Ditz

Media Credit: Megan Locks Juan Medina

Media Credit: Caroline Heldman

There she stood, a confident staff member from the National Organization for Women (NOW), boldly expressing her power as a young woman, seemingly unconstrained by the political and cultural barriers of her foremothers. "War Against Women" was strategically hugging her bust, framed by the universal "no" sign, and the pocket covering her left butt cheek was patched over with a sticker that proudly proclaimed, "This is What a Feminist Looks Like." Lydia, like millions of other young, American women, was embracing her status as a sexual object as though it was empowering, despite the logical impossibility of this notion. What does it mean when girls/women call attention to their breasts and buttocks by wearing lettering that gives others permission to reduce them to a sexual object? What does it mean that young women now widely accept - even celebrate - the notion that they are sex objects?

Female objectification refers to the phenomenon of a woman's body being treated as an object that exists for the pleasure and use of others. Girls/women are typically portrayed as mere bodies or objects in popular culture, and the implied subject - the consumer - is typically male. Despite a push against female objectification in the 1960s and 1970s, it is more popular today than ever before. Female objectification has become acceptable, unremarkable, even normalized in American culture. Girls/women have gotten into the game, too, with consensual objectification - celebrating their object status as a form of empowerment in a truly Orwellian sense through bare midriffs, ferocious cleavage, and clothing with the Playboy and Hustler brands that scream, "I am a sex object and proud of it."

One of the most obvious ways in which consensual objectification is conveyed in contemporary American culture is through permissive lettering, the placing of words over the breasts and buttocks, giving others permission to gaze. A cottage industry of permissive t-shirt production has sprung up to serve the demand for women to show that that have bought into the idea of being a sex object. Some shirts go even further to proclaim that the female wearer exists to cater to male sexual desire. For example, on one shirt, "Fuck Foreplay" is written across a half-used tube of KY Jelly, suggesting that the wearer is always ready for penetration at a moment's notice. (Note that this shirt also reflects and propagates the stereotypical assumption that men do not enjoy foreplay.) Other shirts go beyond signaling sexual readiness, making light of rape with the words "Violate Me" and "No Means Eat Me out First." In one sense, it is great to see young women displaying flagrant sexuality in ways they would never have done a generation ago, and it would be marvelous if these appearance choices reflected the female sexual freedom that feminists have fought so hard for, but they do not. Consensual objectification is a tired re-enactment of old gender roles instead of new expressions of women's sexual freedom. In short, girls/women are asked to eroticize male sexual pleasure as though it is their own, and millions of women have happily obliged.

The idea of empowerment through object status is illogical for the simple fact that subjects act, and objects are acted upon. In other words, by objectifying themselves, women are, by definition, placing themselves below subjects. Sexual objects are positioned to be consumed, and exist for the pleasure of others, typically males. The real power in this arrangement lies with men who are raised believing that they are expected and entitled to consume women as objects, in media, and elsewhere. You might argue that women who objectify themselves are in the position of a supplier who can choose where she delivers her products, but the product she is delivering is herself. The reduction of a human being from subject to object cannot be empowering.

The larger question here is what women's sexualities would look like if women did not exist in a sexual sense for men. What if women's sexual expressions were based on women's pleasures as opposed to a narrow, consumerist conception of male sexual pleasure? What would disappear -- permissive lettering, high heels, mini skirts, plucked eyebrows, habitual body monitoring, body shame, frequent dieting, body hatred, constant competition with other girls/women, liposuction, vaginal reconstructive surgery? Perhaps the most violent aspect of young women objectifying themselves is the socialized inability to even imagine an existence, a sexuality, that is truly their own.

Article Tools