05: Embodiment - Bodies in Cyberspace

The Internet today allows us to learn many things about the world we live in and allows us imagine how cultures look and act in distant countries. Furthermore, it could very well show the embodiment of the values that are most important to us.

When it comes to humans and males more specifically, a hot topic to talk about is the subject of sex on the Internet. I highly agree with the idea that pornography and sex trafficking on the Internet is shaping the embodiment of how women appear. Not only is media showing females how they “should” look but the Internet has also done what the real world have done in making women valued largely by their appearance. While any sane or normal person will conclude that sex trafficking is a horrific and mad idea, regulation in such industries can be complicated and hard to tackle. Many of these Organizations, if you want to call them that, which participate in these industries, are largely in unregulated countries that can be hard to be shutdown. Furthermore, another issue arises when it comes to the Internet and that is how far do governments restrict the content that consumers are allowed to see.

While men are currently the prime users of Internet they only help to allow the sex industry to drive how individuals are embodied. Hawthorns article stats on consumers were quite shocking to me; her resources found that the recorded proportion of buyers of women over the internet are 90% male, 70% of which are living in the US, and 70% between the ages of 18 and 40. While the age range is not surprising to me, the percentage of US consumers is.  

I have always thought of “mail order brides” as a thing you might see in movies. However, Hawthorn goes on to explain how consumers in this industry are pitched on the women that they are selling. I think the biggest fail in embodiment of actual real women these sites pose is the way they apparently explain there brides-for-sale. They explain that these women as pleasers and don’t have unreasonable expectations. To me it’s as if you are buying a puppet that has been suppressed into a life of selfless personal identity, and the men who partake in this think of them-selves as the puppet master. This goes against the idea of the Internet being a place to express and discover yourself, and while this may be true if you’re a male online it certainly does not appear to be the case for women.

Women will continue to be embodied with sexual exploitation on the Internet if the consumers, being men, continue to let these industries have all the power. We as consumers must demand respect from these industries if we are ever to obtain a truly free and clear minded Internet. While I believe we should and always will value beauty in the human-race, we must not do so with a blind eye, to the point where our filtered values that we see on Internet become our real life ones.