By: Chinyanta Nkonde
Sexual objectification has been studied based on the proposition that girls and women develop their primary view of their physical selves from observing others. These observations can take place in the media or through personal experience. Through a blend of expected and actual exposure, women are socialized to objectify their own physical characteristics from a third-person perception, which is identified as self-objectification.Women and girls develop an expected physical appearance for themselves, based on observations of others; and are aware that others are likely to observe as well.
The sexual objectification and self-objectification of women is believed to influence social gender roles and inequalities between the sexes.
The people who listen to social trends and social media highlighted reels will trust in the information given and provided as they don’t know the other side of the story.
Giving an example of the narrative of sexualization of women in the society.
Objectification is a notion central to feminist theory. It can be roughly defined as seeing and/or treating a person, usually a woman, as an object.
My focus is primarily on sexual objectification. Objectification occurring in the sexual realm has identified features that are involved in the idea of treating a person as an object.
The majority of the men who think and discuss objectification of a woman, have taken it to be a morally problematic phenomenon.
The narrative of thought is that sexuality is extremely problematic when exercised outside the context of monogamous marriage, arguing that in such instances it leads to objectification. Sexual love makes of the loved person an object of appetite; as soon as that appetite has been stilled, the person is cast aside as one casts away a lemon which has been sucked dry. “… as soon as a person becomes an Object of appetite for another, all motives of moral relationship cease to function, because as an Object of appetite for another person becomes a thing and can be treated and used as such by every one.”
Women are worried that when people exercise their sexuality outside the context of marriage, they treat women merely as a means for their sexual purposes.
Women go so far as to say that sexual activity can lead to the loss or ‘sacrifice’ of humanity. The loved person loses what is special to her as a human being, her humanity, and is reduced to a thing, a mere sexual instrument. Therefore, it focuses on treating a person as a mere tool for the lover’s purposes.
The idea that within sexual relationships people are reduced to objects, that they lose their rational nature, is an extreme one.
Admitting that there is truth to the idea that “Sexual desire is powerful enough to make reason its own tool; it can subvert our rational capacity to set ends”. In this way, people can “endanger their dignity by undermining their reason since body and self are inseparable and together they constitute the person, in surrendering her body (her sex) exclusively to her male partner, the woman surrenders her whole person to the man, allowing him to possess it.”
The man, by contrast, who has more than one sexual partner, does not exclusively surrender himself to the woman, and so he does not allow her to possess his person.
She allows her male partner to possess her person, without herself being able to similarly possess his person.
The major contributing factor on the male side is “sexual entertainment” in the form of pornography. This leads a Man to think less of Women.
Picture: Nkani
