped differently and therefore have different needs when fashioning clothing” perspective. There’s a good reason to do that (though there isn’t a good reason to enforce it). But from a “one is sexual, one is not, so one needs to be covered and the other doesn’t” perspective, what’s the reason? You indicated that they’re physical sexual characteristics but as I already pointed out, physical sexual characteristics aren’t generally required to be covered. People find both men’s and women’s chests (and other body parts) sexually attractive, so that isn’t it, either.
If you’d say that society treats them differently because we’ve historically objectified and sexualized women (and continue to do so) and as a result women’s bodies are considered sexual in a way that men’s aren’t, and this is ingrained in our culture at this point then I would agree with you. I just don’t agree that that’s a “good reason.”
Women’s breast produce milk, which comes from procreation. That’s more sexual than a man’s non-functional nipples, even if slightly. Other animals don’t have enlarged breast like humans do. That points to them having an estrus function in addition to their biological function. Breast very well may be a hard-wired arousal point.
Feeding infants isn’t sexual.