How Not to Objectify Women
The ultimate guide for seeing and treating women like more than a “piece of ass”.
I’m chilling in a bar with my friend, and he shows me a picture of an actress and says something along the lines of “she is… phwoar…”. I get a little pissy and tell him to stop objectifying women, and he replies: “I’m not objectifying women, I’m appreciating beauty.”
The response strikes a nerve, because I once heard the exact same words from a group of guys harassing me on a street in Cuba. One had come up to me and said something suggestive, and then his mates had all surrounded me, jockeying to make the lewdest sexual comment. I tried to get past, and when they blocked me, I tried to laugh it off. Then I tried to get angry.
“Relax, it’s fine,” one guy said. “This is our way of celebrating beauty.”
In case you were in any doubt, this did not make me feel beautiful. It made me feel like an object, whose desires and needs did not matter. They robbed me of my agency in a very literal and visible way: I could not get past unless they let me. I was scared and surrounded by their bodies — stronger than mine, bigger than mine. Male bodies. Bodies for doing, bodies for fighting. And in the middle, my body. Female body. A body for watching, a body for the taking.
