on sport fighting, porn, entertainment, and objectification

A few days ago, I mentioned a hobby that has absolutely nothing to do with blogging, computers, or skeptical transhumanism to keep my head clearer and take my mind off work. To those of you who read the post and didn’t click on the link, the hobby is krav maga, a mixed martial art. If you think this is some sort of weird male nerd overcompensation, let me tell you that my wife goes to the same practice sessions and what I see her do on the canvas definitely makes me doubt her claim that she’s a lover not a fighter. So considering how much time I spend learning how to do what you’d see in a UFC fight, when a Facebook friend posted a link to an article about a high profile bout and the first comment called MMA a low point of civilization and base entertainment not unlike pornography, exploiting people for profit, I got a wee bit steamed. My reply was swiftly followed by assertions that MMA fighters are working class kids with no other job prospects who get savaged in the ring to cheering crowds and are then cast aside like porn starlets who simply aren’t keeping up with the pace of the industry anymore, ending up broke and alone.

Now aside from the fact that there’s no evidence for this assertion and my own experiences at the gym definitely contradict this (the vast majority of the people I see doing sport fighting have office jobs during the day or are college students), I was obviously riled up. What the hell was all this? Was the person making these sweeping statements and going by old stereotypes in boxing movies on the lookout for a victim to defend from an oppressive society? Did his visceral hatred of seeing someone take a blow to the head make him blind to the fact that some people want to fight and challenge themselves, and that fighting is an insanely complicated sport? Now, we did settle the discussion like adults, and one of the points brought up did make me think. Are UFC’s top fighters objectified much in the same manner as adult performers? Are they just kept around as long as they provide entertainment and then dismissed while those who watch them work are only interested in what they can do, not who they are as people? Well, yes. But who isn’t?

If you dwell in a cubicle farm for most of the day, especially in a large company, you’re reduced to the amount of work you do, just like an MMA fighter is reduced to stats, and porn stars are reduced to the amount of views and money they bring in from a certain demographic. Constant objectification lies at the core of post-modern nihilism that rejects the patterns of life we’ve been told we should follow and the documents that sum up who we are in a resume. And one big part of living in today’s society is coping with being objectified in one way or another, though we only really complain about it happening in public when the objectification happens in an area of life that we’ve been conditioned to see as base vices. The MMA critic on Facebook complained that fighters get pummeled for entertainment (wrath) and that porn stars become sex objects in adult videos (lust), but he probably didn’t even think to make a peep about HR seeing you as John Q. Public, employee number 1375–23J, cubicle 44B. If anything, this last type of objectification can be even worse, reducing a person to hours on a spreadsheet or burndown chart.

And that makes me wonder. If I am going to be objectified, is it really so bad that I was objectified when doing something uniquely human, something raw, emotional, and irrefutably alive than as lines of code, items in production, and hours billed? If anything, being seen as a unit of work on dashboards and charts is far more dehumanizing than having your technique for elbowing your opponent in the ring analyzed and trainers making sure you can execute a really painful block enough times? At least here you have a chance to excel in a way that lets people see your pain but also your dedication and the ability to control your aggression as a sequence of techniques rehearsed a thousand times to commit them to muscle memory. We can ask the same question about adult video performers. Yes they’re a gateway for someone’s sexual gratification but they get the benefit of being objectified in raw passion and emotion, uniquely human qualities that a slot on an office chart could never have. Having a personality is what we reserve for those who become famous by distinguishing themselves enough to be featured in the mass media…