What came to mind when you read it?
What comes to mind when you read the following quote?
Try this the next time you meet a little girl. She may be surprised and unsure at first, because few ask her about her mind, but be patient and stick with it. Ask her what she’s reading. What does she like and dislike, and why? There are no wrong answers. You’re just generating an intelligent conversation that respects her brain. For older girls, ask her about current events issues: pollution, wars, school budgets slashed. What bothers her out there in the world? How would she fix it if she had a magic wand? You may get some intriguing answers. Tell her about your ideas and accomplishments and your favorite books. Model for her what a thinking woman says and does. Here’s to changing the world, one little girl at a time.
Here are some quotes about the objectification of women:
(They're all from here: The objectification of women is more than sexy pictures.)
In everyday conversation, male pronouns dominate our speech and ideas. Every dog we see is a ‘he’, every stick figure a ‘he’, humans thought of as simply ‘mankind’. There are exceptions, though. Boats, cars, bikes and ships always seem to be ‘she’, but this is hardly exciting once we realise that they are all objects, and possessions of (usually) men, at that.
Anyway, the cumulative effect of all this is that we are socialising generation after generation to view the world, and the women in it, from the point of view of men. As a result, only men are seen as full and complete human beings, not women. Women are objectified — this means we are denied agency, and are seen from the outside, our own consciousness, our thoughts and feelings, utterly overlooked.
Sociologist Ashis Nandy said: “One must choose the slave’s standpoint not only because the slave is oppressed but also because he represents a higher-order cognition which perforce includes the master as human, whereas the master’s cognition has to exclude the slave except as a ‘thing.’” Women have been trained to view men as complex people with agency, but men haven’t had the same training with women.
It is because society tells us that women are objects, not subjects, that even good men, when speaking out against violence against women, tell other men to imagine her as “somebody’s wife, somebody’s mother, somebody’s daughter, or somebody’s sister,” it never occurring to them that maybe, just maybe, a woman is also “somebody”.
"I am appalled at the news of a man in Texas who was acquitted of murder after he shot a woman who was working as an ‘escort’ and refused to have sex with him. You have to see people as objects to make sense of this."
"I agree, it’s absolutely appalling. Just shows how little regard society has for women, especially escorts who are not, according to the patriarchy, “virtuous women”. As though they are somehow less than human."
"They don’t “see” women as objects. They know they aren’t objects; they don’t care."
