It's a typical day at Dunder Mifflin Paper Co. Everyone is doing work until an argument breaks out, creating a schism in the office. The debate: is Hilary Swank hot? Various people present their cases calling Swank hot while others insist while she may be attractive and doable, she isn't hot. At the end of the day, the office is unable to come to a conclusion, ending in a tie until Michael Scott casts the swing vote in favor of hot, without even knowing about the competition.
If you're not familiar with the above anecdote, it comes from The Office, which I am currently watching semi-religiously. This is just one of the arenas in which the attractiveness of a woman is called out in a rather crude fashion. I'm frequently (and pretty ironically) asked about the hotness of a woman by my male friends. Other times I'm just told that a particular woman is "super hot" or that the person in question would "f*ck her endlessly." I try to reason that these friends say those kinds of phrases in an attempt to compliment them, but it never sits right with me. To me, it seems rape-y. The image that comes into my head is if my friends ever came into contact with any given "hot" woman, they would be entitled to her body and she would be lucky to have them. I personally never call a woman hot, no matter how attractive she is. Instead, I opt for the far more respectful 'beautiful,' and here's why I think you should do the same.
Do you know what comes up when you google 'hot'? Nothing but half naked women. No hot weather or anything related to temperature, no hot men, just women. That should suggest that maybe our culture is a little too enraptured by women's sex appeal. In fact, that's the definition of hot. If you go through all the definitions until you come to one about appearance, it's "sexually attractive." Sex is in the definition. You may try to argue that calling a woman (or man for that matter) hot doesn't mean you want to have sex with them, but intrinsically it does. Beautiful, on the other hand, means "pleasing the senses or mind aesthetically." This doesn't even mean in relation to women, but rather to anything we deem beautiful. What I like about this though is that it includes pleasing the mind. When we call a woman hot, we're saying that she can satisfy our sexual needs, which is rather demeaning. When we call a woman beautiful, we're saying that she pleases our mind, which is much more respectful.
And now more than ever we need to be respectful of women. I've always found myself as kind of a feminist, but many would say that I'm not feminist enough. Maybe that's cause I'm a man and "can't understand women," but regardless, I've always viewed women as equal to men, but different than men. In my experience, women are just as capable as males. It was mostly women who were excelling in school and now more women are graduating from college than men. What I'm getting at is that women are completely capable beings. It is my belief that we need to treat all people with respect, and women are people, so we need to treat women with respect. I do not think that calling a woman hot is respectful.
I haven't done this personally, but my guess is that if you asked any woman which word they'd rather be called, they'd say beautiful. Even further, I bet they wouldn't want to be described according to physical beauty. Aside from makeup and health, we can't control the way we look. The face we have is the face we're stuck with, unless we pay thousands of dollars for plastic surgery, makeovers, and the like. Now I don't think that there is anything particularly wrong with complimenting a woman on their beauty, but it's certainly not the most important part of a person.
When I look at a person, I try to read them. I feel like I can gauge a personality and a story pretty well just by looking at a person and studying how they sit, what they wear, and so on. I get that may be a little creepy or that I base it off of some stereotypes, but the girls I find most attractive aren't the ones that look best in a bikini. They don't have the biggest boobs or biggest butt, but they have a good heart. I don't often talk to people on the shuttle to school, but frequently I'll see a girl and be able to tell that they're a sweet, intelligent, and kind person just by looking. I don't really have anything to back that up, so I might be dead wrong, but I think you might know what I mean.
So what's the bottom line? Stop calling women hot and replace it with a more respectful term. Women are not here for men to gawk at and wish they could relentlessly have sex with them. They do not owe physical beauty to you and just because a woman is "hot" doesn't entitle you to say so. What does saying a woman is hot even do, announce to your friends that your little friend in your pants is getting rowdy? Very relevant information. It's attitudes like this that not only hold women back, but also men. As a man, I'm given a bad rep by many because of the immature words of many men. Men objectifying women indirectly influences women's views of me, and I'm going to put my foot down. Stop objectifying women and get a hold of yourself; we're better than this.
