To the Editor:

If any girls or guys have ever thought to themselves about how to look sexy, then in my opinion they have aspired to objectify themselves. I’ll tell you I have. Most of us have because sex affects us, and we like being affected because sex can sell anything — and it does.

In some respects sex is the purest sort of power, whether that power comes in an air of confidence in the mind of a desired man or woman, or in the weakening knees of a desirer. It is unnatural to fight this instinct and so we shouldn’t. And in not fighting it, we find ourselves quartering people all the time.

“Wow, look at her hips,” “Do you see his muscles,” “Her legs are incredible,” “She’s a great actor,” “He can run fast.” We very rarely notice or appreciate a whole person unless we know them, and even then it is hard to do. So when I see this controversial T-shirt (“Touchy T-shirt pulled from store’s racks,” 9/27), I see a cartoon. A humorous cartoon that hyperbolizes and mocks our condition. And just like any political cartoon in the papers that takes the head of a president and mashes it out of shape for a good laugh and gets away with it, so should this shirt get away with it.

The crime isn’t the shirt. It’s the people who secretly ogle the booty-cam but won’t admit it.

Russell Greenberg ’02

September 27, 2001