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October brings all that is beautiful about autumn, with its glorious colors and cooler temperatures, but it also carries with it a darker underside, as it’s known as Domestic Violence Awareness Month. As the month winds down, I have been thinking about the lifetime of work I’ve done in the domestic violence field as a writer, educator, and counselor. In this post, I want to turn our attention to something that is part and parcel of violence against women and yet not always examined and understood. Here, I’ll focus on objectification as a key tactic and strategy used to perpetuate violence against women.
Men’s violence against women takes many forms, including physical, emotional, financial, and sexual. Men rely on a host of tactics and strategies to both enact and explain their behavior. These include denial, blaming, minimization, rationalization, seeing oneself as the victim, objectification, etc. There are a variety of reasons why men objectify women, chief among them being entitlement and a social context of tolerance for this behavior.
People objectify those they consider less than—less worthy, less valuable, and less human. The root word of objectification is “object” and when people are objectified they are regarded as things. Things can be tossed around and mistreated, discarded, disposed of, and replaced.
Men’s objectification can take many forms. For example, having served as a counselor for violent men, I remember a man disclosing that he punched his pregnant wife everywhere but her abdominal area, justifying this by saying, “I wouldn’t hit her in her belly because the baby is a person.” In another example, a man in a counseling group shared that the only way he could climax was if he spread pornographic images of other women around his wife. Examples like these reveal the extent to which some men capitalize directly upon the messages of a sexist society. When people can be objectified, they are dehumanized and thus easier to control, manipulate, injure and harm.
Even though there is more discussion in the culture about toxic masculinity, this doesn’t at all mean that the phenomenon has lessened. In fact, arguably, we are living through such a tense sociopolitical climate in which objectification has been normalized, as is evident in the treatment of immigrants and other marginalized groups. Objectification also has roots in possessiveness and the belief that someone else can be regarded as property.
It’s important that women see jealousy and possessiveness for what they are—warning signs that exist on the continuum of objectification and abuse. Sadly, though, socialization about dating has sent very distorted messages to women and men about these issues, leaving many people to incorrectly interpret jealousy and possessiveness as real interest and care.
