Woman ≠ Object
A young twelve year old girl is out buying groceries with her mother one afternoon. As they wait in line to pay, she glances to the side and a young celebrity on the front page of a magazine catches her eye. She picks the magazine up and flips through it slowly. She looks at the achingly beautiful women with careful scrutiny and as she puts it back on the rack, she disappointedly thinks that she’ll never look as perfect as the girls featured in that magazine. Like this young girl, there are many women of all ages who think and feel the way she does. Our society has long since dictated and set unwritten rules for the way women must dress and look. They must be young, tall, thin, with a flawless complexion and dressed in sexually appealing apparel to boot. Over the years, trends have changed drastically but there has been one that has decided to stay: you must look beautiful. While the definition of beauty in society’s standards has surely changed, the expectation that women should follow these trends has not. In modern day society, there are many factors that play into why women make an effort look the way they do and act the way they do. The media, clothing trends, television shows, and the music industry are some of the biggest benefactors of this issue.
These societal expectations have — sadly — led to the objectification of women. Everywhere we turn it is easy to find a magazine, a billboard, or a television show that blatantly and shamelessly uses a woman as an object to sell or advertise their product. They are perfectly airbrushed and Photoshopped to reach that level of perfection that beautiful women are categorized in. Countless of companies use women for their bodies in order to grab a consumer’s attention. Women dressed in scantly clad clothing are seen merely as sexual objects instead of being thought of as a person with emotions and a mind of their own. Music has also had a great influence in the way that women are depicted in our culture. Most songs and music videos of today talk and display women as simple objects to be used only for sex at a man’s own convenience. They are not respected and treated as people. Instead, women are called “bitches” and “hoes” that only exist for a good lay.
Joel Leon writes in “Pussy: A Think Piece” that women’s bodies are never really seen as theirs. Instead they are seen as “ . . . something to be controlled, mastered . . . dominated”. This way of thinking is what further reinforces the idea that women are not really people. They are simply there to fulfill the pleasures of men who cannot offer them the proper respect they deserve. These perverse thoughts associated with the female body have allowed the media to use women to their advantage when it comes to product advertising. The models that are used in commercials are usually young and defined as sexy in terms of today’s definition of beauty. These advertisements are used to sell the woman’s sexuality rather than the product itself. They are used as objects to simply sell to the consumer what they are promoting. Other women see these models and long to look the way they do. When they see the way the model is portrayed, it leads them to want to act and do the same. This only serves to contribute to the never-ending cycle of objectification.
This cycle is one that is in desperate need to be broken. Women are not objects. They are real human beings with real hearts, real thoughts, and real emotions. It is time that women take ownership of their bodies and time that men and the media in general respect the fact that they have no authority over that ownership. To end with the words of the wise Joel Leon, “Live and learn and then teach. Teach our young boys and young men about respect, and love and that humans aren’t property.”
