I met a circus performer who wanted to create a piece about what it is to be sexualized and it reminded me of something I wrote a couple years ago. I told myself I would go back to it, and never did. So, firstly I’d like to thank Sydney, because without her, you likely might not be seeing this:
I wanted to write about sexual objectification, but I feel like I can’t really do that without talking about what sex is.
What is sex?
“Sex is where babies come from.”
Birds do it, bees do it,
then the bees help the plants do it.
Sex is the genesis of complex life. It turns a uterus into the portal through which new consciousness arises. It allows two cells, under the correct circumstances and consequence cascade, to become many millions of cells, unified into a series of singular experiences.
Nurtured appropriately, they become many trillions of cells that will consume other life and generate new experiences that even more life may witness. And these trillions of cells with their specialized roles will form a body - a body working in unison to create an experience so complex that it is likely impossible to fully understand. And that body will reconstitute the matter of this earth into the forms and fuels that will allow an awareness to turn energies and frequencies into pleasure, pain, and concepts of beauty. These forms can turn light to art, chemicals to tastes and smells, and vibrations to heat, sound, and sensation. We may hear music, and maybe we will dance. It will turn our witnessing into fear, anger, and love. We will meet strangers one day, perhaps after thousands of days have passed, and we will decide we don’t want to face the days to come without them. Or perhaps we will be the reason that they do not see another.
Sex drives human existence. We persist because things procreate. Because they have fucked and they will continue to do so. And as time has passed, our awareness around sex has shifted. As our understanding of what it is to be human changes, so too do our attitudes towards sex.
If we believe that a god cares about marriage, we may feel extreme shame and guilt over acting on sexual desires... or even simply having them. Homosexuality occurs in nature but, because of religious law, is punishable by imprisonment or death in some places. Some might have social or political motivations for sexual activity. For one wave of feminism, promiscuity and sex positivity were a symbol of liberation and rebellion. For some, it’s an economic strategy to be selected, whether by one person or by many. Whether an unwed woman from certain societies or eras needs to make a good match or a sex worker needs clients. For some, it’s experienced as essential to bonding. For others, it’s seen as a necessary evil. Still, there are the abstinent and celibate who might find emotional desolation or spiritual connection without sex. There are nuances to the conscious and unconscious understandings of what sex is and can be, for at least as many people as there are to have them.
So where does objectification come in?
One version of objectification invokes how a person really understands anything.
Objectification used to mean concretizing the abstract. Now it also means degrading someone or something’s purpose to its utility. This is problematic in the sense that this word creates loaded language. Humans understand the world through constructs. Constructs are a form of objectification. We simplify things in order to know how to interact with them.
Human constructs are immensely complex as well as complicated. Complex in the sense that there are many interconnected parts. Complicated in the sense that how each part actually relates to the others requires not just information but intuition to grasp. The phenomena in question, the observers of it, their interpretations of it... arguments for or against its very existence and the consequences of interacting with the phenomenon all play a part. How valuable a construct is in helping us understand or engage with the actual reality we are witnessing usually determines its longevity.
(It’s one thing to recognize colors; it’s another to create art that speaks to others’ spirits like it’s your job. It’s one thing to love the art you make, and another entirely to have it critiqued by people whose opinions are respected that happen to hate your guts. It’s one thing to tell someone what a color is scientifically, it’s another to teach a course on how to use it to trick the eye into seeing wondrous things to people who did not think they could be artists.) Hopefully the metaphor is not too extended.
The reason objectification is so fraught and perilous when it comes to social interactions is that we take it for granted. Someone is paid to wait on you at the restaurant. Someone is paid to do your nails at the salon. Their worth is treated as the quality of their service, but we hopefully recognize it’s so much more. Their character, care, integrity, and patience make it so that our experiences can leave us feeling like a business is our friend, or that we are nothing but a paycheck. The objectification goes both ways… and frequently if not always, it’s harmful. No matter what, something is lost.
When we lived in tribes and villages, every human wore multiple hats. We couldn’t see someone as just a shitty plumber or a rude waitress. They hunted with someone we knew. They helped tend the children. They built a barn or made the best elk jerky. The service industry was not an industry. We as communities served each other. And as the spirit of this dies, we wound our humanity.
To objectify a person is to degrade them, from a whole human at best, and from a spiritual being whom the divine witnesses you through at worst. Even if you’re not spiritual, it still sucks.
And if you don’t have to think about it frequently, you might be the one doing it. To engage with others as though the experience doesn’t matter. To treat them as replaceable, usable. To treat them as property. To act as though they are allowed to or deserve to be used, abused, or violated. In the western world, this is most intensely done to women and people of color, and media and socialization can prime children for it to happen before they’re even grown. Objectification happens when you feel like you are excused from respecting their humanity.
When we talk about sexual objectification, we’re talking about engaging in this way to make their existence, identity, and value equal to their capacity to be consumed for sexual gratification.
We’re talking about language: “she’s for the streets” “you can’t turn a hoe into a housewife.”
We’re talking about culture. Virginity and innocence. Statistics of sex crimes.
We’re talking about the male gaze and the corresponding female vigilance.
It’s not enough that women are portrayed as consumable; they also have to construct their path through life in relation to how they are perceived sexually. To have a powerful sense of sexuality too early can be dangerous when young women are seen as a status symbol and predatory masculinity is celebrated. To be too attractive in the workplace can hinder your successes, and to be a mother or to have the potential can limit your opportunities.
Sexuality is a dimension of existence. Before in vitro fertilization, each individual only came into existence if sex happened. Sex is potentially beautiful. The desire someone can feel for another person is powerful. It can upend one’s entire existence. The potential for love and attraction to create literal life is magnificent. When the consequences of intimacy with another person are that bits of what make them, them, and you, you, come together to find their own potential for life and love and suffering and joy, that’s its own kind of magic. You do not know what you will get. You do not know what they will do. And until you’ve met the product of that connection, you do not know how profoundly it will affect you, if you let it.
To sexualize someone is to recognize them as a sexual being. To acknowledge sex as one of their attributes or to make them “sexy.” I apparently get sexualized frequently. I don’t always know how or why, but people frequently read my existence as sexual. It might be how I dance or my devotion to my body. It might be the freedom with which I can talk about sex. It might honestly just be my skin color. Even when I was doing youth theater (I was 18+ at the time), directors would talk to me about my sex appeal, and I would not understand what they meant or what they wanted from me on stage. For me, in the earlier parts of my life, overt sexuality was a power women had. Men were just attractive or not based on the murky preferences of the female psyche or how well they fit male power fantasies, which afforded them the confidence to approach and be approached. Black people are objectified constantly, and since rumor has it we have big dicks, it only occurred to me recently that there are a number of people who probably had that specific sexual curiosity about me based on this stereotype alone. I knew from growing up around white men that it wasn’t uncommon or even taboo for them to sexualize black women when women couldn’t hear, or even to casually joke about my body or Asian men and women’s bodies.
As a person who, for a long time, identified as demisexual, I’ve personally had an experience of discovering what it is to sexualize someone only after getting to know them. To see them as beautiful in a variety of ways that simply doesn’t include sexual attractiveness. For the things they’ve chosen. The loves they’ve cultivated. For the passions of their life that have come and gone. For their unique experience of common things. For their uncommon experiences that they don’t realize are unique. For the way that they laugh or dance. For how open their hearts are or how they guard what is vulnerable or what they love. For me to discover them as a sexual being is a celebration of all of that and more. And it is also a celebration of the body they’ve brought all of this to me with. It can genuinely become a holy experience to see someone as sexual. To be invited to intimacy with them. And to offer it back. And how congruent or disjointed that experience of their pleasure can be is also delightful. People who are dominant in one place and not the other. Playful in the bedroom but not in life. Good kissers. Bad kissers. The cautious and the confident. People who have one way of being in the bedroom and people who wear a million faces. And to recognize that the experience they can have with me is only one of the many they could have. That I can’t know the full potential of our own connection. And that I could never truly know them as anyone else, no matter how much I would love to step outside myself and meet them as someone else and explore them in different ways. Sexually or not. I will never be their sister or the mother of their child. I cannot be their grandfather or their childhood friend who has never given up on them. I can only be so many people’s friend in a truly intimate way.
And honestly for me, sexuality is only one dimension of existence. And it’s one I’m perfectly happy never to explore with someone no matter how magnificent they are. Being given sexual access is a thing to honor. Because even if the participants don’t consciously experience it this way, scientists have discovered that when a lover connects with us sexually, it tells us that things are ok. That we are accepted as we are. And if we fail to communicate in so many ways over so many topics, touch can say for us what words cannot.
Of course, that power is misused... but that’s a topic for another day.
For me, finding the nonsexual connection that says, “I unconditionally accept you, as you appear in each moment,” is the most important part of constructing any intimate relationship. It may be because I was celibate for a time and instinctively felt I must find some other way of holding the space and intimacy of sex if I wasn’t going to have romantic love as a part of my life, but still felt a deep desire to connect with others.
We frequently destroy the beauty of sexuality with objectification. In a western world where capital is king and relationships themselves can be reduced to another set of transactions, sexualization is frequently objectification. In a world spun by money, anyone who exists is likely going to be reduced to their monetary worth.
And for a woman, in a world where across the board they earn less for the same work a man does, what are we telling them about their worth?
When the only arenas where women are expected to earn more than men are fashion modeling and sex work, what are we telling women about their worth?
And when the rules of society rob a woman of her value for how sexually promiscuous she is perceived to be, while a man’s promiscuity in similar ways could be socially rewarded, what are we telling our children about equity? About what it means to respect themselves and each other? About who they are allowed to be?
And when we defend the status quo of sexual objectification, what are we telling our daughters and our sons? It’s clearly not that they are perfectly worthy of love the way that they are. And not that they all deserve to be respected equally for how they embody their truths, make their own mistakes, and grow into who it lights up their soul to be.
We are trauma bonded with society if we allow it to erode our sense of self-worth as a function of the system. If we say that it is ok for society to treat any person as an object, we teach ourselves and our children to accept this treatment if those circumstances ever come about in their lives. (This is actually a question of justice, but that’ll be for a different time).
So even with all the social complexity layered into our experiences of sexuality, we are still animals. Conditioned and instinctual.
For animals and plants out in nature, there can be clear seasonal and environmental triggers that dictate when reproduction happens. It’s an automatic process. And to be sexually successful is to be successful.
That is what success is.
To be healthy enough to do it and to be attractive or seductive enough to mate. To have enough resources for the offspring to mature.
That’s what success is.
For some, it’s so cut and dry, sex is a death sentence. The male antechinus, some octopuses, some spiders, and many praying mantises die shortly after mating. For at least female ferrets, a lack of sex is a death sentence. For male lions, if they cannot find a pride, they live alone or die fighting to get or keep one.
We may think of ourselves as more evolved. We think our behaviors are less “automatic.” But experiencing your own humanity and allowing yourself to be programmed and conditioned not to think, and not to imbue others with the fullness of their humanity at every chance you get is an argument against that. To degrade another human to protect, improve, or maintain your social status is an argument against that idea. To treat other beings as objects, outside of the context of mutually consensual play is an argument against that. I can’t think of another species on this planet that can be developmentally traumatized by seeing its own kind naked or mating because it’s been conditioned to be so unnatural that the most natural things are aberrant. We do not just pay with money, but with time and experiences. With our psyches. We make endless exchanges. We pay not to see trash. We pay to hide death. We’ve made objectification business as usual and intimacy transactional. And we pay the prices for all these purchases with the fullness of our humanity.
And if you are dissatisfied with the experience, what you’re getting probably isn’t worth the cost.
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If this spoke to you, I’d love for you to leave a comment. If you think this would speak to someone else, share it. If this helps you say something you could not put words to, I am blessed to be of service.
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And if you are Sydney Billings, thank you for reminding me to take the time to say all of this.
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I wrote this for every woman I’ve ever known. For my sisters. For every daughter I haven’t had. For every woman whose hands have ever felt forced where love and sex is concerned. That sexism and objectification are the standards that they must accept. I’m sorry for all the men in your life that didn’t have the courage to stand up for you when you needed them. For the ones who simply don’t care. For the ones who believe this is the proper order of the world. The ones that the double standards are dogma for.
I am sorry for every time you have had to fear that what you are won’t matter in the face of your capacity to be objectified. For everyone who has ever been trafficked or abused. For everyone who lost their job or friends or family because of sex positivity or youthful exuberance a man would never be punished for. I’m sorry that any of you have lived a life where the fullness of what each person is, ends up discarded for what can be used, or what is convenient. I am sorry that I can’t snap my fingers and fix the ills of society. You deserve to be seen not just as whole but divine. And I think the greatest sin I will ever commit is failing to honor that.