We Object

We all object to being made into objects; to being treated as less than human; to being undervalued and overused.

Women have been voicing their complaint for a long time now, and rightly so, that many of the products that society sells to them are based on an objectification of what women “should” be. Commercials tend to offer them promises of acceptance as long as they change themselves to fit within a certain subset of skinny, or beautiful, or popular, or whatever. Obviously, with the implication that the product being sold can assist them in that goal, or even that they won't be able to reach that acceptable state of beautiful or sexy without that product.

I remember being in a training during my internship where this subject was the primary focus, and while it was not new material for me, what was surprising to me was that, when I mentioned the objectification that men experience, those that were also in attendance (all of whom were women aside from myself) seemed surprised or confused by what I was saying. But an object is an object, and a tool is a tool, even if the purposes for which they are needed can differ. And the types of objects that many women have expressed resentment over being relegated to differ from the types of objects men are treated as. Try as I might, I can't make sense of the grammar of what I just said, but I think the meaning gets across. Anyway, whether we buy a beautiful decoration or a new lawnmower, we want that object for a purpose that is entirely apart from its individual identity or existence or value or personality. Even if we are buying a lawn mower that we expect to use year after year and then pass down to a child, it is still something to be used to fulfill a need of our own. Our need for it is solely one of its function and nothing more. And in that sense men absolutely can commiserate with the complaints being lodged.

While women are uniquely gifted with traits that allow them to give birth to a child, nurse and nurture that child, and be more prone to responding with compassion to a child's needs, that woman is not solely a womb, a breast, or a shoulder to cry on. Similarly, those physical traits that indicate to men that a woman might be well suited for those roles, such as youthful appearance, physical symmetry, pleasing fat distribution, and big pretty eyes, are not good indicators of the individual underneath. They do not give insight into the values, priorities, hopes, dreams, beliefs, or willingness to blend any of those traits with someone else’s is in a way that produces a healthy and happy long-term relationship. Even if she is willing to take the great risk and make the unbelievable sacrifices inherent in giving birth to a child, that represents only a small part of who she is, and she would probably appreciate being valued for much more than just that. But so many of those commercials are intended to sell products that are purported to improve those physical indicators of objective usefulness, the physical beauty primarily. I have come to the conclusion that it is because no one has yet invented a product that actually makes us a better person. Hence the focus on selling us ways to appear more like a useful object.

That is a universal experience. There are also physical indicators of usefulness that are valued in men, even if they differ from the ones that I just described. Symmetry is valued just as before, but a different distribution of fat is preferred, greater height tends to be preferred in men, different musculature, different levels of aggression, confidence, athleticism, ruggedness, and charisma are valued in men, because of the distinct role that they have played in reproduction and far more recently in the aggregation of families that we call a society. Men go out to hunt, protect, collect, provide, and very often to die on the fringes of society as the first ones in the battle and the last ones in the lifeboat. Men are then expected to be able to shift their utility once they return from the fringe, to become gentle in addition to strong, compassionate in addition to ambitious, and loyal in addition to charismatic. They are expected to earn lots of money and lots of general approval, but to spend it only in one place. So that rather than a beautiful painting or flower arrangement or a soft mattress, men tend to be objectified as a gun, a truck, a wallet, a guard dog, or a shovel. As long as the gun comes with a safety and the dog comes with a muzzle, of course. To be honest, very few of us succeed being all of those things, and we can feel just as intimidated by commercials that sell us those ideal object-like traits. But let me state this again, and not as an excuse for advertisers everywhere, but perhaps as an explanation of the gap in their focus, no one has yet invented a product that actually makes us a better person, so they focus on selling us ways to appear more useful and therefore desirable as an object. There are certainly many books and programs that purport to improve us as people, and some of those can actually be of great assistance improving our outlook and general happiness and success, but not in an easy, convenient, or quick way that does not require ourselves as the engine of change.

As useful as a womb or a wallet may be, as crucial a role as a breast or a gun may have played throughout human history, and as grateful as we may feel for those that fill those functions, it is a hollow and potentially demeaning appreciation unless we recognize and prioritize the person behind it all. So many relationships have failed because of this fact. And not just because others fail to recognize our humanity, but also because we fail to demonstrate our humanity to others. We love things and we fear things and we wish for things and hope for things and there is no way to share a life with someone over a long period of time and feel fulfilled by that relationship unless we put all of that on the table and use gentle hands to deal with it. Not every fear or dream may be realistic, but the person who has those may need them validated before they are able to let go of them. Like a child with a nightmare coming into a parent’s room at night, in order for them to be able to calm down, they first need to have their fear appreciated before they will be able to be helped in overcoming it.

Bad childhood experiences in either family or romantic relationships can cause us to lose faith in people's humanity, to have difficulty trusting that there is more to them than their ability to fulfill our needs. I have seen women left heartbroken in a relationship because of being treated as precious but ultimately replaceable, like a trophy or a diamond necklace; precious because they are something that represents their “owner’s” perceived value more than having value of her own. I have seen men left broken because their importance to their partner was lost at the same time has their job, or after life has dealt them a particularly embarrassing failure, and there was no more social status to be had by associating with them anymore. I've also seen men come to realize that the person that they have been married to for years was never as vulnerable with them as they were with her, as she never fully trusted that they were safe to be around, but still believed them to be a necessary evil. All of these are symptoms of objectification, but it pops up in other places as well. Pretty much anytime there is a power differential between two people, that distance can prompt one or both to see the other as less than or different than a person, and to treat them accordingly.

Perhaps even more heartbreaking than the devastated relationships that I have witnessed are the objectified children. And I do not just mean those who were physically or otherwise abused, but also those that suffered emotional neglect. Far more common are those children, now adults, who have to face the world unprepared to do so because they were either expected to fall in line as a tool or stay pretty and precious as a bauble. They needed to be taught both self-efficacy and self-worth, but instead they either learned that they are useful and replaceable or that they are useless and precious. And those lessons stay with them, potentially for the rest of their lives.

Those are the children that were born to people who wanted children for selfish reasons, as proof of virility, an extra hand on the farm, a means to extend a failing relationship, a way to feel needed, a way to fulfill social expectations, or a thousand other things that have nothing to do with loving, nurturing, and preparing a complex human individual to lead a functional and fulfilling life as an adult. Good parents slip into this too, just like good partners will do at times. Especially when emotions are running high, and we lose the perspective of who is standing across from us. We begin to solve problems in a myopic fashion, where the child is treated like a tantrum and the partner is treated like an argument, and the primary goal is to silence them and relieve our own discomfort as soon as possible.

The long and short of it is that relationships of convenience tend to become relationships of control, because we want to be sure the tool or toy that we bought remains useable and won’t go off without our permission.

It takes courage to show empathy and to collaborate rather than control, wisdom to assume that other people are just as complex as we believe ourselves to be, and resilience to trust our own ability to withstand any hurt that others may throw our way. As high a cost as that may seem to be, there is no relationship more fulfilling than one that you build with someone that you love as their whole self, not just with the parts of them you can use.