The conflation of sexual agency and objectification

Growing up, I became accustomed to the little cues society imposed upon me. There were unwritten but stringent rules that dictated that I should be feminine and sexy, without charting territory that could easily see me descend into something else.
I had dress codes foisted upon me that required up to a certain amount of skin be shown. Then I had clothes bought for me that did not cover me in my entirety because then I could be considered prudish, and no one wants that. I had no agency in the way I developed psychologically. This, in turn, led to me having no agency in the things that have happened to me, nor in the way I even saw myself. Learning to acknowledge and appreciate my need for sexual agency is something that I still struggle with on some levels.

When people think of sexual agency, they automatically think it deals with the right to participate or decline a sexual activity and having that decision respected. While that is partially what it entails, there are also other elements to it. Sexual agency is about having the right to define your gender or the freedom to your sexual preferences; the ability to choose what one does with their bodies and lives. For the purpose of this column however, we will focus on sexual agency and how the line between it and sexual objectification is becoming increasingly blurred. Finally, I can say that I have some amount of sexual agency over myself. It was a long, hard process of re-education and it still is not finished.

I think this is why I find it so troubling how thinly I believe the line between sexual agency and objectification is. I am slowly making peace with the possibility that there might never be any clear distinction between the two, because, living in capitalistic societies, everything from our empowerment to our activism is branded and capitalised upon.
It is an extremely difficult territory to navigate. Trying to definitively define whether the empowerment we see is sexism repackaged or a true liberation of one’s self is something that is blurred, at best. Often, in an attempt to provide our starved minds for ‘empowering’ images of women, we are given caricatures. We are given caricatures of womanhood who fight oppression while maintaining their skinny waists- culturally accepted forms of beauty- and doing everything in outfits that show the most skin. This is where the problem for me lies, because showing skin and being sexy and sensual can be empowering, but

commodifying that empowerment just makes it objectification. The only thing that has really changed in this equation is that the rules concerning how, when and why we should be sexual have been slightly redirected to convince us that being objectified is something we should desire. What these messages do is they commodify sexual expression and empowerment. In a sense, what they are doing is pushing the willing objectification off as something akin to sexual ownership and this holds us in a revolving door of patriarchal structures that continue to rework what the term “womanhood” means with little or no insight from women themselves.

It now leads me to question whether some of our desires to look and be sexy have to do with us finally embracing the right to our body’s sovereignty as our own or has this ‘sexy’ view become so projected that we think it is the only way in which we can claim that sexual agency and power? This makes me wonder whether there is not a growing occurrence of women who consider them to be empowered merely because they believe themselves free to act out. In essence, what this tends to do, is recreate a culture in which the women themselves are actively supporting the subjugation and objectification of women through the focus of our physical appearance and sexual proclivities. At what point do we see ourselves as the ones who continue upholding harmful cultures?

I think it comes down to individual views about self, but we might be wrong to think that larger society does not shape our views of ourselves somehow. There is the dangerous belief that autonomy and objectification is one and the same thing. Autonomy is active ownership of one’s body and sexuality while objectification is almost self-sacrificial in its passive relenting of control over one’s self. While there is nothing wrong with one relishing in being objectified, it is an entirely different thing to only be thought of in terms of a sexual object.

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