Women are not objects.
Hello everyone! My name is Margaret and I have finally gotten around to writing a blog. I have always thought about expressing my thoughts and feelings through one, but never got around to it. I am ready to take the plunge! I will start off with a little introduction about myself. I am a twenty-one-year-old Bible college student! I am studying youth ministry love every minute of it. In my free time I love to spend time with my friends and will always be up for any sort of game night. I hope that through my thoughts you will see that I am constantly learning and growing, so if you disagree, please talk to me about it, I’d love to hear what you have to say.
If you have gotten past the title I am guessing you are one of two people. The first one being, a women coming to get her feelings validated, or the second one being, someone wanting to prove to themselves or potentially the world that they do not view women as objects. I am honestly expecting eye rolls and scrolls throughout this due to how often this topic seems to be brought up. The thing is, women don’t have the luxury of rolling their eyes and dismissing this topic, it keeps being brought up because we keep experiencing the effects of living in a world that views women as objects.
In a book I am reading for a class, Paul Tripp’s “Sex and Money,” he brings up many good points involving this topic. In the beginning of his first chapter he starts off with sharing little stories about different people and how sex and money has influenced them. The two that stuck out to me had to do with a thirteen-year-old girl obsessed with how soon her breasts will develop and a seventeen-year-old boy who is being trained to look at women as objects in way he is unaware of. This is one of the many problems in this world. Women are unaware that they are being groomed as objects and men are unaware that they are viewing women as objects.
The world we live in demands women to look and act a certain way. Being a women in this world is almost unsafe, single or not. You cannot go alone anywhere unless you have some sort of protection, you have to watch what you wear, you have to learn which sexual remarks or “jokes” to address or to let go in order to not make the situation worse. You have to have someone aware of your location at all times or have a code word to keep you safe just in case a date or meeting goes south. If you do not want comments about your body, you have to hide it, and if you stand up for yourself in any way, you’re considered a prude and no one really wants to take it seriously.
Why? Why is the question I keep asking myself. It is because we live in a world that has convinced each member of society that women are there in order to please them, or to look pretty and fit a certain mold. Everyday more songs, movies, and entertainment are coming out with inappropriate degrading images of women. I even catch myself humming the tunes of those songs. It is so normalized in culture for women to be sang about and viewed this way. People buy the material, so naturally they make more. It is a vicious cycle of buying and selling women. Whether physically or just painting a picture, women are being sold as sexual objects. Think about one of the biggest crimes against humanity happening right now, sex trafficking. Women and children are literally being sold for their bodies and that is it.
As you read that last sentence you might be thinking to yourself, okay well I think sex trafficking is bad and have never partaken in it so I am good. To challenge that thought I ask, have you ever watched porn? Have you ever bought or downloaded a song that described women in inappropriate ways? Have you ever made a sexual joke about or to your female friends? Have you ever asked a girl for nudes or talked to her only for the hope of getting involved with her sexually? Have you ever looked a girl up and down or stared at her butt while she walked away? These are the things that sneak into your daily life that culture has deemed as okay, leaving half of the population unprotected and objectified. Now, don’t get me wrong, women are strong, but I am almost certain that half can relate to things I have stated in this article.
Some of you may counter saying that Christianity is the most repressive and objective source to women. I completely disagree. God loves each of his daughters fiercely. He vows to protect them and views them as priceless, rather than objects of pleasure. That is not what he has designed us for. He wants a relationship with us and to shower us in his love. The purest example of what love should look like. Romans 5:8 says, “but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” God’s biggest act of love for us (male and female) was when he sent his son to die for us. He gave himself up, so that we could live.
I included the story above as an example of something many women have gone though, and will continue to go through in their life time. This should challenge you to step up in all environments including/especially work place. If you see something, say somenthing.
I hope through my words above, you learned something or it at least gave you something to think about. This is not an “I hate men” post because there truly are great men out there who advocate for women and treat them right. This blog post was just my way of expressing what women go through in their lives on a daily basis and how culture how has scorned the way women are viewed. Thank you for reading, I genuinely hope you were able to take something away from it.
Here is the book by Paul Tripp that I mentioned in my post.
Tripp, Paul David. Sex & Money: Pleasures That Leave You Empty and Grace That Satisfies. Crossway, 2013.
