“
Oh shit did you just dis the feminine gender
I'll pummel your ass then stick you in a blender
You think I like Tori and Ani so I can't rhyme
But I got flow like Ghostbusters got slime
Objectify women and it's fuckin' on
You'll be dead and gone like ancient Babylon.
”
”
John Green (Looking for Alaska)
“
She has great breasts," the Colonel said without looking up from the whale.
"DO NOT OBJECTIFY WOMEN'S BODIES!" Alaska shouted.
Now he looked up. "Sorry. Perky breasts."
"That's not any better!
”
”
John Green (Looking for Alaska)
“
Objectify women and it's fuckin' on, you'll be dead and gone like ancient Babylon.
”
”
John Green (Looking for Alaska)
“
To turn black women into objectified others was to underline their difference; they may be beautiful, but they are of another kind, separate from the dominant understanding of attractiveness.
”
”
Anne Helen Petersen (Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman)
“
Ideas matter. Ideas that depict women as less than men influence men to treat women as less than men. Ideas that objectify women result in women being treated like objects (sex objects, mostly).
”
”
Beth Allison Barr (The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth)
“
It was probably true that he objectified women. He thought about them all the time, didn't he? He looked at them a lot. And didn't all this thinking and looking involve their breasts and lips and legs? Female human beings were objects of the most intense interest and scrutiny on Mitchell's part. And yet he didn't think that a word like objectification covered the way these alluring - but intelligent! - creatures made him feel. What Mitchell felt when he saw a beautiful girl was more like something from a Greek myth, like being transformed, by the sight of beauty, into a tree, rooted on the spot, forever, out of pure desire. You couldn't feel about an object the way Mitchell felt about girls.
”
”
Jeffrey Eugenides (The Marriage Plot)
“
When we differentiate women because of their sex, we objectify them and deny them their humanity.
”
”
Beth Allison Barr (The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth)
“
Oh shit did you just diss the feminine gender / I’ll pummel your ass then stick you in a blender / you think I like Tori and Ani so I can’t rhyme / but I got flow like Ghostbusters got slime / objectify women and it’s fuckin’ on / you’ll be dead and gone like ancient Babylon.
”
”
John Green (Looking for Alaska)
“
Shame infuses women's most intimate experiences, from menstruation to sex. Women who internalize objectified ideas about their bodies often feel intense disgust with bodily functions – even pregnancy. Objectification and self-surveillance also put women at higher risk of sexual dysfunction. Rather than enjoying sex or engaging with their partners to ensure sexual satisfaction, women, distracted by what their bodies smell, feel, and look like, become unable to think about their own pleasure.
”
”
Soraya Chemaly (Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger)
“
When a woman objectifies her body, she sells a piece of her soul for the power to be seen as an object to be desired, not a person to be loved.
”
”
Allene vanOirschot (Daddy's Little Girl: A Father's Prayer)
“
DO NOT OBJECTIFY WOMEN’S BODIES!” Alaska shouted.
”
”
John Green (Looking for Alaska)
“
the male glance.” Not to be confused with the male gaze, which objectifies women’s bodies, the male glance does the opposite to women’s creative work: it barely gives it a second look.
”
”
Regan Penaluna (How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind)
“
For many men, just seeing a woman in a sexually objectifying pose, such as in a bikini, deactivates the part of the brain's prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain where thinking about people and their intentions, feelings and actions happens. Instead, the region of the brain that lights up... is the one that reacts to looking at inanimate objects, such as a pen or a ball.
”
”
Soraya Chemaly (Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger)
“
Pornography is not egalitarian and gender-free. It is predicated upon the inequality of women and is the propaganda that makes that inequality sexy. For women to find passive, objectified men sexy in large enough numbers to make a pornography industry based upon such images viable, would require the reconstruction of women's sexuality into a ruling-class sexuality. In an egalitarian society objectification would not exist and therefore the particular buzz provided by pornography, the excitement of eroticised dominance for the ruling class, would be unimaginable.
”
”
Sheila Jeffreys (Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution)
“
I don’t understand the whole ‘real women have curves’ statement. I think it’s fucking stupid. You are technically objectifying women right down to their body type and excluding other people who identify as women. Whatever happened to all the other aspects that make women who they are? Aren’t we all ‘real’ human beings? There are so many things that are wrong with that statement.
”
”
Elizabeth S. Bar
“
Most women have a problem with being seen as a sex object by men, or so they claim, but do not have a problem with benefitting from, or even exploiting, their being seen as a sex object by a man.
”
”
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“
Women incorporate the values of the male sexual objectifiers within themselves. Catharine MacKinnon calls this being "thingified" in the head (MacKinnon, 1989). They learn to treat their own bodies as objects separate from themselves. Bartky explains how this works: the wolf whistle sexually objectifies a woman from without with the result that, ``"The body which only a moment before I inhabited with such ease now floods my consciousness. I have been made into an object'' (Bartky, 1990, p. 27). She explains that it is not sufficient for a man simply to look at the woman secretly, he must make her aware of his looking with the whistle.
She must, "be made to know that I am a 'nice piece of ass': I must be made to see myself as they see me'' (p. 27). The effect of such male policing behaviour is that, "Subject to the evaluating eye of the male connoisseur, women learn to evaluate themselves first and best'" (Bartky, 1990, p. 28).
Women thus become alienated from their own bodies.
”
”
Sheila Jeffreys (Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West)
“
When you objectify and dehumanize a class of people”—whether that’s women or a racial minority or both or anyone—“it becomes easier to mistreat them without guilt.” Scholars have a clever word for this kind of social structure in which power is formed through a brotherhood that objectifies and dehumanizes those on the outside: they call it fratriarchy. Many think this is a more accurate way to describe our culture’s post-feudal system, which is ruled not by the fathers, but by peer networks of the brothers. Backstage talk that otherizes all things feminine is part of the mortar that keeps the walls of fratriarchy standing strong. And when you are part of an especially close group, like Donald and his bus bros, it makes it even harder to dissent, because you risk giving up that bond and the power that comes with it. So you end up like Billy Bush, laughing along.
”
”
Amanda Montell (Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language)
“
there were about a thousand things I liked better than this part, in which we talked about women like they were just things. I tried to imagine what it would be like if gay were normal and all of us were gay. Would we objectify men in the same way? My
”
”
Bill Konigsberg (Openly Straight)
“
Finally, and I think most important, there are more male-to-constructed-female transsexuals because men are socialized to fetishize and objectify. The same socialization that enables men to objectify women in rape, pornography, and “drag” enables them to objectify their own bodies.
”
”
Janice G. Raymond (The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (Athene Series))
“
It’s futile to attempt to prevent young people from accessing porn on the internet. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t offset its impact with clear, targeted education to provide them, at least, with an alternative narrative and to prevent what they have seen from crystallizing into unquestioned, accepted assumptions. We might not be able to protect young women from the barrage of Photoshopped images and objectifying adverts regularly bombarding them, but we can at least arm them with the tools to analyse and rationalize the manipulation – and in so doing offset at least some part of the impact. There
”
”
Laura Bates (Everyday Sexism)
“
Being an American boy is a setup. We train boys to believe that the way to become a man is to objectify and conquer women, value wealth and power above all, and suppress any emotions other than competitiveness and rage. Then we are stunned when our boys become exactly what we have trained them to be. Our boys cannot follow our directions, but they are cheating and dying and killing as they try to. Everything that makes a boy human is a “real man’s” dirty secret.
Our men are caged, too. The parts of themselves they must hide to fit into those cages are the slices of their humanity that our culture has labeled ‘feminine’—traits like mercy, tenderness, softness, quietness, kindness, humility, uncertainty, empathy, connection. We tell them, ‘Don’t be these things, because these are feminine things to be. Be anything but feminine.’
The problem is that the parts of themselves that our boys have been banished from are not feminine traits; they are human traits.
There is no such thing as a feminine quality, because there is no such thing as masculinity or femininity. ‘Femininity’ is just a set of human characteristics a culture pours into a bucket and slaps with the label ‘feminine.’
Gender is not wild, it’s prescribed.
”
”
Glennon Doyle (Untamed)
“
Did I, do I, admire the artist for claiming her pain is worthy of art, or did I, do I, find the act of aestheticizing also trivializing, or in fact is that feeling, that impulse to call the art trivializing, a way to conceal the true feeling, guiltier, that her art is vulgar, that it is indulgent, because she is her own subject? Because she elevates herself as subject? The woman as object is less vulgar than the woman as subject. The woman as object is art and the man who objectifies her an artist. The woman as subject, well. Just a narcissistic bitch, isn't she? Not that I believe these. Not that I do not believe this.
”
”
Miranda Popkey (Topics of Conversation)
“
A genius must sometimes be a racist if we are to hope for elucidation. History is generously peppered with geniuses who despised the Jews, who dismissed the blacks, who objectified women. Are we to bury their great works because of this? The answer is a resounding no, we are not to. We are, all of us, human. We are, all of us, imperfect. Prejudice is evolutionarily implanted in our genes. We need to know The Tiger is a dangerous animal. We need not know that all tigers are not. Identifying the personalities of individual tigers does not serve our need to survive. Granted, it might make us more enlightened individuals and friends with some tigers, and I am all for that. I applaud that, but one must recognize that there is a tribal instinct in humans and it is at its base an instinct for survival. So accept that, mourn it, decry it, rail against it, but recognize it is a very human trait and have patience with it. Have compassion. Thank you and good night.
”
”
Charlie Kaufman (Antkind)
“
their bodies seemed to be a battlefield" between the values of the west, the "'capitalist' construction in which female bodies are 'sexualized, objectified, thingified' and the traditional in which women's bodies were 'chattelized,' 'propertized,' and terrorized as trustees of family (sexual) honor." (P. 524) Lama Abu-Odeh
”
”
Sheila Jeffreys (Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West)
“
The War on Men Through the Degradation of Woman” - "How is man to recognize his full self, his full power through the eye’s of an incomplete woman? The woman who has been stripped of Goddess recognition and diminished to a big ass and full breast for physical comfort only. The woman who has been silenced so she may forget her spiritual essence because her words stir too much thought outside of the pleasure space. The woman who has been diminished to covering all that rots inside of her with weaves and red bottom shoes.
I am sure the men, who restructured our societies from cultures that honored woman, had no idea of the outcome. They had no idea that eventually, even men would render themselves empty and longing for meaning, depth and connection.
There is a deep sadness when I witness a man that can’t recognize the emptiness he feels when he objectifies himself as a bank and truly believes he can buy love with things and status. It is painful to witness the betrayal when a woman takes him up on that offer.
He doesn’t recognize that the [creation] of a half woman has contributed to his repressed anger and frustration of feeling he is not enough. He then may love no woman or keep many half women as his prize.
He doesn’t recognize that it’s his submersion in the imbalanced warrior culture, where violence is the means of getting respect and power, as the reason he can break the face of the woman who bore him 4 four children.
When woman is lost, so is man. The truth is, woman is the window to a man’s heart and a man’s heart is the gateway to his soul.
Power and control will NEVER out weigh love.
May we all find our way.
”
”
Jada Pinkett Smith
“
It is charged that pornography objectifies women: It converts them into sexual objects. Again, what does this mean? If taken literally, it means nothing at all because objects don't have sexuality; only human beings do. But the charge that pornography portrays women as "sexual beings" would not inspire rage and, so, it has no place in the anti-porn rhetoric.
”
”
Wendy McElroy (XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography)
“
... when women themselves perceive that they are being objectified, which happens every day to a visibly pregnant woman, they act more like objects, moving less and speaking less.
”
”
Soraya Chemaly (Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger)
“
Most men see most women as sex objects, whereas most women see most men as security objects.
”
”
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“
But that’s impossible. They’re full of pornography.’ I searched for the worst thing I could say about them. ‘They objectify women!
”
”
Anthony Horowitz (The Sentence is Death (Hawthorne & Horowitz, #2))
“
Womankind is, in fact, the soup of man,
And when a man perceives that others wish
To dip their dirty fingers into his dish,
His temper flares, and bursts into a flame.
”
”
Molière (L'Ecole Des Femmes / La Critique de L'Ecole Des Femmes / Remerciment Au Roi / L'Impromptu de Versailles / La Princesse D'Elide)
“
[...] all women want to be objectified.
”
”
Alice Walsh (A Poker Game of Love)
“
...While many who have debated the image of female sexuality have put "explicit" and "self-objectifying" on one side and "respectable" and "covered-up" on the other, I find this a flawed means of categorization. [...] There is a creative possibility for liberatory explicitness because it may expand the confines of what women are allowed to say and do. We just need to refer to the history of blues music—one full of raunchy, irreverent, and transgressive women artists— for examples. Yet the overwhelming prevalence of the Madonna/whore dichotomy in American culture means that any woman who uses explicit language or images in her creative expression is in danger of being symbolically cast into the role of whore regardless of what liberatory intentions she may have.
”
”
Imani Perry (Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop)
“
It wasn’t like mainstream, white-centering American culture was any better. It seemed to her that women were endlessly objectified, consumerism ruled their desires, and addictions were encouraged then stigmatized.
”
”
Etaf Rum (Evil Eye: Don’t miss this gripping family drama novel from New York Times Best-selling author!)
“
It’s not right that women should cover themselves from our gaze. Who has the problem here: women, who have committed the heinous crime of merely existing, or men, who choose to objectify women? If the sight of uncovered women offends you, stay at home or wear a blindfold. Better yet, pour acid into your eyes. Then you’ll never have to see anything that offends you again.” Was New York next? That’s what everyone wanted to know.
”
”
Sarai Walker (Dietland: a wickedly funny, feminist revenge fantasy novel of one fat woman's fight against sexism and the beauty industry)
“
He's supposed to be the hottest guy you've ever seen..."
"And that's all we know about him?"
The amusement in my tone betrays my true feelings. If we don't like being objectified by men, then we shouldn't be doing the same to them.
”
”
Laura Greenwood (First Time's a Charm (Grimalkin Academy: Kittens, #1))
“
Instead of making history and electing the first woman President, they now had to face a stinging rebuke and come to terms with the fact that the country had just elected someone who objectified women and bragged about sexual assault.
”
”
Hillary Rodham Clinton (What Happened)
“
The violence enacted on Julia's mother and sister are part of a long history in which black women were seen as both undesirable and sexually objectified. This is the illogic of white supremacy, it does not need intellectual continuity
”
”
Clint Smith (How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America)
“
But what about women who have contributed directly to culture? There aren't many. And in those cases where individual women have participated in male culture, they have had to do so on male terms. And it shows. Because they have had to compete as men, in a male game - while still be pressured to prove themselves in the old female roles, a role at odds with their self-appointed ambitions - it is not surprising that they are seldom as skilled as men at the game of culture.
Women have no means of coming to an understanding of what their experience is, or even that it is different from male experience. The tool for representing, for objectifying one's experience in order to deal with it, culture, is so saturated with male bias that women almost never have a chance to see themselves culturally through their own eyes. So that finally, signals from their direct experience that conflict with the prevailing (male) culture are denied and repressed.
”
”
Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution)
“
She balled her hand into a little fist, her expression turning fierce. “You haven’t any idea the strength it takes to be a woman. In my experience, it is men who are the weaker sex. Either too undisciplined to control their baser, primal instincts or, conversely, they are too fragile to endure the discomfort of honesty or integrity. Yet women endure and survive by whatever means we are able. And still we are either property or playthings. We have as much use in the eyes of the law as a cow or a fertile plot of land. It is not wrong to mistreat us. To objectify us. To shame and demand things of us and bend us to your will. That is your right as a man and our duty as a woman. Is it any wonder the world is in chaos?
”
”
Kerrigan Byrne (The Duke (Victorian Rebels, #4))
“
Well, there are plenty of misogynists out there who are obsessed with a certain type of woman,” Tamra said. “Despite the fact that they use women to validate themselves, they think they aren’t sexist because they love to objectify women so much.
”
”
Kiley Reid (Such a Fun Age)
“
And since the overwhelming majority of consumers of Internet pornography are men, the easy availability of images that objectify and devalue women allegedly reinforces the most misogynist tendencies in men and makes them even less available for real intimacy.
If
”
”
Michael J. Bader (Male Sexuality: Why Women Don't Understand It-And Men Don't Either)
“
Objectification of Gender - This might be less obvious, but both sexes objectify one another. Naturally when we think of this, the popularized notion is that men objectify women as sex objects, but women have a tendency to objectify men as “success objects” for the same reason. It is easier to accept rejection from an object than it is to take it from a living, breathing, human being. This is why we refer to intergender communication as a “game.” We “score” or we get “shot down” not personally or emotionally rejected; the buffer is in the language and mental approach.
”
”
Rollo Tomassi (The Rational Male)
“
The deeply irrational attitude of each sex toward women may be seen in novels, particularly in bad novels. In bad novels by men, there is the woman with whom the author is in love, who usually possesses every charm, but is somewhat helpless, and requires male protection; sometimes, however, like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, she is an object of exasperated hatred, and is thought to be deeply and desperately wicked. In portraying the heroine, the male author does not write from observation, but merely objectifies his own emotions. In regard to his other female characters, he is more objective, and may even depend upon his notebook; but when he is in love, his passion makes a mist between him and the object of his devotion. Women novelists, also, have two kinds of women in their books. One is themselves, glamorous and kind, and object of lust to the wicked and of love to the good, sensitive, highsouled, and constantly misjudged. The other kind is represented by all other women, and is usually portrayed as petty, spiteful, cruel, and deceitful. It would seem that to judge women without bias is not easy either for men or for women.
”
”
Bertrand Russell (An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish: A Hilarious Catalogue of Organized and Individual Stupidity)
“
The reality is that men look at women, and men look at other men, and women look at men, and women especially size up other women and objectify them. Has anybody who’s ever been on a dating app recently not seen how our Darwinian impulses are gratified by a swipe or two? This, in order for our species to survive, is the way of the world and it’s never going to be modified or erased.
”
”
Bret Easton Ellis (White)
“
Years later I cam across an article by the critic Lili Loofbourow introducing an expression that I thought uncannily captured some of my graduate school experience: "the male glance." Not ot be confused with the male gaze, which objectifies women's bodies, the male glance does the opposite to women's creative work: it barely gives it a second look. Those under its spell decide after cursory examination that the work in question isn't of much value. The male glance "looks, assumes, and moves on. It is, above all else, quick. Under its influence, we rejoice in our distant diagnostic speed . . . it feeds an inchoate, almost erotic hunger to know without attending--to omnisciently not-attend, to reject without taking the trouble of analytical labor." It turns away without care.
”
”
Regan Penaluna (How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind)
“
Cutting off the nose is a metaphor for shame. The notion of locating honor in the women of the household has led to women in India being objectified and denied their freedom and choices. Whether Sita is physically abused or not, Ram's honor has been stained. Modern notions of justice mock these deep-rooted traditional notions of shame that have been used to justify the violent oppression of women.
”
”
Devdutt Pattanaik (Sita: An Illustrated Retelling of the Ramayana)
“
You’ve got that extra gene, that sensitivity toward women. That unwillingness to objectify the opposite sex, isn’t that what they say about you? That you invent a female character and put her in a marriage, a family, a king-sized bed in the suburbs, and yet you don’t feel the need to describe . . . I don’t know, her pubic hair in literary terms: ‘a burnt-sienna nimbus,’ or whatever, like the rest of your crowd would.
”
”
Meg Wolitzer (The Wife)
“
We train boys to believe that the way to become a man is to objectify and conquer women, value wealth and power above all, and suppress any emotions other than competitiveness and rage. Then we are stunned when our boys become exactly what we have trained them to be. Our boys cannot follow our directions, but they are cheating and dying and killing as they try to. Everything that makes a boy human is a “real man’s” dirty secret.
”
”
Glennon Doyle (Untamed)
“
Joss would come to understand that this position— respecting, admiring, and identifying with women while acknowledging the objectifying influence of the male gaze— helped him create female characters that worked and connected with an audience. “You can't write from a political agenda and make stories that are in any way emotional or iconic. You have to write it from a place that’s a little dark, that has to do with passion and lust and things you don’t want to talk about.
”
”
Amy Pascale (Joss Whedon: The Biography)
“
There is no freedom or justice in exchanging the female role for the male role. There is, no doubt about it, equality. There is no freedom or justice in using male language, the language of your oppressor, to describe sexuality. There is no freedom or justice or even common sense in developing a male sexual sensibility—a sexual sensibility which is aggressive, competitive, objectifying, quantity oriented. There is only equality. To believe that freedom or justice for women, or for any individual woman, can be found in mimicry of male sexuality is to delude oneself and to contribute to the oppression of one’s sisters.
Many of us would like to think that in the last four years, or ten years, we have reversed, or at least impeded, those habits and customs of the thousands of years which went before—the habits and customs of male dominance. There is no fact or figure to bear that out. You may feel better, or you may not, but statistics show that women are poorer than ever, that women are raped more and murdered more. I want to suggest to you that a commitment to sexual equality with males, that is, to uniform character as of motion or surface, is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered. I want to ask you to make a different commitment—a commitment to the abolition of poverty, rape, and murder; that is, a commitment to ending the system of oppression called patriarchy; to ending the male sexual model itself.
”
”
Andrea Dworkin (Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin)
“
The difference between the butch and the queen is rooted in the system of male supremacy. Gay male camp is based not simply on the incongruous juxtaposition of femininity and maleness, but also on the reordering of particular power relationships inherent in our society’s version of masculinity and femininity. The most obvious cause for the minimum development of camp among lesbians was that masculinity was not and still isn’t as incongruous as femininity in twentieth century American culture and therefore not as easily used as a basis for humor. Concomitantly although individual women might be able to sexually objectify a man, women has a group did not have the social power to objectify men in general. Therefore, such objectification could never be the basis for a genre of humor with wide appeal. But why didn’t camp develop and thrive within the lesbian community itself? Because the structures of oppression were such that lesbians never really escaped from male supremacy. In lesbians’ actual struggles in the bars or out on the streets, authority was always male. For queens to confront male authority was a confrontation between two men, on some level equals. The queen was playing with male privilege, which was his by birthright. For women to confront male authority is to break all traditional training and roles. Without a solid organization of all women, this requires taking on a male identity, beating men at their own game. Passive resistance or the fist is most appropriate for the situation, though not a very good basis for theater and humor.
”
”
Joan Nestle (The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader)
“
Sometimes they’d make a donation to charity in the name of the blog or respond with a self-deprecating parody on YouTube. I took care to focus on satire, poking fun at the extremes, playfully objectifying these untouchable gods among men. Women, especially females of notoriety, in our society had to suck up and swallow daily doses of criticism about everything—too fat, too skinny, wearing the same outfit twice in public, having an opinion—from fake TV personalities and tabloid vultures. In comparison to these self-esteem vampires, I provide a public service.
”
”
L.H. Cosway (The Hooker and the Hermit (Rugby, #1))
“
The main reason why trans-woman-exclusion evokes such passion and frustration in me is precisely because it is both anti-trans and antifeminist. And as a feminist, it gravely disturbs me that other self-described feminists are so willing to overlook or purposefully ignore how inherently sexist trans-woman-exclusion policies and politics are: they favor trans men over trans women, they rampantly objectify trans female bodies, and they privilege trans women's appearances, socialization, and the sex others assigned to us at birth over our persons, our minds, and our identities.
”
”
Julia Serano (Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity)
“
People tend to refer to nonhuman animals as “it” or sometimes “he,” regardless of the individual’s sex. This one-sex-fits-all approach objectifies and denies individuality. In fact, nonhuman animals who are exploited for food industries are usually females. Such unfortunate nonhumans are not only exploited for their flesh, but also for their nursing milk, reproductive eggs, and ability to produce young. When guessing the gender of a nonhuman animal forced through slaughterhouse gates, we would greatly increase odds of being correct if we referred to such unfortunate individuals as “she.
”
”
Lisa Kemmerer (Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice)
“
Did I, do I, admire the artist for claiming her pain is worthy of art, or did I, do I, find the act of aestheticizing also trivializing, or in fact is that feeling, that impulse to call the art trivializing, a way to conceal the true feeling, guiltier, that her art is vulgar, that it is indulgent, because she is her own subject? Because she elevates herself as subject? The woman as object is less vulgar than the woman as subject. The woman as object is art and the man who objectifies her an artist. The woman as subject, well. Just a narcissistic bitch, isn't she? Not that I believe this. Not that I do not believe this.
”
”
Miranda Popkey (Topics of Conversation)
“
On one hand, I think it’s natural to be curious about sexuality. But on the other hand, I think girls are caught in this terrible net of perpetual disappointment. We’re not really allowed to talk about sex, or ask questions about it, or be interested in it. If we are interested and if we like it, then we’re labeled as easy or sluts. If we’re not interested, then we’re frigid and repressed…we’re prudes. It’s like, we see images of women being objectified everywhere. And then we’re told to act and dress like a man at work and school, or else no one will take us seriously—even other women won’t take us seriously. Basically, women are fucked.”
“That’s depressing.
”
”
Penny Reid (Capture (Elements of Chemistry, #3; Hypothesis, #1.3))
“
But I was wrong : there are no rules if you’re a boy. If you’re a girl, you have to play the game. What is that game ? You are allowed to be pretty, and cute, and sexy, but don’t act too smart, don’t have an opinion, don’t have an opinion that it’s out of line with the standards at least. You’re allowed to be objectified by men and dressed like a slut but don’t hold your sluttyness and do not – I repeat – do not share your own sexual fantasies with the world. Be what men want you to be, but more importantly, be what women feel confortable with you being around other men. And finally, do not age because to age is a sin. You’d be critized, you’d be vilified and you would definitely not be played on the radio.
”
”
Madonna
“
Some ’70s feminists complained about Playboy, and porn in general, and as males we were confused: What was wrong about looking at and objectifying beautiful women (or men)? What was wrong about this gender-based instinct to stare and covet? Why shouldn’t this be made more easily available to horny boys? And what was wrong with the idea of the male gaze? Leaving aside everything we now know about toxic masculinity (whatever that is), no ideology will ever change these basic facts that are ingrained by a biological imperative. Why should we be turning away from our sexuality? My male friends often wondered, Who is empowered here? It’s certainly not me. I’m staring at this beautiful woman I desperately want and who I’ll probably never meet.
”
”
Bret Easton Ellis (White)
“
And I *know* I wrote in the above that I hate biographies and reviews that focus on the psychological, surface detail, especially when they pertain to women writers, because I think it’s really about the cult of the personality, which is essentially problematic, and I think simplistically psychologizing which biographies are so wont to do is really problematic, and dangerous, especially when dealing with complicated women who just by being writers at a certain time and age were labelled as nonconformist, or worse, hysterical or ill or crazy, and I think branding these women as femme fatales is all so often done. And I know in a way I’m contributing to this by posting their bad-ass photos, except hopefully I am humanizing them and thinking of them as complicated selves and intellects AND CELEBRATING THEM AS WRITERS as opposed to straight-up objectifying. One particular review long ago in Poetry that really got my goat was when Brian Phillips used Gertrude Stein’s line about Djuna Barnes having nice ankles as an opener in a review of her poetry, and to my mind it was meant to be entirely dismissive, as of course, Stein was being as well. Stein was many important revolutionary things to literature, but a champion of her fellow women writers she was not. They published my letter, but then let the guy write a reply and scurry to the library and actually read Nightwood, one of my all-time, all-times, and Francis Bacon’s too, there’s another anecdote. And it’s burned in my brain his response, which was as dismissive and bourgeois as the review. I don’t remember the exact wordage, but he concluded by summing up that Djuna Barnes was a minor writer. Well, fuck a duck, as Henry Miller would say. And that is how the canon gets made.
”
”
Kate Zambreno
“
This fear of pornography that cannot speak its name is a quiet dismay
that extends across the political spectrum. It can be found inside “free
speech” feminists who oppose the antipornography movement, and
inside women who don’t follow feminist debate, and inside women
who don’t identify with the “bad” women in hard or soft pornography, inside religious women and secular,
promiscuous women and virgins, gay women and straight. The women
hurt by it do not have to be convinced of a link between “real” pornography
and sexual violence; but they cannot discuss this harm without
shame. For the woman who cannot locate in her worldview a reasonable
objection to images of naked, “beautiful” women to whom nothing bad
is visibly being done, what is it that can explain the damage she feels
within?
Her silence itself comes from the myth: If women feel ugly, it is our
fault, and we have no inalienable right to feel sexually beautiful. A
woman must not admit it if she objects to beauty pornography because
it strikes to the root of her sexuality by making her feel sexually unlovely.
Male or female, we all need to feel beautiful to be open to sexual
communication: “beautiful” in the sense of welcome, desired, and
treasured. Deprived of that, one objectifies oneself or the other for selfprotection.
”
”
Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth)
“
I also kept wondering, throughout that week in the summer of 2016, what if all I wanted to do was bang Nick Jonas (a question still) and maybe wrote a fifteen-hundred-word ode, talking about his chest and his ass and his dumb-sexy face and the fact I didn’t really like his music—would that have been a dis on Nick? Or what if a woman wanted to write about how she really hated Drake’s music but found him so physically hot and desirable that she was lusting for him anyway? Where would that put her? Where would that put me? Would either of these pieces raise any eyebrows? Were we then equal? No, not even close, because in our culture social-justice warriors always prefer women to be victims. The responses from Jezebel and Flavorwire and Teen Vogue all recast Ferreira as a victim, reinforcing her (supposed) violation at the hands of a male writer—the usual hall-of-mirrors loop people find themselves in when looking for something, anything, to get angry about, and one where they can occasionally, eventually, get tripped up. The reality is that men look at women, and men look at other men, and women look at men, and women especially size up other women and objectify them. Has anybody who’s ever been on a dating app recently not seen how our Darwinian impulses are gratified by a swipe or two?
”
”
Bret Easton Ellis (White)
“
The violence enacted on Julia’s mother and sister are part of a long history in which Black women were seen as both undesirable and sexually objectified. This is the illogic of white supremacy; it does not need intellectual continuity. The temptation is to say that this illogic “dehumanizes” its subject, though some historians argue that such a characterization is incorrect. Historian Walter Johnson aptly notes that the “language of ‘dehumanization’ is misleading because slavery depended upon the human capacities of enslaved people. It depended upon their reproduction. It depended upon their labor. And it depended upon their sentience. Enslaved people could be taught: their intelligence made them valuable. They could be manipulated: their desires could make them pliable. They could be terrorized: their fears could make them controllable. And they could be tortured: beaten, starved, raped, humiliated, degraded. It is these last that are conventionally understood to be the most ‘inhuman’ of slaveholders’ actions and those that most ‘dehumanized’ enslaved people. And yet these actions epitomize the failure of this set of terms to capture what was at stake in slaveholding violence: the extent to which slaveholders depended upon violated slaves to bear witness, to provide satisfaction, to provide a living, human register of slaveholders’ power.
”
”
Clint Smith (How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America)
“
When I was younger, I remember taking pride in people’s well-meaning remarks: “You’re so lucky that no one would ever know!” or “You don’t even look like a guy!” or “Wow! You’re prettier than most ‘natural’ women!” They were all backhanded compliments, acknowledging my beauty while also invalidating my identity as a woman. To this day, I’m told in subtle and obvious ways that I am not “real,” meaning that I am not, nor will I ever be, a cis woman; therefore, I am fake.
These thoughts surrounding identity, gender, bodies, and how we view, judge, and objectify all women brings me to the subject of “passing,” a term based on an assumption that trans people are passing as something that we are not. It’s rooted in the idea that we are not really who we say we are, that we are holding a secret, that we are living false lives. Examples of people “passing” in media, whether through race (Imitation of Life and Nella Larsen’s novel Passing), class (Catch Me if You Can and the reality show Joe Millionaire), or gender (Boys Don’t Cry and The Crying Game), are often portrayed as leading a life of tragic duplicity and as deceivers who will be punished harshly by society when their true identity is uncovered. This is no different for trans people who “pass” as their gender or, more accurately, are assumed to be cis or blend in as cis, as if that is the standard or norm. This pervasive thinking frames trans people as illegitimate and unnatural. If a trans woman who knows herself and operates in the world as a woman is seen, perceived, treated, and viewed as a woman, isn’t she just being herself? She isn’t passing ; she is merely being.
”
”
Janet Mock (Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More)
“
US trans activist Sam Dylan Finch lists 300+ "Unearned advantages" that cis people benefit from. These include being spared questions on how one has intercourse, being able to move freely around without being stared at, receiving competent healthcare, not being discriminated in the workplace, not being bombarded with articles about how many people of their gender are murdered, being allowed to wear clothes and uniforms which align with ones' gender, not being sexually objectified and potential partners knowing what their genitals look like and what to call them. Sound familiar? Finch has just described what most women go through on a daily basis. Receiving poorer healthcare due to ones' sex, being groped, subjected to sexual violence and inappropriate, probing questions, reading articles about how women are killed by their partners because they are women - this is unfortunately well known territory for us women. The text thus turns the very harassment and injustices the women's movement fought against into undeserved privileges. We should feel pleased that we are allowed to dress in alignment with our gender, despite us having done nothing to deserve it. We should be thankful that we are permitted to wear high heals and veils, since these 'align' with our gender. If we follow this analysis to its logical conclusion, even a girl who is genitally mutilated at nine and married off at twelve is a cis person and thereby privileged - her sexual partners know what they are to call her genitalia: CUNT! Similarly, a homosexual man in Saudi Arabia or Uganda would, according to this interpretation, be considered the 'normal, natural and healthy' - and privileged.
”
”
Kajsa Ekis Ekman (On the Meaning of Sex: Thoughts about the New Definition of Woman)
“
Sadly though, this side of heaven, we can only attempt to have a fore-shadow of the romance to come. Even the best marriages and the men and women who valiantly strive to follow the Bible’s model of marriage fall short. I am sure many of us have failed in obtaining the type of earthly relationship God planned and intended to display His love. Pre-marital sex, extra-marital sex, homosexuality, sex outside of a marriage covenant, and love-less, dysfunctional marriages are just the beginning. Many have been abused, sold, objectified, molested, even raped. All manner of perversion and depravity have marred the beauty God intended. We are broken, injured, hurt, marginalized, left feeling like so much less than what God requires. If you are one broken, please hear this: It should not have been. It was not God’s way or His will that you were treated like anything less than His highly valued, flawless beauty—His beloved. If you are one who lost your way and engaged in things beneath your royal standing, He died, arose and lives to forgive and restore. Yes, we know a good and solid Biblical marriage gives the closest representation of godly intimacy. But let’s get real for a minute. So few of us have ever experienced that for ourselves or grew up in homes where that was our example, we desperately need to trust God for our own healing and restoration in this area before we can ever hope to experience it in our relationships. I am convinced God’s priority for us is to learn about spiritual intimacy with Him. He can restore marriages, liberate from sexual addictions, save spouses, give us a godly man. But I think, for the most part, those things happen after we realize and accept our need for Christ. His priority will always be our spirit intimately one with His, because He puts the spirit above the flesh. We have to lay our souls bare and ask for His touch. God alone can reclaim our perception of intimacy for His holy and righteous glory. He can restore our hearts and minds to righteousness, clean and pure so we might experience holy intimacy through the Spirit until we see Him face to face in glory.
”
”
Angie Nichols (Something Abundant)
“
We don't have a hard time realizing how messed up we are messed up we are. I know I'm broken. I know I'm deeply flawed. I know I'm not good enough. You don't need to shout those things out at me from the corner of the street with your sandwich board--I already know them. But you tell me I have inherent worth and value based on who made me, not what I do and I think, Really? Are you sure? But...
That's subversive. In a culture that continually strips humans of dignity (homelessness, exploitation of the poor, objectifying women, abortion, euthanasia, and so forth), we have to return to shalom. We have to return to that special declaration God shouted over humans thousands of years ago in that wonderful garden--"So God created man in his own image.
”
”
Jefferson Bethke (It's Not What You Think: Why Christianity is About So Much More Than Going to Heaven When You Die)
“
To me you look like a man everyone underestimates, objectifies, and misjudges because of his appearance. To me you look like a man who’s thoughtful, insightful, and kind, but hopes no one will notice because it will be mistaken for weakness. To me you look like a man who hides his pain behind smiles and buries it in women and tries everything he can to forget whatever’s hurting him but can’t because he’s got a soft heart that scars easily, but no one has ever looked close enough to see.
”
”
J.T. Geissinger
“
I’m worried that there are too many women out there who know the difference between right and wrong but don’t have the guts to say it to the people in their own lives who are causing the problem. What is stopping you? Who are you afraid of? Men, why? Other women? Well, that’s just dumb. The reason men progressed above us in society is because they dominated us with actions and attitude. It’s that simple. To re-address the balance, we have to do the same thing. If someone is overpowering you and stopping you getting to where you want to be, then STOP letting them do it. If someone is objectifying you for your sexuality, STOP allowing yourself to be
”
”
Dawn O'Porter (The Cows)
“
When Donald Trump's crude comments about women surfaced during his presidential campaign, these progressive university folk were among the first to criticize him. The same people who tell their students anything goes when it comes to sex acted offended in order to score political points. I'm not defending his comments--not at all--but since when did they care about the adverse [e]ffects of objectifying women? Why should Trump's comments come as a surprise when many of those same professors champion "sex weeks" on their respective campuses, replete with seminars that include porn stars and even prostitutes as guest speakers? Doesn't the feigned shock expressed by the progressive Left seem just a bit disingenuous when we know as empirical fact this same faculty has no compunction at all about using similar vulgar language in their classes and would quickly belittle and shout down any "prudish" conservative such as me who tried to say otherwise?
Everything, from their celebration of The Vagina Monologues to the cover of Cosmo to the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated and nearly every beer commercial known to man, unapologetically portrays females as literal objects of sport to be enjoyed first and foremost for their body parts. So why the feigned outrage over Trump's comments?
”
”
Everett Piper (Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth)
“
As we have repeatedly seen, domination ultimately deprives both subjugator and subjugated of recognition. Gender polarity deprives women of their subjectivity and men of an other to recognize them. But the loss of recognition between men and women as equal subjects is only one consequence of gender domination. The ascendancy of male rationality results finally in the loss and distortion of recognition in society as a whole. It not only eliminates the maternal aspects of recognition (nurturance and empathy) from our collective values, actions, and institutions. It also restricts the exercise of assertion, making social authorship, and agency a matter of performance, control and impersonality - and thus vitiates subjectivity itself. In creating an increasingly objectified world, it deprives us of the intersubjective context in which assertion receives a recognizing response. We must face the enormity of this loss if we are ever to find our way back through the maze of domination to the heart of recognition.
”
”
Jessica Benjamin (The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination)
“
Women Know Best (The Sonnet)
Wanna learn about running a world, go find a woman mentor,
For women are better teacher and better leader.
Society that glorifies men and objectifies women,
Is but a jungle where primitivity never ceases to fester.
Nature looks upon kindly any species that,
Has realized the synonymity of sacred and feminine.
Those who still fail to recognize the voice of women,
Are basically violating the very reason for existing.
Women know best what's best for the world,
The world that comes out of her womb.
They cuss us, they mock us, it's for our own good,
All time is feminine, feminine is the rule.
The world is but creation, women are the creator.
Feminine is the idol, we are mere idolator.
”
”
Abhijit Naskar (Mucize Misafir Merhaba: The Peace Testament)
“
If I had been ten years younger, a guy like that would have been begging to drizzle his cashew dressing all over me,” Barbie lamented. “I know as women we’re not supposed to want to be objectified anymore, but don’t you feel like being invisible is even worse than the alternative?
”
”
Jenny Mollen (City of Likes)
“
The way yoga has been stolen is not a unique example of the way money and capital blind us from our social responsibility, but it's one of the most glaringly obvious cases. .... As if yoga was for white women only. This claim that whiteness has enforced, the claim all white people always seem to have to the other, always centring themselves in every narrative, is a very bid problem that needs to be addressed and unlearned. This has to be included in the necessary evolution of yoga. If white people spent more time humanising themselves, maybe they could see non-white people with more depth and complexity a well. This means not treating us like we're the other, unconsciously objectifying our difference, only to expect sympathy of the very definitions that were created by white people. All black, indigenous, and other people of colour deserve your respect and humanity, not your sympathy. If you're a white person who profits off of yoga, what we need now is your action, your commitment, find trusted organisations and give at least a quarter of what you make on work in India.
”
”
Fariha Róisín (Who Is Wellness For?: An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who It Leaves Behind)
“
Transexualism is primarily an adult male fetish that compulsively objectifies and covets womanhood. Men with autogynephilia (the professional name for this form of transexualism) seek to medically appropriate the sexed humanity of women by purchasing surgical simulacrums of their sexed reality in parts to assuage their compulsion. [...] the transhumanist agenda sees immortality as its ultimate end goal and splits the mind from the body, like most patriarchal religions.
”
”
Jennifer Bilek (Transsexual Transgender Transhuman: Dispatches from The 11th Hour)
“
Did you know the Barbizon used to be called the Dollhouse? Can you get more objectifying than that? As if these women were simply playacting until the magical powers of marriage turned them into living, breathing people. I want to humanize them, include photos of when they were young, descriptions of what their lives were like. Just because they don’t look fresh-faced anymore doesn’t mean…that they’ve lost they’re worth as human beings.
”
”
Fiona Davis (The Dollhouse)
“
Women say that men objectify them and men try to claim that the objectification of women does not exist... it does exist. Yes, some males do objectify females, but most do not. So, my fellow females... here's a secret. Female objectification will not exist if females do not objectify themselves. You have that choice. If you choose to dress like a tramp, it will not ensure you popularity... it will make you look like a tramp. If males force you to objectify yourself, it's a sex crime. Males, we know that females are also guilty of objectifying you. Do not objectify yourself. If they force you to objectify yourself, it is a sex crime. If nothing else, this statement will hopefully cut down on the number of racy Super Bowl ads.
”
”
Monica Murray
“
Rude wasn’t so much a heel who happened to be attractive as he was a 100 percent pure concentrate of machismo and self-absorption, a Lothario for his own sake. He could have any woman he wanted, but his objective was never love or even lust; it was heterosexual avidity purely for show. And he seemed not so much to objectify women as to coolly demean them. The object of his affection was solely himself. It was hardcore pornography minus the sex.*
”
”
Anonymous
“
Your mom’s really—”
“If you’re about to tell me how hot my mom is, just stop, okay? I’m really tired of guys objectifying her. Yes, she’s gorgeous. But she’s my mom, okay? And she’s a human being.”
Blake took a step back. “Hold on, Addie. I was going to say, ‘Your mom’s really nice.’ I don’t talk about women like that. I don’t know why you think I would.
”
”
Tristi Pinkston (Turning Pages)
“
Women have been defined and confined by the male gaze for way too long, " Mary said suddenly, aware that she had spoken the words almost as an announcement or a call to arms.
"What do you mean by the male gaze?" Patty asked.
"It's a term used when talking about a sexualized way of looking that empowers men while objectifying women," Mary explained. "For example, it's always been the assumption in the art world - painting, movies, what have you - that the core, important audience is the heterosexual male. Therefore, women, who are meant by their nature to be attractive to that audience, are shown as weak, available for sex and for being rescued, and even if a woman is portrayed as a heroine, her 'weak' point is sex, her pathetic need for a man's approval. Her costume, her attitude, all are chosen to remind the audience that deep down, no matter how bravely she behaves, she is a woman, meant for sex with men and nothing more.
”
”
Holly Chamberlin (Summer Roommates (A Yorktide, Maine Novel Book 1))
“
The tool for representing, for objectifying one's experience in order to deal with it, culture, is so saturated with male bias that women almost never have a chance to see themselves culturally through their own eyes.
”
”
Shulasmith Firestone
“
However in one deed, Hypatia was able to teach several lessons. Her powerful message let her students know that women represent more than which is "beautiful". With this lesson, she taught her students that men should not objectify women, but rather value them for their intellect and acumen.
”
”
Gabrielle Birchak (Hypatia: The Sum of Her Life)
“
Several requirements typify positivist methodological approaches. First, research methods generally require a distancing of the researcher from her of his “object” of study by defining the researcher as a “subject” with full human subjectivity and by objectifying the “object” of study. A second requirement is the absence of emotions from the research process. Third, ethics and values are deemed inappropriate in the research process, either as the reason for scientific inquiry or as part of the research process itself. Finally, adversarial debates, whether written or oral, become the preferred method of ascertaining truth: The arguments that can withstand the greatest assault and survive intact become the strongest truths.
Such criteria ask African-American women to objectify ourselves, devalue our emotional life, displace our motivations for furthering knowledge about Black women, and confront in an adversarial relationship those with more social, economic, and professional power.
”
”
Patricia Hall Collins
“
While many feminists - especially those who came of age in the 1980s and '90s - recognize that trans women can be allies in the fight to eliminate gender stereotypes, others, particularly those who embrace gender essentialism, believe that trans women foster sexism by mimicking patriarchal attitudes about femininity, or that we objectify women by trying to possess female bodies of our own. Many of these latter ideas stem from Janice Raymond's 1979 book 'The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-male', which is perhaps the most infamous feminist writing on transsexuals. Like the media makers discussed earlier, Raymond assumes that trans women transition in order to achieve stereotypical femininity, which she believes is an artificial by-product of a patriarchal society. Raymond does acknowledge, reluctantly, the existence of trans women who are not stereotypically feminine, but she reserves her most venomous remarks for those she calls 'transsexually constructed lesbian-feminists', describing how they use 'deception' in order to 'penetrate' women's spaces and minds. She writes, 'Although the transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist does not exhibit a feminine identity and role, he [sic] does exhibit stereotypical masculine behavior.' This puts trans women in a double bind, where if they act feminine they are perceived as being a parody, but if they act masculine it is seen as a sign of their 'true' male identity. This damned-if-they-do, damned-if-they-don't tactic is reminiscent of the pop cultural deceptive/pathetic archetypes.
”
”
Julia Serano (Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity)
“
Feminists want to free all women from the threat of harassment in the street through the reconstruction of male sexuality. [...] men would have to abandon objectifying exploitative sex and redefine altogether what they saw as sexuality.
”
”
Sheila Jeffreys (Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution)
“
If men knew how often women are filled with white-hot rage when we cry, they would be staggered, I remember someone saying the other day, through the groaning static of my house's ancient intercom system. We self-objectify and lose the ability to even recognize the physiological changes that indicate anger. Mainly, though, we get sick. And oh, how true that is: We sicken, we are consumed, laughing wild amidst severest woe. We flourish with illnesses that have no cure and a thousand different names. Hysteria, the lung, wandering womb syndrome. Our own immune systems turn against us, fight us as if we ourselves were diseases, infestations. We wither, we swell, miscarry, grow phantom pregnancies, ingest our babies and turn them to stone. Our wounds fester, turn inside-out. Our equipment rusts and degenerates from over-use or lack of use or potential for use alike, decays within us, sliming blackly over the rest of our pulsing, stuttering interiors. Things get lost inside us: penises, forceps, scalpels. No maps to the interior. And every once in a while, we simply flush our systems without adequate warning, drooling blood in clots from inconvenient areas, dropping squalling flesh-lumps everywhere—in trash-cans, in bathrooms, shoved under beds and swaddled in bloodied plastic, buried shallowly, immured behind walls that bulge with black mould-stains, pumping out flies.
”
”
Gemma Files (Hymns of Abomination)
“
I take offense at those who want to criticize the feminist movement when they themselves have done nothing to move the needle forward on equality. I am offended by those who are nostalgic about the second wave of feminism or the first wave and claim that today's feminists aren't fighting real wars. Let me be clear: as women, as gender non-confirming individuals, our rights are under assault right this very moment. Our bodies have been sexualized, objectified, touched without our consent; our agency over our bodies is not respected. We are in a perennial state of defense because this is war being waged on us from all fronts.
”
”
Scarlett Curtis (Feminists Don't Wear Pink (And Other Lies): Amazing Women on What the F-Word Means to Them)
“
Jezebel" or harlot stereotype dates back to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade where Black men's and women's bodies were oversexualized and objectified, as a way to dehumanize and market them as attractive commodities that could be bought, exploited and sold. By creating the Jezebel stereotype, enslavers attempted to rationalize their routine sexual exploitation of enslaved African women (Green,
”
”
Kweli Carson (The Ultimate Self-Love Guide for Black Women: How to Be Kind to Yourself in an Unkind World - Prioritize Self-Care, Embrace Self-Compassion, and Love Yourself Unconditionally)
“
If girls do not objectify their own breasts, others do it for them.
”
”
Deepa Narayan (Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women)
“
Being an American boy is a setup. We train boys to believe that the way to become a man is to objectify and conquer women, value wealth and power above all, and suppress any emotions other than competitiveness and rage. Then we are stunned when our boys become exactly what we have trained them to be. Our boys cannot follow our directions, but they are cheating and dying and killing as they try to. Everything that makes a boy human is a “real man’s” dirty secret. Our men are caged, too. The parts of themselves they must hide to fit into those cages are the slices of their humanity that our culture has labeled “feminine”—traits like mercy, tenderness, softness, quietness, kindness, humility, uncertainty, empathy, connection. We tell them, “Don’t be these things, because these are feminine things to be. Be anything but feminine.” The problem is that the parts of themselves that our boys have been banished from are not feminine traits; they are human traits. There is no such thing as a feminine quality, because there is no such thing as masculinity or femininity. “Femininity” is just a set of human characteristics a culture pours into a bucket and slaps with the label “feminine.” Gender is not wild, it’s prescribed. When we say, “Girls are nurturing and boys are ambitious. Girls are soft and boys are tough. Girls are emotional and boys are stoic,” we are not telling truths, we are sharing beliefs—beliefs that have become mandates. If these statements seem true, it’s because everyone has been so well programmed. Human qualities are not gendered. What is gendered is permission to express certain traits. Why? Why would our culture prescribe such strict gender roles? And why would it be so important for our culture to label all tenderness and mercy as feminine? Because disallowing the expression of these qualities is the way the status quo keeps its power. In a culture as imbalanced as ours—in which a few hoard billions while others starve, in which wars are fought for oil, in which children are shot and killed while gun manufacturers and politicians collect the blood money—mercy, humanity, and vulnerability cannot be tolerated. Mercy and empathy are great threats to an unjust society. So how does power squash the expression of these traits? In a misogynistic culture, all that is needed is to label them feminine. Then we can forever discount them in women and forever shame them out of men. Ta-da: no more messy, world-changing tenderness to deal with. We can continue on without our shared humanity challenging the status quo in any way.
”
”
Glennon Doyle (Untamed)
“
There are plenty of misogynists out there who are obsessed with a certain type of woman. Despite the fact that they use women to validate themselves, they think they aren't sexist because they love to objectify women so much.
”
”
Kiley Reid (Such a Fun Age)
“
For hundreds—if not thousands of years—women have been marginalized and objectified.
”
”
Terri Cole (Boundary Boss: The Essential Guide to Talk True, Be Seen, and (Finally) Live Free)
“
Trump treats women the way Roman culture treated them at the time of Jesus—as property, objectified and ridiculed. We see in Gospel stories Jesus’ radical approach to treating women with honor and respect.
”
”
Ronald J. Sider (The Spiritual Danger of Donald Trump: 30 Evangelical Christians on Justice, Truth, and Moral Integrity)
“
According to clinicians, anger as a significant component of anxiety and depression is a specific type of anger, the kind of anger caused by a perceived or actual loss or rejection. Faced with these feelings, young girls find ways to cope; sometimes they compartmentalize; sometimes they agitate for change; sometimes they bury their heads in the sand; sometimes they conform and self-objectify. Sometimes, though, they get very, very angry. When they do, that anger is, more often than not, turned into a form of illness instead of given free expression, because the adults around them would rather call what they are feeling anything but anger.
”
”
Soraya Chemaly (Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger)
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For many men, just seeing a woman in a sexually objectifying pose, such as in a bikini, deactivates the part of the brain’s prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain where thinking about people and their intentions, feelings, and actions happens. Instead, the region of the brain that lights up on imaging scans, for example positron emission tomography (PET), is the one that reacts to looking at inanimate objects, such as a pen or a ball. In what researcher Susan Fiske described as a “shocking finding,” in some of the men studied the part of the brain that is activated when thinking of another person’s intentions did not light up at all. It should come as no surprise that the more prone a man is to seeing women in these ways, the higher his measures of hostile sexism.
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Soraya Chemaly (Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger)
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It occurs to me that my sexuality is more fluid in my mind than it is in 3D. I often wish that my sexual desires were more malleable than they are. Being solely attracted to men sucks. It's like suffering from an irreversible case of Stockholm syndrome. I'm drawn to the very creature that has violated, oppressed, exploited, raped, kidnapped, subjugated, controlled, made fun of, manipulated, abused, belittled, objectified, persecuted, and condescended me and my people for centuries.
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Madeleine Ryan (A Room Called Earth)
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Rise up in such situations, open your mouth, and say that while men and women are not the same, diversity is no rationale for hierarchy between them. Say to all within the sound of your voice that men and women are to be treated with equal respect and value. Do not laugh at jokes that poke fun at or objectify the other sex. Do not join in with harassment of the other sex, even if that harassment is considered “just having a little fun.” If you see someone being harassed, step in and make your views on such behavior known. Do not buy into advertising that demeans or exploits the other sex. You should never ask a member of the opposite sex to do something that you would not be willing to do.
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Valerie M. Hudson (Sex and World Peace)
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Being an American boy is a setup. We train boys to believe that the way to become a man is to objectify and conquer women, value wealth and power above all, and suppress any emotions other than competitiveness and rage. Then we are stunned when our boys become exactly what we have trained them to be. Our boys cannot follow our directions, but they are cheating and dying and killing as they try to.
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Glennon Doyle (Untamed)
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The beauty and genius of Christian sexuality is that it protects people from being objectified and used simply for another person’s selfish pleasure. If you have a daughter, how would you feel about her being used by a man who did not love or care for her, simply for his own sexual gratification? My experience has been that fathers quickly unite to protect their daughters from this type of situation. God wants to protect all of his children from being objectified and used, sexually or otherwise, and he calls on all Christians and all men and women of goodwill to join him in this quest.
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Matthew Kelly (The Biggest Lie in the History of Christianity: How Modern Culture Is Robbing Billions of People of Happiness)
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People also tend to refer to nonhuman animals as “it” or sometimes “he,” regardless of the individual’s sex. This one-sex-fits-all approach objectifies and denies individuality. In fact, nonhuman animals who are exploited for food industries are usually females. Such unfortunate nonhumans are not only exploited for their flesh, but also for their nursing milk, reproductive eggs, and ability to produce young. When guessing the gender of a nonhuman animal forced through slaughterhouse gates, we would greatly increase odds of being correct if we referred to such unfortunate individuals as 'she'.
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Lisa Kemmerer (Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice)