There are feminists who disagree. I also tend to think of myself as middle of the road, there are liberals, and conservatives who disagree.
My take on this is simple, women are people, as such they are entitled to the same treatement, rights, privileges and hassles that I am.
I understand the game, at present, is fucked up and that sometimes a stink must be made. This is also my feelings on (insert minority group here).
Right now I am in Kiev. A lovely city, with a lot of wonderful people, good food, pleasant weather (at present... we'll not discuss what it's like in the sleet, the snow, nor the slush) and a different culture of dress. It's also, for all that it's miles apart from most of Ukraine, economically depressed in comparison to lots of Europe, and North America.
I like to look at women. In some ways I look at them as objects. I also look at men, horses, cats, statues, books, poems, etc. as objects. A pretty girl (by my lights) gets looked at. This, so far as I can see, in no way invalidates my views on her as a person. I am not any more likely to talk to her for being stunning, nor am I the less likely to talk to her if she isn't (the visual record of my lovers is about the only way I can prove this, and for that to work one would have to know what I think makes a woman visually attractive, which ain't possible, you will have to accept my self-delusion [because I know that looks do affect some of how I choose whom to flirt with, though that isn't the usual way I end up with a lover... I'm not that aggressive, but I digress).
Kiev, is a great place to look at women. The style of summer dress is not easy to describe. It isn't skimpy, but it is revealing. It isn't purely skin-tight, but it can be. Some forms of translucent, and see through, are completely acceptable (there is a lass in the mess who doesn't seem to mind that anyone who looks at her can tell the lace, pattern, and cut, of her underwear, since she is one, tall, and two, wearing heels, her underwear is at eye level when I am sitting down. She is serving three removes to twenty five people. It's hard for me to not notice).
Tonight, in the hotel, is a some sort of "marriage club" meeting. Women are mingling with a few men, and making video tapes and phorotgraphs to show to other men, looking for brides. It feels cheap. I know why they are doing it. They are hoping for a better life, and (though they know it's not as likely as all that, a decent husband. Like their grandmothers they hope love will come later. Unlike their grandfathers, the men who are looking to marry them aren't under the expectation that they have to work at making that love reciprocal).
And I hear the men, some of them in the crowd I am here with, talking about the women as though they weren't really people. As if the fact of being able to look at them as objects entitles the men to interact with them as objects. It appalls me.
Hearing men say they wish they could get a Ukrainian wife, saying they'd never want her to learn English, in the belief that would prevent her from learning the nasty things American women know, and come to the terrible expectations Western women have. In short they want a cross between a maid and a sex-toy.
For some I know it's just atavistic fantasy, because when I point out that keeping them in an aritifical cage will only lead to intellectual atrophy and frustration and them deciding the lifestyle, and the chance at citizenship aren't worth the candle they will leave (and that could get ugly, because they can only stay if they get married, which means in a state like California, the divorce can get ugly. I don't know for certain, but I'll bet it could get uglier if they knew how to show the marriage was entered into in bad faith on the husband's part).
But it still appalls me. I'm strange, I just can't understand how people can think like that. How they can see someone, in the abstract, as less than human.