Let's Stop Pretending "Normal" Is the Problem

I had Wilfred Reilly on the show recently, and he brought up a study he’d been sent about “objectification.” Finally, science is going to settle this once and for all. Men are pigs. Case closed.

The study worked like this. Participants were shown a photo of a scantily clad woman posed provocatively and then were asked to score her on a one to ten scale for intelligence and morality. The same exercise was repeated with a photo of a woman dressed in professional business attire. The first photo produced slightly lower scores across the board. Conclusion: objectification causes dehumanization.

Before we even address what “objectification” means, there’s something worth sitting with about the study design itself. Participants are shown a single photo of a stranger and asked to make judgments about how intelligent or moral she is. They have no other information. They probably wouldn’t consciously ask themselves these questions if they simply encountered her in real life. But they’re being prompted to answer, with these photos as the only available signal.

A perfectly non-judgmental person should give anyone they’re shown the same score or refuse the task altogether, but I have yet to meet that person. More likely, someone who wants to appear non-judgmental and is willing to lie would score the women equally. A normal, honest person would look at the two photos, understand that these are likely two very different kinds of people, and then judge accordingly.

The researchers compared scores and declared the gap a moral failing of the participants. You were asked to judge. You judged. How dare you.

So what do these results actually show? That people generally consider modesty good and promiscuity bad. Not that being modest means you’re good, or that promiscuity means you’re bad, but that all else being equal, one is a positive trait and the other is a negative. In other words, the sexual morality of any moderately traditional culture.

Of course the woman in business attire scores higher. Without any additional information, what other inference is available? Sure, it’s a judgment. In a real-world scenario it might even be an unfair judgement. But judgment and dehumanization are not the same thing, and the study never earns the right to conflate them.

Here’s where it gets better. Wilfred checked the footnotes and found that almost 80% of the participants were… women. To be specific, it was 46 women and 14 men.

Whether or not the researchers themselves would admit this, everyone knows who’s being criticized when people rail against “objectification.” A related phrase, “the male gaze,” gives away the game. Whenever those terms come up, the conversation is usually focused on how men are too beholden to their animal instincts, men haven’t been sufficiently trained out of those instincts, and therefore men are bad. The first two points may have some merit, but the overall attitude is just about the definition of “dehumanization.” It’s just targeting men, not women.

Modern progressives often present themselves as maximally non-judgmental, treating any negative assessment of a person’s behavior or lifestyle as a form of oppression. They insist that people cannot be held responsible for their behavior because they are fundamentally shaped by forces beyond their control. If their basic assumptions were correct, you could call that compassion. But if you believe, like I do, that people have individual autonomy over their choices and actions, then the progressive perspective is itself dehumanizing. Noticing a pattern?

What’s interesting is who ends up being the truly judgmental party in all of this. The researchers presented the subjects of these photos as passive objects to be evaluated, asked participants one-dimensional questions about them, and then condemned the values implied by their answers. They aren’t condemning judgment itself. They’re specifically condemning judgments made by average people with conventional opinions.

This is the logic of Herbert Marcuse’s “repressive tolerance,” the idea that the only thing a society shouldn’t tolerate is intolerance itself. It also resembles the logic of George W. Bush’s claim that he “abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system.” Neither of these comparisons are compliments.

Maybe non-judgmentalism isn’t built on airtight logic, but does it at least have the desired outcome of an overall less judgmental world? Well, the last 15 years of woke non-judgmentalism has seemed to me like the most judgmental era in living memory. You can argue whether “cancel culture” was justified, but you can’t argue that it wasn’t judgmental.

So what happens when it’s no longer acceptable to publicly judge behaviors that trigger the judgmental instinct in most people? And what happens when you combine that with the internet’s near infinite potential for niche subcultures? Things. Get. Weird.

Wilfred laid out how, in generations past, if you told your buddy about a peculiar interest you had, you’d be told in no uncertain terms to keep that to yourself. Today, however, anyone who has some strange fleeting impulse can immediately go to the internet and indulge it, often discovering whole communities of people who’ve had the same impulse and have gone down the rabbithole. This dynamic helps explain everything from transgenderism to eating disorders and fringe politics of all sorts.

These problems couldn’t spread far and wide without the internet, but non-judgmentalism prevents us from fighting back. If you cannot judge behavior, you cannot correct it. If you cannot correct it, the fringe grows. And if you spend enough time in spaces where the sum total of the fringes has become the majority, you start to wonder whether you’re the weird one.

As Wilfred described the objectification study, “the entire thing is garbage.” Unfortunately, the social scientists that produce this kind of work have serious sway in our culture, especially in education. Their worldview does real damage, providing legitimacy to the childish idea that the highest good is to never make anyone feel bad about what they do (unless, of course, they have the wrong opinions).

The solution is not complicated. Stop pathologizing normal human instincts. Start holding people accountable for their choices. And if you’re feeling the pressure to withhold judgment even though you know something’s wrong, don’t give in.

That would do more good than a thousand objectification studies.