Empowerment, Not Objectification

Mia Daniele // Blog Writer

In my creative writing class, there is a student about a year older than me. He sits in the back and, at the beginning of the semester, he mentioned the twenty novellas he has written over the years. I eyed him and wondered what kind of art he was going to present a room of writers, his puffy eyes obviously perceived as inferior. Within his first story, I understood exactly what kind of artist he was. He was the overt sexual reference, the narrator who first described a woman by the quality of her breasts, then her personality as an afterthought. His first story alone featured no female characters to be seen, yet managed to make so many sexual references that every woman in the room felt thoroughly objectified. When a few brave souls tried to convey this to him, his eyes told us that we merely did not understand his genius.

This classmate of mine is a part of a subgenre of writers who are more numerous than I would like to admit. They are the ones who regard the female body only by the circumference of her nipple, the swell of her breast, and the cinch of her waist and yet claim to be the biggest perpetrators of the Strong Female Character trope. We have all seen art of the female protagonist portrayed as the topless angel or the undressed leader of the rebellion, whether it is a show on HBO or the newest book on the New York Times Bestseller list. It is almost impossible to find a story with a female character we can depend to not be objectified in some way, whether it is through the thorough description of her sex life or the glorification of her genitals. It’s as rampant today where the Strong Female Character is the choice protagonist as it was in ancient Greece where male poets looked upon the naked forms of the muses for inspiration.

I didn’t realize how bizarre this was until I was sitting in my writing class, listening to the classmate with the puffy eyes use his narration to make me feel absolutely naked. He obviously viewed sexual references as a way to elevate his art. I used to think that this was an unfortunate symptom of being in art school where all the creative, adolescent minds could finally compose without fear of punishment. Without the high school rules of no sex, everyone wanted to capitalize on their newfound freedom. But, when I listened to the other stories in my class, I realized that this was a disease found only in men. The women wrote tragedies of love and the horrors of war all without mentioning the size of their female character’s chest.

I don’t want to say that all male writers are scum. But it is men who, more often than not, glorify the female body by objectifying it. They strip their female characters of their identity, leaving them as nothing more than a symbol. And, more often than not, this symbol becomes an objectification of the female body. Then the next generation reads works filled to the brim with these symbols and the cycle repeats itself. The past two decades has seen an improvement in female characters in literature, but these advancements cannot be effective if the objectification of female characters is seen as high art.

This is my plead to not only my classmate, but to every writer out there: please stop. Stop symbolizing a loss of identity by a loss of clothes. Stop calling post-apocalyptic cultures that rape woman “disturbingly realistic and insightful.” Stop taking the Strong Female Character, the supposed modern advancement in literature, and turning her into something no longer human. To read a story and have the words on the page strip you of your identity, make you feel worth nothing more than what the male characters can deem for you is wholly horrifying and disheartening. For the sake of change, please stop.