Women as Objects: Secondhand Books

Some time ago, I was turned on to the New York Review of Books by a friend and former professor of mine. Being an undergraduate student with plentiful Internet access and browsing skills, I started at their website, reading what articles of interest I could find, of those available online. Now, I've subscribed to the NYRB on my Google Reader account, and I try to read as much content there as I can.

Recently, I started receiving not just full article updates but short blog posts on my RSS feed, under the title of "NYRblog". I read one such post today, a brief lament by author Charles Rosen on "the lost pleasure of browsing" -- browsing books, that is, prior to purchase. Rosen contrasts the "seductive", tacile experience of holding a book with the practice of mail order (online) shopping.

I think there is something to be said for his argument here. Certainly some might find irony in his publishing such a (broadly speaking) anti-digital view on a blog, of all places, but putting aside the issue of media experience, I was left scratching my head at Rosen's next point:

Of course, a century ago and even less, ranchers in sparsely settled sections of the West used to get mail-order brides. That seems to me similar to buying books online, and equally likely to lead to customer dissatisfaction. Buying a secondhand or used book without having seen and examined it first is difficult for me to accept. By now secondhand bookstores are disappearing rapidly all over the world.

What is the message here? Women are like books, you have to hold them in your hands and let them seduce you before "making the purchase", so to speak? The bit about secondhand books just raises even more questions about the comparison -- what does one need to know, to have "seen and examined" about a "secondhand" woman before one is satisfied and accepts her?

I'm not familiar with Rosen or his work so I can't speak to this in any broader sense than in the short piece itself. It seems that the replies, as of this writing, have focused mostly on the broader question of whether Rosen is being a technological alarmist or not.

So, perhaps my focus here speaks more to my own recent theoretical alignments more than anything else. Had I read this post back when I first started poking around at the NYRB, I doubt I would have considered it in the same way.

So what, then? Well, for one thing it's interesting for me to look back and see how my personal theoretical viewpoints have shifted. More generally though, I think this is a good example of how theories work to sensitize us to certain concepts and aspects of social life, aspects that we might have otherwise ignored or deemed unimportant.