Enough with objectification! Enough with telling us that objectification is positive as long as the woman embraces it!

What really gets me is that women are proud to be called sexy by men, as though that's the ultimate pinnacle in life. "I'm desired by men! I wear very little clothing! My body, despite being 42 and having just given birth, looks like it belongs to a 20 year old!"

I think The crux of our dilemma is that being desirable IS the ultimate pinnacle in life for a lot of women. 

To many women, having a family is the pinnacle of life, not succeeding in a career.  How do you create a family? By first being desirable to men. 

Feminist are butting their heads against women who, while wanting equal opportunity, don't really want equality. 

Sexy works.  What's easier, working hard to provide for yourself or enticing someone else to provide for you?  Many women have chosen the latter and are happy with their situations and feel no need to change.   Work a tiresome and thankless job to get things or maintain my desirability to get things...To many women, their power does lie in their sex... To many men, a woman's power lies in their sex.
How can you convince a woman that objectification is wrong when it works to get them what they need?

I think this attitude in women is the equivalent of male tendencies towards power and control.  It's instinctive yet destructive.    Excel due to your intellectual merits or just dominate others by force...The reason why we have so much trouble stopping violence and abuse, is that it works.  Men who act this way get their needs met and the mentality is supported by the rest of society.  It's hard to tell a man that a person who loves you will provide more than a person who fears you.
Just like it is hard to tell a woman that she will reach a greater potential through her intellect rather than her body.

The only way to fight this is to prove to the masses that this behavior doesn't work.  That objectification doesn't really work..  Quite frankly, we can't really convince anyone when you can use your body to get what you need. How do you convince the media and marketing agencies when sex does sell their products?  Hell, they even try to use sexy women to sell products in women's magazines, even when it doesn't work.  

Things will change the day Halle, and every woman like her, says, "I'm not going to do it anymore.  There's nothing in it for me."  Honestly, how likely is that going to happen?

We're fighting with the forces of human nature here.  Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution telling us to be fruitful and multiply. I assume most gay people really don't understand this because it really doesn't apply to most of us.  But trust me, the force is strong.  I think people (gay or straight) aren't being very honest about how much power sex has over their lives.  That most of the things men do are to attract a woman or many women.  This is true for women too.

That isn't just a drooling teenager in you, that's your primal nature.  I've said before that humans aren't as evolved as we'd like to believe.  This is why it's so hard to win the fight against sexism, objectification, violence, and other things that just make us the human aniimals we are.

I totally agree with you.   Halle Berry is beyond hot - uber hot.  I work in a retail pharmacy and I have a customer who comes in about once a month that could be Halle's older sister.  No joke.  I make a fool of myself everytime this woman comes in; I can't speak and just stare at her with my mouth gaping open.  I think the only halfway intelligent thing I've ever said to her was, "has anyone ever told you that you look like Halle Berry?"  Wow, I am so clever, right?

Anyway,I also wanna yell "here! here!" to this statement of yours:  women are proud to be called sexy by men, as though that's the ultimate pinnacle in life.  Why is that anyway?  I know sooo many women who only get validation of themselves through what a man thinks of their looks.  Not her intelligence, her compassion or humor.  No her looks.  If a man says you look good, that's the same as society putting a Grade A inspection sticker across your forehead.  Burns my butt, can you tell?  I actually had a former male boss tell me I didn't "have the look" the hospital system wanted to portray in the personnel department.  So what I only talked to people on the phone about why their supervisor was late in submitting their pay raise to HR.  Considering all the HR reps were vicious sharks, I took that as a compliment and quit!

Don't send flowers!  Send your girl a sexy gift basket! 

It would be interesting, but I'd probably see it as Hillary attempting to copy her husband, as though women can only make it (in politics, anything) if they follow the lead of a man. What would have been really cool is Halle Berry wearing some damn clothes. But hey, this is why men have Esquire and why we have Bitch and Bust :)