The everyday horror of modern sexism
Cherry is a British nurse who has experienced a lifetime of sexualisation and objectification. Working in a hospital hasn’t offered an escape, but new worries. Cherry has large breasts, and reports that a lot of her mental energy is spent thinking about them. “It’s a bit pornographic” is how she described it to Jamie Chen, a researcher at the University of Sussex studying the impacts of sexualisation on working-class women. Her work uniform made her feel particularly self-conscious: it was so tight she worried people would think she was trying to look like a “saucy nurse”. Cherry told researchers that because of this sexualisation, she decided against breastfeeding her child. “I didn’t really like breastfeeding because I felt, because they were so big, it looks inappropriate in my mind, that these massive, you know, boobs sticking out in public”.
Compare this with the sales pitch for Kim Kardashian’s new push-up bra: “Made to be seen. Our viral Ultimate bra is back, reinvented with a built-in raised nipple detail and removable nylon-coated nipple piercing for an unforgettable statement”. Women can now buy a bra that not only gives them “sexy, natural-looking lift and support”, but also the appearance of pierced nipples under their baby-crop tees. While Cherry feels unable to carry out the natural function of her breasts, Kardashian is cashing in on the business opportunity that sexual objectification represents—her fashion company Skims is currently valued at US$4 billion.
It is no exaggeration to say that sexual objectification is ruining women’s lives. From childhood, women are made to understand that their appearance is all-important, regardless of any and all other achievements. Their faces and bodies are treated like things, objects primarily for the use and pleasure of others, overwhelmingly men. The unrelenting portrayal of women as sex objects has been shown, in multiple studies, to lead to a “diminished view of women’s competence, morality and humanity”.
New York University professor and author of Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt, has detailed how predatory tech companies turn this oppression into a business opportunity. When women delete selfies on social media, he says, algorithms are programmed to detect the behaviour and treat the assumed negative self-image as a marketing opportunity, bombarding the woman with beauty product advertisements. This is contributing to a mental health epidemic among young girls, around 57 percent currently reporting a persistent sadness or helplessness, up from 36 percent in 2011.
Objectification is the reality for women, day in day out, their entire lives. From childhood to old age, the measure of a woman’s worth is their ability to remain young and attractive to men. Margaret Atwood, echoing art critic John Berger’s description of the male gaze, described the effect: “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur”. Sociologists describe this as self-objectification—when women wake up in the morning and plug in the epilator, they are listening to the voice inside their head put there by the advertising executives who decided making women feel like shit was a good way to make money.
To add insult to injury, at the same time as women are being sexualised to an absurd degree, ironically, they are getting as little pleasure from sex as ever. Heterosexual sex is most unequal—one study found that only 65 percent of heterosexual women usually orgasm during sex, compared with 95 percent of men.
So while women are pressured to worry about being “sexy”, their own sexual desire and agency are suppressed. Women are taught not to be sexual, but sexy. They have to control what they eat in order to fit the ideal body type, they have to wax and pluck and shave every part of their body below their hairline. Women internalise that as normal, and failure to conform, at least to some degree, has consequences. Their conditioning is always to alter themselves to meet others, mostly men’s, expectations and desires, to the point where they often can’t even define what their own are in relation to sex and relationships.
This is particularly the case for younger women. Most young women’s first experience of sex is likely to be at a party when they’re drunk or because they feel pressured into it. In the words of one of the many teenagers Deborah Tolman spoke to when writing Dilemmas of Desire, which documents the experience of young women and sex, sex was something that “just happened” to them. In her book Consent Laid Bare, Chanel Contos describes the way that, when men’s desires are the centre of sex, women lose out. “This puts an unspoken sense of control in [men’s] hands about whether they want you or not, and leaves the woman in the heterosexual relationship with no agency.”
Women are socialised to see their feelings as less important than those of their male partner. From film, TV and seeing their parents interact, women learn the role they are meant to play. They are trained to notice a shift in someone’s emotional state, to push down their own feelings in order not to upset the men around them.
It’s no surprise, then, that relationships are frequently unequal and sites of abuse. One in five Australian women over the age of 15 has experienced sexual violence, according to the Centre Against Sexual Assault. A recent study undertaken by the Australian Institute of Family Studies found that one in three men has committed intimate partner violence. One ABS report from 2022 showed that 23 percent of women experienced emotional abuse in relationships. This is likely an understatement given the normalisation of emotional manipulation in relationships, but it is a form of intimate partner violence. Men can create a climate of fear for women in situations where they make their partners feel like they are required to “walk on eggshells” in order not to provoke them, which can be just as damaging as physical violence.
Making matters worse, men are entering relationships with attitudes and expectations shaped by the same extreme sexism that women are. They are encouraged to see themselves as domineering, aggressive and unconcerned about feelings—their own or those of others. They learn the lesson that women are there to provide for them. They also learn to objectify and dehumanise women. One study found that men’s frequent exposure to sexually objectifying media was associated with greater objectification of their romantic partners.
The consumption of porn is an important part of this. Young men are more likely to consume porn than young women, and this is often the major factor shaping both men’s and women’s understanding of sex and sexuality. Jess Hill, in her recent Quarterly Essay, describes the impact of this consumption of porn—which is more readily available today and often extremely violent towards women—as part of understanding the increasing rates of sexual violence among young people. “On average, young people are thirteen when they get their first lessons in sex and intimacy from free online porn ... In much of this porn, degrading and painful sex acts are unremarkable ... In the majority of these clips, women not only go along with degrading treatment but are almost always grateful for it.”
An outcome of this is that there has been a mainstreaming of violent sex acts, particularly strangulation during sex. According to a new study, 61 percent of women have reported being choked during sex. Maree Crabb, a sexual violence prevention educator, told the ABC, “Young women have talked about [how] they have felt like they're genuinely being murdered ... they’re really uncomfortable and feeling very, very unsafe”. Women are being murdered by their male partners. These men then claim it was a “sex game gone wrong”. According to the campaign group We Can’t Consent To This, there has been a tenfold increase of the rough sex defence between 1996 and 2016 in the United Kingdom.
All of this leads us to ask: Who is responsible for this sexist state of affairs, and is there any hope that it could change? The sexism that surrounds us and that is constantly being reinforced by social media, pop culture, mainstream media, the entertainment industry, the beauty and fashion industries among others, destroys the humanity and empathy of men, and belittles and endangers women. But it is not ordinary men, and certainly not women, who benefit. Rather, it is ideologically useful and extremely profitable to the capitalist system.
Advertising companies, the fashion and cosmetic industries directly profit from women’s insecurities—and create them where they don’t already exist as a way to open up new markets. Every part of a woman’s body is now subject to fashion trends and must look “perfect”, and every one represents an opportunity to sell something to help achieve this “perfection”. Exploitative images of women are used to sell anything and everything, and the pornography and sex industry—which could not exist without the oppression of women—are worth hundreds of billions.
Added to that, bosses in every industry maximise their profits by paying women on average less than men, and rely on sexist socialisation to normalise this inequality. And the whole system benefits from forcing women to do unpaid labour in the home, which maintains the stability and productivity of the workforce capitalism needs. The resulting division between the lives, experience and social standing of working-class men and women has a further benefit—it undermines the likelihood of united working-class resistance to the system.
Despite all this, it is possible for working-class men and women to see themselves as allies rather than sex objects or potential dominators/sexist creeps and to fight back. Fortunately, this possibility doesn’t rest on every sexist individual being convinced not to be a sexist prick, though this definitely can happen and should. It’s because the conditions of capitalism bring people together as relative equals in the workplace, and give them a common interest that can manifest in collective resistance and struggle. This sort of activity, and the consciousness it gives rise to among those involved, pushes against the degrading and dehumanising way we are usually socialised to see others.
Women are conditioned to accept sexism, but they are also able to rebel against it in the right circumstances. That which drags people down at one time can fuel resistance at another. The conservative conformism of the 1950s eventually gave rise to the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s—discontent was brewing below the surface and exploded when the general atmosphere of society shifted to one of rebellion rather than resignation.
This has happened before and can happen again. When people go on strike against a bastard boss, or join an anti-war protest, when they stand on picket lines to defend public housing—they become more keenly aware of their joint interests and the benefit of unity. Places that were previously sites of exploitation and oppression, such as the workplace, now become sites of strength and resistance. Both men and women can see each other in a new light—as fighters for their class and equals in struggle.
Actions like this start to transform mass attitudes. But ultimately, we need a society built on equality to have a world where we are not perennially fighting sexism, but are free from it. This means collective, democratic control over every aspect of social and economic life: a world in which working-class women and men could have real say over the conditions they live in, rather than being dominated by the capitalist class and the institutions and ideology that maintain its power and privilege; a world in which hierarchies of class wouldn’t be justified by hierarchies of gender.
We need to get rid of this system that denies women their sexuality and treats them as nothing more than little pieces of fat and muscle for the sexual gratification of men. We need women to fight back against the voice inside their head that tells them they aren’t good enough. We need working-class men to join the struggle against women’s oppression and to learn genuine empathy and care. We need women rebels to build the power of our side and smash this sexist system.
