Events of Objectification: producing and experiencing the female embodied subject

“All women dress to be noticed:

gross and vulgar women to be grossly and vulgarly noticed,

wise and modest women to be wisely and modestly noticed.”

-G.K. Chesterton

This post captures a moment of my thinking on the phenomenology of objectification and how that disrupts thinking around modesty. This is particularly poignant during this stage of my PhD as I explore self-actualisation in an arts practice then return to a world that seemingly re-asserts my status as an objectified embodied subject.

Walking home with my grocery shopping, sweaty palms and sweaty armpits in a beautiful oversized pink button up that seamlessly transitioned into a stiff white maxi skirt, I carried my load and cone-like body back to my London flat. This is what I was wearing when four men laughed, jeered, and 'catcalled' me. The encounter stood out in my mind as an event like many others but distinct both in its intrusive and domineering intent, and its ability to clarify my thinking around how my objecthood was established during and prior to the event.

During the event, as I looked around at the other body-subjects around me, I conjectured that I had clearly been identified as the easiest objectified target. The one least empowered to respond. A woman alone that fit enough criteria to be 'catcalled.' And yet, I know if another female body (perhaps less cone-like) had been in the firing line, I might have been spared and she would have received the verbally dominating behavior I had.

This brought questions up of both how my objecthood had been established in relation to the other subjects around me; how that positionality might have been affected by another woman's presence; and what made me a target in the first place. These led me to continue critically examining modesty in relation to objectification, specifically how to uncouple the objectification events women experience with the degree to which they practice 'modesty.'

My clothing wasn’t “immodest.” But maybe that was never the issue to begin with.

Dressing “modestly," or in other words, dressing against the norms of male gazing, hadn't prevented the objectifying event. If dressing modestly failed to prevent objectifying behaviors, then dressing immodestly didn't produce my objecthood. The paradigm of woman-as-object must be taught, reinforced, and validated to the point that status as object is perceived regardless of appearance-based factors such as exposure of skin, clothing that emphasizes the body, etc. We must look to other factors within the social and political that created the paradigm of woman-as-an-object.

There are many avenues that can be explored from this event, I am interested at the moment in the fact that my objecthood was not determined by my modesty. That was a predetermined paradigm before the event. So, dressing modestly could not, indeed did not, prevent the event of objectification. This effectively dismantles the logic that women are responsible for the level of objectification they experience. Simultaneously raising questions on how the female embodied subject has been formalized to paradoxically occupy the status of both subject and object. De Beauvoir and Scott articulated it best that women “[stand] before man not as a subject[s], but [as objects] paradoxically endued with subjectivity."

My research deals with how and why women are politically, ideologically, and socially objectified. One of the ways I establish women’s objectification in the literature is the Objectification Theory. At its most basic, objectification is "whenever someone becomes a something."

John Berger wrote: “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.”

If the act of seeing is already conditioned by power, then women aren’t dressing to be noticed, they are dressing to survive in a system that objectifies them. Some women might deal with this by trying to deny their objecthood in order to assert themselves as equal (perhaps what I was trying to do by making my body indistinct in shape but present in color), however that still failed to prevent the objectification event and equality was not mine walking home that day. Meaning other factors decided the event in the perpetrators minds. Other women might dress according to the rules that will grant them the most status in a system that actively works against them, or what GK Chesterton refers to as ‘vulgar.’ Others will dress how they want to dress regardless, while still experiencing themselves through how others interact with them (aka: object).

There are many ways women negotiate, interact with, manage, and fight against their objecthood. For me it is important to begin with an acknowledgment that women are trying to make livable a system in which they are not meant to equally live- so rather than criticize women for how they navigate the complexities of their own objectification, let’s have more conversations about how WE objectify women because patriarchy makes perpetrators of us all. This PhD research continues to operate within these gaps to understand how women experience themselves in the world they walk through, and further how they navigate the seemingly rough waters of female self-actualisation because, as illustrated, women can’t fight against objectification by how they dress.

Berger, J. (2008). Ways of seeing. Penguin Classics.

Gervais, S.J. 2012 “Seeing Women As Objects: The Sexual Body Part Recognition Bias” European Journal of Psychology.

Gervais, et al. 2020 “The Social Interaction Model of Objectification: A process model of goal-based objectifying exchanges between men and women” British Journal of Social Psychology.

Morris, Goldberg, Boyd 2018 “Women as Animals, Women as Objects: Evidence for Two Forms of Objectification” Personal & Social Psychology Bulletin.

Scott, J. W. (1996) Only paradoxes to offer: French feminists and the rights of man. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Available at: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/roehampton-eboo ks/detail.action?docID=3300722 (Accessed: 1 October 2023).

Vaes et al. 2019 “Assessing Nueral Responses Towards Objectified Human Targets and Objects to Identify Processes of Sexual Objectification That Go Beyond the Metaphor” Scientific Reports.