some thoughts on self objectification
Holy mother of hell
this is a huge reason why lesbians can go years just not figuring out that they aren’t attracted to men. when your whole understanding of attraction is “objectifying yourself to the point that you understand intimacy as a performance to be the perfect sexual object for a man” then the question of who and what you desire isn’t even being asked- let alone answered.
a few years back, i read “cinderella ate my daughter" by peggy orenstein (which is an interesting sort of crash course on the ways in which gender roles are really impressed on children through media, capitalism, toys, etc.). I read it like 5 years ago so if I get anything wrong, forgive me; I don’t own the book so I can’t consult it.
but one thing that really stuck with me was a part where the author speaks with (I believe) a child psychologist, and they talk about sexuality of teenage girls. one thing the psychologist mentions is that, when talking about sex, sexual attraction, etc, girls will frame it in terms of how they look, rather than how they feel when asked about their feelings (emotional and physical): “I feel like I look sexy, I look hot, etc,”. from the onset of experiencing sexuality, etc (which really means, going back to childhood, because girls are really bombarded by objectification from the time they’re tiny), girls are already alienated from their own bodies and sense of what feels good, right, or okay.
no wonder the process of realizing you’re a lesbian can be so difficult; it’s also no wonder that we have so many women who look back and say it took them years to realize that what happened to them was sexual assault, or who look back and say that they weren’t happy or satisfied in relationships but stayed in them anyway, or that women are so constantly critical of their appearances in everything they do. all of it comes down to the fact that women are so alienated from their own bodies, feelings, and experiences. monitoring how you look constantly really creates such a distance between you and your actual life, it takes you out of the moment, it makes it difficult to judge your actual feelings, or create boundaries, or bond genuinely with others, or have positive experiences free of self-criticism.
One of the reasons it took so long for me to come out to myself as a trans woman is because of how much I feared being an unattractive (if not outright ugly) woman, because all the images I had of trans women from pop culture were either sexless androgynous blobs or women with prominent Adam’s apples and hairy arms wearing a French maid outfit.
The real secret, though, is that even though I feel profoundly unattractive & unappealing now (regardless of what others tell me), I’m still infinitely happier than I ever was even when I was young and much more attractive than I realized at the time.
And all this shit is why I’m so intensely passionate about women feeling good about enjoying sex, especially with other women, and why I’m so protective of young queer women and fiercely of validating their attraction to women. (Not to myself, because I’m an old, but to both girls their own age and to queer female celebrities like Janelle Monáe, Hayley Kiyoko, Kehlani, and more.)
This is why it’s so bizarre when feminists go off about ‘autogynephilia’ whenever a trans woman is happy she looks sexy.
Like, the idea that women are socialized to feel satisfaction about feeling sexy and define sexual desire around being attractive is… not new or controversial in feminist circles.
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