30 Days of De-Objectification: Wrap-Up

Sheriff Buford Pusser

December 12, 1937 - August 21, 1974

30 Days of De-Objectification:

Wrap-Up

Back in 1981, there was a television show called Walking Tall, which was inspired by the life of Sheriff Buford Pusser. The real-life Sheriff Pusser fought corruption in McNairy County, Tennessee. He was due to portray himself in the sequel to the 1973 film about his life, but died under mysterious circumstances in a single-car accident. Many people believe that his vehicle was sabotaged.

One of the lines in the theme song for the television show was “sometimes right hurts you more than wrong.”

I was struggling with a lot of issues at that point in my life. I was sixteen years old and far from popular. I gave in to peer pressure in several instances because I wanted to be liked. Still, I tried to make sure that my core values didn’t change. I didn’t join in bullying kids who were even less popular than I was. I did, however, do some things that I’m not proud of, mostly minor acts of vandalism on school property.

I also allowed boys to do things to me that I really didn’t want to do, because I wanted to feel loved. Instead, I ended up feeling even worse about myself.

I haven’t had an easy life, and I haven’t always done the right thing. I’ve learned a lot of hard lessons.

Many years later, the line from the theme song of that short-lived television program that I loved still sticks with me. I still try to live by it, even though I’ll probably always fall short.

Doing what’s right isn’t easy, especially when you’re young and wanting to be accepted.

Sometimes the “cool” thing is the wrong thing.

Some people act like it’s cool to belittle other people for aspects of their appearance, such as their size and the clothes they wear.

Those who belittle others to make themselves feel big tend to be extremely insecure. They take their own self-doubts out on others. These are hardly people that should be emulated.

It seems to me that some people join in the trend of expressing lewd and objectifying thoughts about people like actors and musicians because those individuals don’t seem real to them.

They are real, no matter how remote they may seem to be.

Most people do not like being objectified.

I would be extremely creeped out if I were to discover that someone had been writing graphic sexual fantasies about me and perhaps pairing me with one of my associates in these fantasies.

It seems very disrespectful to me to objectify anyone, let alone someone markedly older than myself.

I’ve found people who are a good deal older than me attractive. I couldn’t imagine implying that these men were fodder for sexual fantasies, let alone broadcasting such fantasies for public consumption.

Nobody should be thought of as only a sex object, and people who have become vulnerable due to infirmity should be afforded special consideration in this regard. I say this as a person who is experiencing deteriorating physical health myself. The last thing I want is for someone to look at me and see nothing but a thing to be masturbated over.

I am unsure how anyone could fail to see it as anything but incredibly insulting to look at a picture of a person who accomplished a great deal in their life, and instead of thinking “I really admire what this person was able to do,” the viewer of the photograph thinks: “Damn, he was hot! I want him to ram his rod up my coal chute like a runaway mine cart!”

I sometimes wonder if younger people have been taught the concept of putting themselves in another person’s shoes.

Would the people objectifying older and dead musicians like to have others objectifying them in the same way?

“Your accomplishments are meaningless. Only your genitals matter.”

That’s pretty disgusting.

I’m fairly sure everything I’ve written in this series has made not one damn bit of difference.

I wrote it anyway, because, if intent means anything, I’d like to think it made a difference on some level to the people being objectified.

I want them to know that their accomplishments matter more than their sex appeal to me.

~The Cheese Hath Grated It~

30 Days of De-Objectification: The Photographic Lie

It may surprise you to learn that this cat was not actually rolling this watermelon out of the lake

30 Days of De-Objectification:

The Photographic Lie

We’re going to get esoteric here. So, if that sort of thing really isn’t your bag, Baby, feel free to skip this post.

I will say from right out of the starting gate that I have no intent of arguing with anybody about the existence of spirits or any ability I may have to communicate with them. Believe it or don’t. I have no fucks to give one way or another. What I also don’t have is patience for debate, and I refuse to acknowledge any straight-up asshole commentary.

That being said, here we go.

When people die at a young age, there can be a tendency to see them as eternally having the sort of beauty which exists for only a very brief time. Hell, who knows, maybe in spirit they do possess such eternal “beauty”. I generally believe in the continuation of the personality after death. However, if I have indeed communicated with spirits, they have all been bemused over the preoccupation of the living with physical appearance.

“That’s not me,” they say. “This is me.”

“Me” is energy without physical form.

These “beautiful” people were not their bodies.

They were also not the images captured in photographs.

Those photographs depict an infinitesimally brief moment in time.

The person could have sneezed violently and farted at the same time a moment after the photo was taken. That isn’t sexy or glamorous.

The fact of the matter is, none of us are sexy or glamorous most of the time.

Many of the people we see as sexy or glamorous don’t think of themselves that way.

Many of the photographs that people find enticing are the result of carefully planned lighting, expertly applied makeup, and precise posing of the subjects.

With live concert photographs, there are more that don’t make the cut than that do.

The selected photographs are often retouched before being printed.

With people who died young, we have no way of knowing what they would look like had they survived.

With people who were able to age, the faction of “fans” who were only drawn to them for their physical appearance tend to ignore their increasing infirmity in favor of viewing photos from their youth and believing that this is the person who currently exists.

To say that photographs lie isn’t entirely accurate.

What photographs do is capture a select moment in time, which may have been staged.

People lie to themselves regarding the content of photographs.

~The Cheese Hath Grated It~

30 Days of De-Objectification: Zombie Zoo

Zombie girl from wallpapersafari.com

30 Days of De-Objectification:

Zombie Zoo

While there’s no way to know who started the trend of objectifying aging and dead musicians, most of the people who do so are followers rather than the edgy trendsetters that they like to envision themselves to be. Having original thoughts takes effort. Taking responsibility for one’s thoughts and actions also takes effort. Most people can’t be bothered to expend the effort to do either.

Most of the so-called “classic rock fandom” on Tumblr are not innovators by any stretch of the imagination. They parrot what those they have deemed their leaders tell them to and don’t think about what they’re doing. They think they’re being “outrageous”. Really, they just look foolish and crass.

Most of them are going through a phase.

I had an unfortunate encounter a couple of years ago with one of the ringleaders. It was a disturbing experience the likes of which I do not care to repeat. I became convinced following this encounter that the person in question, whom we’ll call Angie after the song “Angie Baby,” is a literal sociopath. To be fair, I don’t think that she is a danger to society. I do, however, think that she is a master manipulator and that a lot of people have fallen under her spell, so to speak.

Angie is intelligent, obsessive, and excels at playing the victim. Many of the so-called “classic rock fans” of Tumblr are, as I said, nowhere even close to being “cool” and “unique.” They are under the thrall of the puppet master.

Angie started out by attacking me using various sock puppet accounts to make it appear that I had multiple detractors. Initially, it was extremely unsettling to be piled on as I thought was happening. However, on closer examination, I realized that all the derogatory comments were written by the same person.

The incident that led to the trolling stemmed from my expressing sympathy for the terminal illness of the person with whom Angie is obsessed. We’ll call the object of Angie’s infatuation “Arthur.” Arthur died a while ago, but Angie is still obsessed with him. I avoid her blog, but sometimes people I follow reblog stuff from people who are members of Angie’s Zombie Zoo.

One incident illustrates quite well the sway Angie has. One of Angie’s zombies, who strikes me as being about as smart as a jar of applesauce, gushed to Angie that Arthur would be crazy not to fall in love with her, never mind that he had children older than she is and some of his children have children. Also, there was that inconvenient factor of him being, you know, deathly ill.

The followers of people like Angie have no capacity for either forethought or afterthought. They don’t apply reason to their actions or the words they’re reading. They want to be “hardcore.” They fall in line and dance at the Zombie Zoo without pondering even for a moment why their behavior is unpleasant.

They don’t care because they have all the depth of a shallow puddle.

They’re a bother, but in the end, they’ll find something else to distract them. You can only be fifteen, stupid, and jobless for just so long. Hopefully, once the minions of the Zombie Zoo find something else to do with themselves, the obsessive sorts will be left to rattle about in a haunted house of their own making.

I foolishly tried to communicate with Angie once, and came away feeling like the blood had frozen in my veins. This is something I will never do again. Dealing with people like Angie leaves me very unsettled. For some reason she dropped her “sweet little girl so in love with a dying man” act, and her words chilled me to the bone.

I am not suffering. The knowledge of “Arthur’s” illness doesn't disrupt my life. I do feel a bit sad over what is happening to him. The way he is dying is grim, but he has his family to look after him.

Maybe she thought I was one of her zombies and was too arrogant to realize that she was exposing her true nature. Arrogance is often the weakness of the sociopath, since they feel they can do no wrong. However, she keeps up the “lovelorn girl” act on her blog.

I have long said that while there are no immortal, bloodsucking fiends from beyond the grave, there are vampires. Psychic vampires are very real. Angie and I are polar opposites. I felt chilled when I initially read her words, and I still feel drained reading them two years after the fact.

Arthur struck me as being an extremely sensitive person. I have no doubt that, unlike Angie’s minion postulated, he would have been repulsed by Angie the instant she revealed her true nature, never mind the fact that he wasn’t the sort given to having the kind of midlife crisis that involves an ill-advised tryst with someone young enough to be his granddaughter.

In some ways I wish that I hadn’t insisted that this project needed to last thirty days. I’m quite ready to be done with it here.

In some ways I wish I’d never taken the project on at all. At the moment, I feel like I’ve been wrung out like a dishrag, and I want to tell fucking Grammarly to go piss up a rope, as my dear old pappy used to say. I know I’m preaching to the choir and the words I’ve written aren’t going to change anyone’s mind. They’re going to go ahead and do the stupid stuff they’re doing and feel justified in doing it.

One day, some of them will get a clue and say to themselves “what the hell was I thinking?”

I won’t know about it when that happens.

In any case, I was a fucking idiot not to just do this as an “A to Z” blogging challenge, which involves 26 posts. I now must come up with four more.

I’m too tired to think of anything clever to say, so I’ll just go with DON’T FUCKING OBJECTIFY PEOPLE, MMMKAY? IT’S NOT COOL!

~The Cheese Hath Grated It~