Day 4

Day 4, Fri 12/3/10
It's horrifiying, the extent to which I really do see women as sex objects. That's what "internalised" sexism is, I suppose. I have actually learnt this stuff on a deep level and a simple belief in equality is not enough to overcome that. I believe in lots of things women have the right to (I mean like all the normal stuff that men expect) but I actually take part in denying them some of those rights every day.

I guess that some women probably think about sex a lot but I can imagine most women get bombarded with messages about their sexuality so much (and, more directly, with sexual attention and harrassment from men) that what they really want is to have completely non-sexual interactions a lot of the time. Even just to be distracted by a woman's cleavage denies her that non-sexual interaction, but the old look-up-and-down and all that is even worse. I do both of those things habitually, and worse things sometimes too, like changing where I'm sitting to get a better view up a woman's skirt.

Naturally, women are also taught to objectify themselves their whole lives and so most women participate in their own objectification is some way. But this is all about me changing my behaviour, so I don't need to say much about that. It is useful to recognise it though, so I'm not confused when I see women doing things that seem to play into their own oppression.

I really want to have comfortably non-sexual relationships with women. And to have that means giving up the practice of reading sexuality into every situation that contains a woman. That is itself a learned practice. I didn't always do that. Obviously there is something natural about having sexual fantasies and I don't know where the instinct ends and learning begins but I'm sure it's not inevitable that I should read every sighting of the shape of a breast as a sexual expreience.

But on some level, I do experience it that way. Just now I watched a couple of people crossing a pedestrian crossing, and I imagined seeing them all as just sexual beings. It was absurd and made me smile but, subtract the men and that's kind of what I do all the time. But the difference between a "being" and an "object" is that beings have their own plans for what they will experience but an object is only there to be experienced by someone else.

So sexual objectification involves making someone into scenery (men gloat about "enjoying the view" at beaches). That's part of the more general sidelining of women as intelligent people and participants in democracy etc. Who knows which came first - in a way it seems more natural that it owuld all develop together as a manifestation of men's selfishness (and their active decision to indulge and enforce it).