The Grim Truth About Objectification

I was thirteen years old when I finally parsed the meaning of “objectification.” Before then it had been for me one of those words adults trotted out with much verve, which is to say an obviously loaded word. Despite my understanding of the word’s weight, its apparent gravitas, I could not for the life of me parse its meaning. Make no mistake, I had on countless occasions looked it up in the dictionary with the hope that its meaning, seeing my earnestness, would make itself manifest to me. And yet, every time I searched its meaning in my mother’s Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, I was left stupefied: how can a human be reduced to an object? What does that even mean?

The answer would come to me when, at my behest, after the completion of my junior secondary school education, my parents switched my school. I used to be the kind of kid some would refer to as shielded. Not that I ever felt that way, but in hindsight, I can see how my life at the time fit into a smattering of activities drawn up by my parents. Nothing unusual: school, church, home, and the occasional visit from friends. I cannot in good faith say that I read my life as being monotonous, something in my subconscious however yearned for a disruption of my routine. It was this longing, this implacable feeling, that prompted me to hound my parents, with ceaseless pleas until they gave in and switched my schools.

My new school was big, and sprawling, not just in the literal sense but in the eclectic medley of personalities that constituted its ranks. Unlike my former Christian school where everyone seemed to have been plucked from the same demographic, people here were from everywhere. Crucially, however, the boys in this new school were different, wilder, brimming with a boundless capacity for lewdness. My perception of these new boys did not derive from having been a prude in my former school. My peers in my former school, across genders, did occasionally amuse themselves with ribald conversations. But it was always lacquered in the amused curiosity of young people newly discovering this wonderful concept called sexuality. And so, the reality of my new school would hit me with the forcefulness of a train moving at full velocity. 

The boys in this new school were a different breed; regular in every other way but their perception of the female gender. All women, except family and a few platonic friends, were considered a corporeal pastiche, a collection of parts—breasts, lips, buttocks, thighs—which, by some great acts of providence—just so happen to be able to perform human functions. Slim girls were viciously excoriated with invectives such as “plywood” or “ironing board.” Saggy breasts were considered anathema. Small ones were equally derided. One time, a boy quipped about how a girl’s breasts resembled pimples and “joked” about how they might disappear if she took antibiotics. Girls were judged against pornstars with bulbous breasts and cinched waists. The fact that these pornstars had undergone cosmetic treatment seemed to be lost on them. Even the girls who fit their insular definition of attractiveness were analyzed and compared with the same insouciance that tech YouTubers reviewed gadgets.  

Seeing Tems, weeks ago, issue a fierce rebuttal to a man who had objectified her through a garish tweet, dredged up those memories from my childhood, the ones that conferred me with a palpable understanding of objectification. The casual wickedness and jarring obscenity of the concept. How it possesses the uncanny ability to flatten people, especially women who had rich, textured lives, into a pallid portrait of their bodies. The tweet in isolation was abhorrent enough. But it goes beyond that: a horde of men camped in the comment section and quotes, firing off even more inane opinions, seemingly without the faintest idea of the weirdness, for lack of a better word, of their conduct. The tweet has been viewed some 6.2 million times on X. It also comes in the wake of a disturbing trend that has seen a horde of men realize their perverted desires toward women by putting AI tools to work. These men have leveraged AI to strip women, commandeer them into obscene poses, and dress them to suit their desires. It’s not like any of this is new, deep fakes and more crude tools like Photoshop have forever been used by degenerates to satiate their depraved imaginations. AI has however provided the opportunity to act on these impulses with unprecedented ease and speed. 

The Atlantic’s Sophie Gilbert in her new book  Girl on Girl, argues, with bracing clarity, that in the late 90s and the early aughts, women increasingly pivoted away from feminism and towards post-feminism, whose focus on individual empowerment and an embrace of female sexuality as a form of power, put it odds with feminism, which favors collective effort and vociferous criticism of the patriarchy. Gilbert notes that despite the best efforts of post-feminists at placating the patriarchy, what resulted was an obsessive policing of women’s bodies, especially in pop culture where it seemed that women’s bodies served little function other than acting as a canvas on which society expresses its anxieties and whims and stereotypes. And so, over the years, the quintessential female body has shifted from curvaceously slim, to gaunt, to “curvy like the Kardashians,” and now, with the advent of weight loss drugs a return to skinny seems to be in short order. Women’s bodies are subject to intense scrutiny based on factors that are constantly in flux, and yet we wonder why eating disorders disproportionately affect women. 

In Gia Tolentino’s incisive essay, The Rage of The Incels, she similarly contends that male power “has chained all of human society to the idea that women are decorative sexual objects, and that male worth is measured by how good-looking a woman they acquire.” Her assessment is beyond apt. On social media, as in the case with Tems, we regularly see stupefying opinions from men who critique women for attractiveness, with a zeal that makes one wonder if they were, unbeknownst to us, elected to perform that role. The reality is more simple: we live in a world where women are seen as sexual objects. It’s not just that these men are acting with callousness—that is true—but the deeper issue is that these men do not even consider women outside of the value of their corporeality, which is to say they see women simply as objects. It’s why they feel no shame, or compunction when they cruelly pick apart women’s features and undress them with AI: they simply cannot fathom that women are real people, with feelings and dreams and ineffable qualities that transcend their sexual potential.