Remember those old movies where some American with a camera would try to take a picture of an Indian or Asian or African, but the Indian/Asian/African would run away, screaming in terror, and we'd learn that these "primitives" believed that by taking their picture, the "magic box'' took a piece of their soul?
Remember?
No?
Well, let's just pretend that you do.
Anyway, it seems to me that these "primatives'' might have been on to something.
Stick with me.
Let's say I take a picture of a loin-clothe wearing, spear-carrying, flesh-eating pygmy while on safari in Africa (and I mean loin-clothe wearing, spear-carrying, flesh-eating in the nicest way possible!).
I show you that picture. You say, "Wow! He looks mean/cute/bored/in love! That must have been quite a trip. Tell me about it."
And so the picture of the pygmy turns an actual live pygmy into an object. He's no longer a real person, but a thing - an object of curiosity that I saw while on vacation, or maybe he becomes a cause as I return home determined to bring tennis shoes to the Pygmies of Africa.
In other words, he becomes less of a real person with emotions and feelings and a soul and more of an inanimate "thing."
In my last blog ("Globally Positioned Somewhere ... But Where?"), I talked about how my grandmother used to assign gender and personality to inanimate objects like her toaster or favorite chair.
Then it occurred to me how often we do just the opposite: we turn people with gender and personality into inanimate objects.
And nowhere is this more obvious than with porn.
(Wow, I bet you never saw that coming!)
It doesn't matter that the men and women of porn choose to become objects used by purchasers of porn in the same way you or I might use a lawn mower or toaster or pencil.
(Wait. Don't take that too literally. I'm not suggesting you or I use lawn mowers the same way some people use porn - unless you do. I don't. I absolutely respect my lawn mower because he has feelings and a unique personality and makes me laugh while cutting the grass. He's much more fun than my toaster, whose personality is unpredictable - either 'up' or 'down').
The truth is, our society does a lot to objectify people and turn them into objects. And there is apparently pretty good money in allowing yourself to become an object, particularly an object that other people can use for their own gratification.
And while those people that allow themselves to become objects may not think of themselves as impersonal objects, most of us don't care what they think. All we know is that person has been photographed or filmed in some manner that causes us to see them not as some one but as some thing.
And that's just wrong.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not assuming responsibility for what anyone else chooses to do. But I am assuming responsibility for how I view other people, no matter how they view themselves.
And I do think I have a responsibility to always see people as, well, people. With emotions, personality, souls.
(Hello, my name is Ray, and I'm addicted to italics).
Even if they don't care how the rest of the world sees them - maybe they like (there I go again) being viewed as objects, like lawn mowers and toasters (albeit undressed lawn mowers and toasters), I should not see them as they see themselves, but as for the worth that each individual was created with (a phrase that makes me sound like a Miss America contestant).
You know - we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator .... yeah, yeah.
Here's the deal, though: the more we view these images, the more we - and by 'we' I really mean "men" - become susceptible to stop seeing women as human beings and start seeing them as soulless objects that are supposed to be there to give us what we want in the same kind of self-absorbed, self-satisfaction seeking mentality that we get from the pictures.
See?
Pictures really do have a way of stealing a person's soul.
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