As I was walking home from a farewell dinner for a friend, the salience of an otherwise commonplace event was quite high for some reason. It could be the podcast I had been listening to while walking to said dinner, but whatever the reason, I became increasingly incensed as my walk continued at the sheer audacity of men arrogantly gazing at women. As I walked, I just happened, at various points, to end up walking behind or passing by women of different ages, sizes, races, etc. and yet without fail did each one pass under the gaze of a man who did not merely give a passing glance to acknowledge another human’s existence, but lingered their gaze, moved it up and down the figure of whomever it was they ocularly possessed.
This is unacceptable. I am writing this to not only vent, but to also reach out to my fellow men in an effort to raise awareness because, like sexual violence (concomitant with it really), the objectification of women is a problem of men; yet all too often women are left to do the problem-solving. So my particular audience here is my own gender. I am not looking to cut women out of the conversation or discourse by any means, but I want to make it abundantly clear that it is men who need to recognize their privilege and ought not be the burden of women to fight this fight; they’ve just been forced to do so in order to survive and receive their due recognition as children of God.
Men are entrenched in a position of power. It is too often taken for granted that by and large throughout history it is men who have always been in power (minor cultural exceptions notwithstanding for now). Using the US as a prime example, women had to fight for a 19th amendment to be made (19th!) to be able to vote and even that was less than a century ago. And there’s no need to go into how gender inequality remains strong to this day, even in the land of the free. A fundamental problem with this inequality is that it is deviously innocuous. It is truly difficult for a fish to difficult to describe itself as “wet.” And without that self-awareness being present in us men, it becomes nigh impossible to recognize when our privileged place in relationships is manifesting (hint: it’s by default).
Since I’ve been consciously working with it for a few days, and having recognized more and more layers of how I operate out of that privilege by loved ones with whom I’ve processed this topic a bit, I want to use the process of objectification as a means to scrutinize what all too often enjoys inscrutability. As was highlighted for me by a confidant, it is positively maddening that the kinds of questions I was asking aloud are not only necessary, but that they so rarely, if ever, present themselves as questions for men.
I think I can boil all of the questions I was asking down to one fundamental question that men fail to ask: “How do you feel about this?” where “you” is, in this case, a woman, and “this” is about everything really, but particularly about the way in which men think about/interact with women. Critical to this question being asked is being able to experience the woman’s authentic response. How do we know this has been achieved? When a woman feels completely able to respond with a “No” without fear of repercussion, of not being heard, or that response not being honored. It is a subject that can say both “Yes” and “No”. It is an object that is reduced to degrees of acquiescence.
The male gaze, in its form I so saliently noticed during my walk home, is a pervasive cultural practice wherein a man can project onto a woman any thoughts, all fantasies, as well as the sexual desires he may have. In that very act of gazing, the woman is objectified because she is never asked “How do you feel about this?” but instead accepts all of the things passing through the man’s presumptuous mind. In fact, the stereotypical cat calls and the lewd suggestions are all made, presumably, with the expectation that she is the type of woman who wants (or should want) all of those things. But even the less explicit thoughts and actions on the part of the man accomplish the same thing. Do not misunderstand me, there may be women out there who do enjoy such attentions (though perhaps that would exemplify self-objectification); I am not attempting to prescribe women’s conduct/responses here. That would be playing right into the paradigm I’m attempting to highlight and distance us from. The fundamental issue is that the man assumes the woman is one who likes such things because he has failed to ask. In Laura Mulvey’s words:
“Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.”
The male gaze is an arrogant act. It arrogates the woman to the man. She is not allowed to be a subject with whom he relates as a child of God; she is merely an object to be possessed through the man’s look. This is furthermore a male act due to men’s entrenchment in privilege. From what I’m more and more fully coming to understand, men, by society’s valuation of their sex, are by default the active subject while women are the passive object. Even if a woman gazes upon a man and objectifies him in her mind, the man still will retain his subjective status. He thinks himself the actor, society recognizes him as a subject, the man cannot be reduced to an object (I wager this is why men are understood as the ones able to be “objective” while women cannot; men have the ability to set aside their subjective self, not because of some superior ability but simply because women have no subject to set aside). However, when a woman is objectified, because that objectification is far more total and global due to socialization, acculturation, etc., she is not only viewed as an object, but she perceives herself as an object. This is the ultimate danger of this process of objectification. It not only realizes the sin of pride in men, it also realizes the sin of self-abnegation in women. Truly, we need to liberate ourselves from this paradigm because it dehumanizes each of us, which is antithetical to the purposes of God.
The process of objectification of women is a subtle one. Our culture does it so ubiquitously that it is hard to identify when it is occurring. Because of this, I cannot enumerate particulars of it, though I hope my example of how men look at women provides a concrete example. The critical component to honoring the humanity and divinity of each child of God is to be authentically present with them. This does not mean men cannot be sexual. It does not mean they cannot think sexually about a woman. It does not mean men cannot fantasize about a woman, cannot admire a woman’s beauty, cannot desire a woman. It means that men must recognize a woman can do all of those things as well. More to the point, it means that men must recognize women can NOT do those things; not only can they can say “No”, but there must be an authentic opportunity for that consent or dissent to be expressed. And that recognition of a woman’s subjectivity must be honored by men in their thoughts as well as actions.
In closing, I’ll highlight another concrete example. It is no coincidence that pornography is made predominantly by men for men. Think of the ease with which one can access images of women doing everything a man could imagine (and further consider the angles, the editing, the actors’ blocking, etc.). In the very act of accessing those images, those videos, those literotica stories, the man has forsaken the all-important step of asking the woman “How do you feel about this?”. There is an arrogation of a “Yes” response that maintains the man’s power, perpetuates the notion that men can project onto women their desires without the woman’s input, and this dynamic will translate from mediated objectification to in-person objectification. “But she has made her sexuality public and has consented to being viewed in this manner” you say? That same justification could be used by the guy on the street corner, gazing at the backside of a woman who has long since walked by. Did you honor a subject? Or have you arrogated an object?
(Note: I recognize I speak of gender in binary terms above, as well as heteronormatively. I do this because of the structural nature of culture’s dominant perception of gender. There is the additional element that the process of objectification eliminates the gender spectrum because it operates categorically. I also recognize there’s far more to this subject [e.g. the question of whether men can self-objectify for example]. I freely admit that I still have much to learn, so please, if you feel able and willing, build upon what I write, provide feedback, share, etc. so that the conversation can continue and be enriched)
(I recommend, as a seminal work [irony of word choice is noted] to see how this dynamic occurs in film, Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Try not to get too distracted by the dated film references or psychoanalysis)
