Treat It Like A Lady: Can Objectification Of Women Be Avoided?

"I don't want you to look at women and think that they're only around for your pleasure," my mom said.

Being twelve years old at the time, I thought that was silly. The girls in the magazines were very different from the girls I knew at school--these girls were there for my enjoyment, whereas the girls in school paid virtually no attention to me, and clearly had no intention of bringing me pleasure.

Obviously, I didn't stop reading or viewing pornography after that lecture--if anything my viewership only increased as I got older. Growing up, I tried to think about women and consciously tested myself to see if I objectified women. Do I only think about girls in terms of sex? Do I only care to talk to women if I'm trying to get in their pants? The answer, until about two years ago, has been no.

Now, at the age of twenty-three, I often think back to the words my mother spoke as a premonition of things to come. I lamented what I interpreted as my newfound misogyny to a friend.

"I don't know--it's like all I care about is sex. If I don't think I can sleep with a girl, I just feel like there's no good reason to talk to her."

"Welcome to the club," he said.

"Yeah, but I don't want to feel this way. I want to appreciate women and look at them as people, not objects. The only problem is, I never agree with them on anything, and I can't stand talking to them unless I think there's a chance I'll be able to do it with her eventually."

"I think that part of the problem is that you haven't met a girl recently who has shown herself to be more interesting than the average girl, and therefore you don't have much respect for the rest of them either."

"Plus, I do watch a lot of porn."

"Not much you can do about that."

But that was a lie. That was a goddamn lie.

So I stopped watching, reading, and imbibing pornography of all kinds. For one month. And guess what happened?

I still objectified women. In fact, I objectified them more than ever, because all I wanted to do was jerk off all the time, since I wasn't rubbing out to pornography, internet and otherwise.

In a particularly memorable conversation in my human sexuality class in my last year of college, a girl complained that guys often want to "use girls for sex."

"And what would you use a guy for?" the professor asked.

"Love," she answered proudly.

"You wouldn't want to have sex the man you're in love with?"

"Well, yes," she said.

"Oh, so you want to use a man for two things, and he just wants to use you for one. It sounds to me like you're pretty greedy."

He went on to make the point that all relationships are utilitarian--we wouldn't be in a relationship if we weren't getting something out of it. In many cases, the most useful thing to the man is the woman's sexuality. Alternatively, it is often the case that the most useful thing to a woman is a man's wallet. The most difficult thing humans can do is control their animal natures, and bring a little civility into our everyday actions.

The reason I had a hard time refraining from mentally screwing every woman I came across during my painful hiatus from pornography was because despite my having a change in behavior, I hadn't had a change in mind. It was only a year or so later (present day) when I didn't have the opportunity to view pornography or associate with women for a period longer than thirty days that my mind began to change in such a way that I realized that I didn't want to watch porn all that badly anymore, and that women actually can be kind of interesting to talk to even if you aren't trying to screw them.

I hesitate to make a moral to this story, mainly because I find morals to stories patronizing and stupid. However, I find it difficult to resist dictating my lesson learned: Objectification of the opposite sex is a pretty natural thing--we all do it, almost all of the time. The problem comes when it's done at the expense of the understanding that a woman isn't just a big walking vagina, and a man isn't just a big masturbating wallet. My advice on this one is some that I could probably use myself: Try to find value in the opposite sex outside of what you objectify them to be. I admit that it's quite difficult for me to have a conversation with a woman that I'm not trying to bang, simply because I find many things that come out of their mouths to be simplistic and banal. However, when this happens I do my best to shut the hell up and listen, because every once in awhile, some really good stuff comes out of their mouths, and I don't mean my dong, which is what I would normally be thinking about.