We see it everywhere. There is the striking image of Adriana Lima, famous for modeling for Victoria’s Secret. Thousands of girls desperate to be loved and admired would do anything to be her. Including starve them to death. They have no idea what it is to be her; they merely want to look like her. This is a significant distinction that we should make as we consider Adriana Lima’s body image: she is virtually unknown to the public. She is, at least in the public eye, a thing. Surely, Ms. Lima is a being, quite possibly a wonderful one, but how she functions in the public consciousness is a carefully engineered human marketing message.
Ms. Lima elicits a strong sexual response from a wide spectrum of people, largely men when she appears in her underwear. This leaves young women with no notion of real love’s depth with the thought, “I want to be adored like that.” Her sexual celebrity is based on her ability to trigger the basest of human instincts and is confused by young people as real admiration. She is the sexual version of a Big Mac shown on late-night television to entice hungry people to visit the drive-through window of their local fast-food restaurant.
Teenage years are already fraught with considerable insecurity as nearly every young person is trying to figure out who and how to be. Being pounded with fashion and body imagery suggests that physical beauty standards are passed off as empirical stratifies us into a rigid caste system based on genetic luck and marketing greed. Suddenly, bald men cannot win elected office even if they are organizational geniuses. Heavy women cannot be news anchors as beauty-caste consciousness perpetuates itself through our entire society. The cultural conversation of idealized beauty leaves everyone except for the largely self-proclaimed beauty Brahmans feeling bad about themselves.
This phenomenon is doubly disturbing when you realize that body image marketing ultimately impacts natural selection. While doing wonders for the next generation of trophy wives, it informs breeding selection based on looks rather than characteristics that benefit survival and the future of the human race, like intelligence. There is no suggestion here that fortunate enough people to match the beauty ideal du jour lack other qualities. This is certainly not true. The point is that, as a society, we should rethink the merit of allowing marketing dynamics to influence our sense of human value.
The marketing strategy behind the body image of Adriana Lima is carefully calculated to drive consumers to the store to buy lingerie. It is the consumer culture equivalent of driving lemmings off of a cliff. In the process, young women, especially those in their teenage years, are highly vulnerable to the not-so-latent suggestion that being pretty is powerful because being rather triggers sexual responses. This type of thinking causes young people to look in the wrong direction when finding a path to success, social contribution, and happiness. We are a culture that worships mannequins and promotes life practices of self-starvation and purging to pay homage to those gods. We need to find a new religion or a more wholesome hobby.
In the beginning of the history of women as the thing, the image of the woman was revered as the symbol of fertility, representing the possibility of survival. One of the first known instances of the objectification of women can be found in prehistoric art, specifically in a statute known as the Venus of Willendorf. Found in 1908, this small statue is estimated to be over twenty thousand years old.
It is a matter of scientific assumption that this image of a heavy-set woman is somehow related to fertility consciousness. This hypothesis is evidenced by the visual emphasis on large breasts, substantial body fat, and the detailed articulation of the vulva ( not pictured here). These visual emphases suggest that the sculptor was focused on these characteristics and possibly idealizing them, thereby conveying reverence for the highly fertile woman.
While the details carved into the Venus of Willendorf tell us what was on the sculptor’s mind, the missing information tells us what they considered unimportant. The Venus of Willendorf has no face. One could argue that this is simply an oversight due to the primitive technique of the sculpture, but the facts suggest otherwise.
The artist here took great pains to sculpt the fine plaits in her hair, presumably a prehistoric fashion statement. In other words, as a symbolic communication, the Venus of Willendorf depicts a fertile beauty whose personal identity is unimportant. This statute is similar to carvings of other things that prehistoric humans held as necessary to sustain life, mainly wild game and other animals.
Twenty thousand years later, our cultural iconography still generates this same consciousness. We are still obsessed with the woman’s object and do not necessarily care to know much about her as a being. While our art allows women to have a face, it does not allow them to have an identity other than what is predicated on fashion. That is not a lot to show for twenty thousand years of evolution.
After all these years, it appears that we may finally become a bona fide age of equality. Sexual objectification is now an equal-opportunity affliction. There are billboards on the side of most urban freeways of young men’s torsos rising out of their partially opened pants that expose the waistband of their boxer shorts as perfect abdominal muscles ripple upward to join a flow anatomical structure that seems to the ordinary man as a hopeless impossibility.
Sometimes we see his face, and sometimes we don’t. His image has been carefully selected to jolt some of us into sexual arousal while suggesting to the rest of us that we are not worthy because we do not look like that. Even heterosexual men cannot help but look on in awe. In the next decade or two, we will not look at real human physiques in visual art. Computers will calculate the most appealing human image and fabricate virtual people for advertising.
Since we do not need the advice of fashions to help us find ways to world peace, the need for an actual person to be associated with a body image will disappear entirely. Will there still be the lucky few who meet the physical standards of the ever-fluctuating virtual standard of beauty, or will we all be in therapy because we cannot possibly compete with our computer-generated fantasies?
When you have children to feed, your paunch is an artifact of a different set of life choices than those suggested in fashion advertising. House payments and braces replace gym memberships as we resign ourselves to something that we are told is visibly less admirable. Young people are programmed by marketing media practically from birth to believe that following a temporary body image fad will acquire some ill-defined virtue. Girls, in particular, seem susceptible to believing that being able to trigger sexual attraction is a form of personal power and validation. In a world where a hot body gets you what you want, at least in round one, where is the incentive to become more?
My eldest daughter attended high school at an all-girls school. Like any high school, there were dances, but because there were only girls in her school, this required my daughter to invite boys to be her date. As her first dance approached, she asked a boy with whom she had attended grade school, and he accepted her invitation. A week or so before the dance, she heard through a friend that her intended date was not going to go to the dance with her but instead had changed his plans and was intending to go with a tall, slender girl who had just weeks before been one of my daughter’s close friends.
It turns out that this fellow had gotten what he felt was a better offer and decided to trade up. Not coming from a family of any breeding or familiarity with common decency, my daughter was stood up without as much as a phone call just days before her first venture into dating. To my daughter’s merit, she attended that dance anyway with another boy, a family friend, which, in my book, took enormous courage.
This was my daughter’s first excursion into the world of boys and my first excursion into having a daughter in the world of boys. She was thunderstruck by the rejection and, as we all do, went searching for answers. As we were sitting on the couch one afternoon, she asked me a question that broke my heart. “Daddy, am I pretty?” Every father of a daughter should be prepared when they take their daughter home from the hospital for the first time to answer that question with a resounding “yes.”
I froze because I was consumed with my natural tendency to over-intellectualize everything. I was simultaneously completely unprepared to handle my sadness at even being asked such a question. She took my hesitation for a “no.” After that, no convincing would make up for me not having my answer on the tip of my tongue.
This has since come to infuriate me. First, the creep that gave her cause to have this moment of doubt should have been thrashed within an inch of his life for being a vulgar, gutless cretin. Of course, I might be slightly paternal on this point. But the fact remains that my daughter is not a pair of sox to be traded out on a whim. Second, no one should ever have to question their validity, especially not teenagers.
Ever. No one should ever have to live in doubt that they are anything less than perfectly lovely and possessed of the value of an angel. The mere fact that we live in a society where we can objectify people and then impose upon these human things of our own, making subjective interpretations of their appearance based on arbitrary standards concocted by the ignorant, is enough to make you want to go blind and be free of such nonsense forever.
And for the record, my daughter is lovely – adorable. Every time I look at her face, she reminds me of the pictures of my favorite grandmother when she was young. I do not see my daughter in three dimensions. I see her in four. I can still see her former infant self in the curve of her forehead. She has her mother’s hands. She is the little girl scrambling into my lap and the powerful woman walking into the office building of the United States Senate to go to work.
She had thick, curly blond hair and beautiful blue eyes gracing a woman’s face. Because she is not a thing to me, she is a being that represents an entirely personal and family history and is the culmination of a lifetime of experience and virtue; she cannot be anything but awe-inspiring. This is not true just in these old eyes but in the eyes of anyone who truly sees.
Every person on this planet, without exception, is here because their ancestors have kept the spark of life alive for millions of years and successfully passed it on to the next generation. They hid their children in the tall grass outside their villages to conceal them from invading hordes. They nursed them through famine and disease. The living is the artifact of a life force that has fought for its existence for millennia. How are we then to degrade this with underwear advertising? We are a species of walking miracles. We are a race, the human race, of highly improbable beings. How dare anyone find fault with the appearance of any one of us?
Since the beginning of the species, human iconography has been used as a shamanic device, a totem image, expressing the deepest and most urgent desires. Art is a form of prayer. It not only declares what is on our minds but what we want. The art of marketing attempts to create what we want to be after it tells us we want to be it.
However, human iconography sends a different message in the domain of true religion. We see a crucifix, and even if we are not Christian, we are reminded of the power of unlimited human commitment and sacrifice for the sake of compassion. In the image of the Buddha, we see the possibility of eternal happiness through tranquility and the development of human consciousness. Of course, these images have been subverted as well. Victoria’s Secret, for example, had to be told by the Thai government by mandate of the law that an idea of the Buddha was an inappropriate decoration for the crotch of women’s panties.
So when we see Adriana Lima in her underwear, our attention is not merely drawn to a pretty thing. For those for whom she is an object of sexual attraction, she is a visual mantra of sexual consumption. For those who yearn for the power of her sexuality, she is an inspirational deity of truly false religion. It is mesmerizing. It is instinctive. Like throwing blood into a shark tank, she is a thing that triggers and ultimately controls basic human instincts. She is the sacrificial goat tied to a stake in the jungle that lures the tiger.
Human sexual dynamics and the historical trend of male domination over them have been worn like grooves into the collective consciousness of humanity. Food and sex are things that humans must instinctively seek out. It is the basis of our physical survival and our point of greatest psychological vulnerability. It is the ring in our nose by which we can be led to market.
Thousands of years later, our culture still uses images to objectify both women and men. It is a form of sexual exploitation that is no longer limited to corralling women to be dominated by men. Modern marketing seeks out and even fabricates images designed to appeal to our sexual instincts to control our behavior. Marketing uses this imagery of sexuality to influence our buying habits just as it used to control our breeding habits. No longer is a woman the thing being used as a symbol to manage human sexuality socially, but now she is being turned into something that ensures that we buy certain products.
This is the main point about objectification. It is always a means of domination and control. It has not always been a device of manipulation for just marketing agencies. There is a history of the worker as the thing, the Jew, and the enemy as the thing. The history of women reveals a process by which women have been measured against a societal standard to create social expectations and ensure compliance. Clothing and the expression of sexuality have played a huge part in this control scheme. You can practically measure the degree of power women hold in society by what they are allowed or encouraged to wear. As women have fought for equality with men in Western cultures, there has been a correlative shift in fashion.
Just over a Century ago, women were depicted as a vision of modesty and compliance. The image of a woman in a wasp-waist dress refrained from any public expression of her sexuality was iconic throughout much of American history well into the 20th Century. As the women’s rights movement gathered momentum, culminating in winning the right to vote in the United States in 1919, women started shrugging off the image that was forced upon them by a male-dominated society. They began to publicly control their sexuality by cutting their hair and wearing more comfortable and revealing attire.
If you would like to see the modern version of this rebellion against the domination and control of female sexuality, look into a 20-year-old Egyptian girl named Aliaa ElMahdy. Alicia has a blog that recently ignited controversy across Islam when she posted a nude photograph of herself. While by Western standards, this type of photograph is relatively common as young people grapple with and communicate their sexuality in the Information Age through social media and sexting, it is shocking in the context of Muslim culture.
Women have been stoned to death for less. As it stands in Egypt, her iconic nudity is a one-woman assault on the forced modesty imposed on women by her culture. It is a version of bra-burning in the Age of the Internet. She says to her culture that she is beautiful on her terms and that her sexuality is hers and hers alone to manipulate. She has had many Western counterparts in this type of rebellion.
In the late nineteenth Century, Mary Edwards Walker, the only woman to ever receive the Congressional Medal of Honor, was arrested several times for wearing men’s clothing. She was one of the first female doctors trained in the United States and was a decorated war hero who served as a field surgeon for the Union Army during the Civil War. She married a man but felt that it was inappropriate for a male-dominated society to force women to wear uncomfortable clothing. When she died, she was buried wearing a man’s suit.
In the 1910s, progressive women began to “bob” their hair bucking the tradition that short hair was the fashion of prostitutes and sluts. In the 1920s, women began to wear sleek and revealing dresses that left little to the imagination as they took control and used their sexuality on their terms. In the 1960s, women of the Women’s Liberation Movement began appearing in public without bras, thereby taking additional control of their bodies and public presentation. Aliaa ElMahdy now joins the ranks of those women who have stepped out of the paddock of sexual power and have used their body image not as a symbol of sexual manipulation but of sexual self-determination.
And yet, for as much as Gloria Steinem and Aliaa ElMahdy have sought to use body image as a badge of freedom, the business has subverted even this newly liberated body image once again for greed and control. Thanks to feminists, it is no longer shocking to see ads of women in lingerie, even on a billboard. Still, it has lost its meaning as a symbol of liberation from male domination and become, once again, a means of entrapment.
Thousands upon thousands of teenagers flock to stores to buy all manner of decorations to show off their sexuality because they have been led to believe that being the object of their sexual instinct is a source of personal value. This often comes at the expense of developing more realistic sources of unique worth and greatly diverts attention away from the evolution of the whole being. As long as human beings insist upon turning themselves into things, a self-defeating act of self-objectification, they will be moved about through time and space like furniture rather than as essential beings capable of deeply influencing the human experience.
True power comes from thoughtfulness and relatedness. The development of wisdom and the skill to use it makes the world a better place because our daughters and sons have lived. When we teach boys and girls to contemplate the meaning of who they are and help them become aware of themselves as people who have the power to love, the ability to commit, and the ability to change the world around them, we have transcended all time the domination of objectification.
So, how do we bring the history of women to an end? We cannot do it for women alone. We must do it for all living beings. When we stop using physical beauty as a proxy for value, we start a cultural conversation about the real value that exceeds mere sex appeal and allows us to recognize the importance of every member of the human race. If our sum-total of attraction to each other is sex and beauty, it will create a new generation of naturally selected children that meet our visual ideas. Still, if they grow up vain and incapable of understanding value beyond appearances, we will have evolved into a species of well-sculpted idiots. We are halfway there now.
The danger of treating people as things is that it traps our awareness into the tiny confines of three-dimensional existence. The shape of an item is the least likely indication of its value. The usefulness of a being, what it does, and what it causes in the world of living beings matters most. There are women whose faces bring tears to the eyes of many and thoughts of compassion and social commitment to better humanity in the minds of all.
They are beautiful in ways that an underwear model can never fathom. They hunger and thirst for the well-being of all people, not to sculpt their bodies to look a certain way. It is not because of what they wear but because of how they live, inspiring us and igniting benefits to sweep through the collective consciousness of humanity.
People are beautiful because of what they think and do and what they create and bring to life in the world. Suppose we allow our marketing systems to continue to measure us against a narrow set of ideas. In that case, we will miss the opportunity to evolve into our full potential as beings entirely. Keep in mind that people’s consciousness is the consciousness of people as targets, as enslaved people, and as objects of manipulation. The evil of this perspective cannot be underestimated. Beings do not have to look a certain way. They are not dependent on their shape. A truly free mind appreciates this and can embrace beauty everywhere.