This post is inspired by the books “In Praise of Love,” by Alain Badiou and “I and Thou” by
Martin Buber. See the Book Reviews and Resources page for more information on these books and others discussed below. But first, the HBO television show, “The White Lotus.”
Spoiler Alert: There is a closing scene in the second season of “The White Lotus” where three men of different generations within one family are in an airport line readying to leave their vacation and return home.
The grandfather has represented the open patriarchy norms of “womanizing” objectifying behavior as accepted and glorified male behavior, as “life as it is” and anyone hurt by it only has themselves and their naivety to blame.
His son stands behind him in the actual line and generationally, and has represented men raised in those norms but who are now suffering from destroyed relationships from their own acting out, one who is belatedly seeking change and to break the cycle from his father, and who sees himself as an addict relapsing, white-knuckling, relapsing, etc.
Finally, there is the grandson, caught in the wake of his father and grandfather and their norms and determined to have a healthier, more equitable relationship with sex and with women, but he is unsure of how to engage with those he is attracted to and he is still prone to using money and position to get what he wants.
The other major and minor characters are also steeped in plots that involve sex and ambition and ego and greed and escapism. People use sex or are used by it. No surprise then to consider this show a contemporary look at the objectification of ourselves and others, especially through the lens of sex itself as an object, a product of consumption and capitalism that in the end affects all regardless of economic status. Everything becomes transactional.
In that pivotal final scene with the three men in the family, we wonder what they have learned, how have they changed as they head back to their daily lives. Then a woman walks past and each of them turn with a lingering gaze upon her.
I am interested in how this habit, the instantaneous reaction, a form of objectifying others dehumanizes all involved in some way. It is a learned behavior. Treating others as an object created for our consumption also cuts both ways. It becomes another of those addictive self-destructive cycles and most likely finds its roots in adverse childhood events. Having been objectified by others and seeing that as normal, we then project that on to others as part of our defensive reactions. But by objectifying them we only deepen our own self-objectification. And though objectification exists on a spectrum of harm and intensity, of course, as always if unchecked it gets progressively worse. Whether it shows up in physical spaces or online spaces or in the media, and whether the other is aware of it or not, it is corrosive to the spirit and reinforces addictions.
I don’t want to indicate any fixed “false equivalencies” between objectifier and the objectified. And there are differences in how people may interpret behaviors as “self-objectification” or “empowerment” which are not my purview or purpose here. Objectifying another sexually can happen across the gender spectrum, but it has been built into the historical culture of the “male gaze” as an expression of power. I believe there are cultural explanations for this objectifying behavior, such as how boys can be socially pressured into roles, becoming objects, for military, business, family legacies, sports heroes, sexual prowess, et al, but I am not offering these as excuse; rather, as roots we need to dig up if we want to fully address this problem. That is why the broad lessons from Badiou and Buber below will be helpful. Also, just as focusing on women and girls and the still immense inequities and extraordinary stresses they face will help all in families and society to have better lives, so addressing the pressures of a toxic culture on boys and men (inherited from men before them) will create a healthier environment for all. (Check out Richard Reeves’ latest book, “Of Boys and Men.”)
A limited form of sexual objectifying is probably natural in the simple physical attraction to
others, in a sexual spark. It is what happens next that can cause problems. Speaking of the final scene in The White Lotus, the men were sparked as the woman walked by, fine, but the spark became an objectifying action when they responded by turning, gazing "to take her in" (hear how the language we often use points to objectification), not knowing and so not caring in the moment what the woman might feel about their action.
In the way sexual objectification works like an addiction, it can escalate for many if unchecked. Unchallenged, the spark often becomes such an intentional reactive gaze, the gaze for some becoming the catcall, the whistle, or a full sexual fantasy that may then later fuel masturbatory orgasm or, for some, seeking it out through porn or a partner, or an infidelity, or some other form of acting out like spending at a strip club or on a prostitute or some other illegal activity. With each spark more extreme sparks or hits are felt needed by the brain and the false ego and the spark becomes a fire.
The good news is that sparks can be checked and not allowed to grow into objectification, and they can be channeled into healthy spiritual sexuality with expressions varying person to person. Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher, said all our relationships fall between the spectrum of I-It relationships and encounters on one end where objectification and a kind of power-over dynamic reigns and harm and selfishness ensues or the I-Thou relationship grounded in respect for self and others as full and deep persons, as subjects with their own agency in power-with dynamics that promote love and the divine presence.
The task is to take a spark and turn it into an I-Thou response. As an addict, I begin by trying to actually limit my exposure to sparks themselves. Avert the gaze. Refocus on the other as a whole person in their own right, even when responding to something online or in various media, even if the other depicted is created by a visual artist, even still if it is a non-visually depicted character in a story that has prompted the spark in your imagination as you read. As sobriety time accumulates in recovery work, more control comes over responses to the spark just as other middle circle triggering responses diminish. The real first thing to do is to spend more of daily life in one’s outer circle healthy practices.
Over time, this discipline will help in averting the gaze or thought and stopping the spark of objectification from growing. Like all tools in recovery, the more one practices healthy responses the less one will need to.
(This is the same technique helpful for reducing the urges and triggers of substance abuse; it is a form of not driving by the bar, averting the gaze along the beer and wine section of the grocery store and online shopping and pickup instead, of substituting the gum for tobacco, flipping the rubber band worn on the wrist, etc.)
This is where the so-called three-second rule comes into play, but which I have been taught to think of as the nano-second rule because to an addict a lot can happen in the mind within three seconds. I have also been helped on objectification with the book “Brain Lock” which deals with compulsive thoughts and behaviors. Now for me the spark creates an automatic reframing as the trigger for a silent prayer for whomever I have been aroused to notice, a quick prayer for their wellbeing. It is a doorway that closes on objectification and opens up for empathy. It moves from I-It to I-Thou in a second.
In a broader sense, the empathy invoked in response to the objectifying spark is a manifestation of the love traditionally known in the Greek word of agape love, a tapping into the universal love or compassion one for another without any necessary personal or group ties. It reminds us of our connections and equality with one another unconditionally. It then is the soil for all other kinds of true loving relationships, sexual and otherwise, which might grow. In doing so, it shapes love itself not as a fixed object, like something one gets, possesses, but more like a living subject itself we should respect. When we do this, then sexuality becomes healthy and its sparks, as the sober know, can be even more intense when they grow from emotional intimacy and not objectification.
This is where my introduction to Alain Badiou’s “In Praise of Love” helps round out my
experiences with the objectification vs. love spectrum of relationships and encounters with
others. The French Christian Marxist philosopher wrote it in 2009, a short book I immediately
knew was going to be helpful in recovery because of his main tenet that love is more mutual
adventure than an object that some of us, especially in selfishness, wanted to keep seeking and acquiring over and over, which meant sabotaging and ending or damaging love so we could always be in pursuit, always hungry to have, and as a result becoming more focused on
maintaining the hunger itself than to rest in having love in our lives. Our way to not experience love is to avoid its necessary ingredient of intimacy through such repeated approach-avoidance.
Badiou praises love as a long enduring constancy, a steadfastness, an "hesed" to use the Hebrew biblical term for lovingkindness that doesn't abandon us even when we abandon it; he praises love as a mutual adventure of and into life, an adventure of sharing perspectives of life, a shared deeper seeing of one another and of our days together; in fact, the commitment to help the other to see life is what helps us see and experience it wholly, holy. Love gets us out of and over our shallow selves to get into our deeper selves. This is the opposite of objectification’s superficial seeing and skimmed-surface of desire and passion. We then become deeper subjects of life itself as we together create love and life. (And this is why being in and with Nature, the physical world howsoever we can, aids sober sexuality as it reminds us of our greater wholeness, the mutual “Subject-ification” of all. As we learn to rid ourselves of the colonizer instinct of dominion over Nature, we rid ourselves of objectification, and vice versa. Again, seeing the Thou of the other transforms the I into part of that greater sense of Thou.
I have great remorse at how objectification possessed much of my secret inner life even as I
fought against it in my outward behavior with others at the same time. I was mostly able to resist the male “James Bond” objectification culture of the decades in the 60s, 70s, 80s, those of my supposedly formative years. But I surrendered to it in much of my secret behavior with porn in those pre-internet years. That disconnect even then fueled my shame which fueled my secrecy.
I was torn between the reactions to porn at the time that are still with us today. One that it was only a natural harmless diversion somewhat akin to a man continuing to enjoy the comic books of his adolescence and it was only moralistic reactionaries who disliked sexuality who opposed porn, unsuccessfully as it exponentially grew around us. The other influence was the burgeoning feminist critique that porn was not victimless and the objectification tended to become extreme with real life effects. I knew the latter was the more accurate assessment, but by then I felt trapped by my desires and dopamine, to my addiction to a secret life, to my character defects I couldn't or wouldn't see of selfishness and lack of courage and integrity and the true strength to make the choice to seek support.
In my wishful thinking I thought I could just outgrow it all by myself, not realizing, of course, that I couldn't just think myself out of a situation of objectification and acting out which my thinking had gotten me into and which then in my mind's minimizing and rationalizing was keeping me tied to bad habits.
I felt helpless to change out of the pattern since childhood of acting out, purging, white
knuckling, relapsing. And that was all before the advent of the internet. With the proliferation of the mediums of the internet and the rise of video and not just photos and
words on the web, and then with the powerful spread and impact of social and interactive medias and the subsequent explosion of sexual, violent, and illegal content of various kinds online connected to all sorts of addictive behaviors, all this took objectification to whole new, and low, levels.
And all of it came with the veneer of a user's supposed anonymity acting now not with one's self alone or with another but among thousands of others also anonymous. The dopamine effect from that extra hit or rush which also comes from the secrecy of the acting out was now being multiplied thousandfold. It became obvious that the profiteering platforms of the online environment are built on creating consuming objects out of people, out of the most vulnerable all too often. Users become the used and people on screens lose their sense of the self that exists beyond the screen. Objectification moves back and forth between the physical, natural, offline world (what once was just known as the world) and screen-based worlds. All becomes It. Any sense of Thou is diminished.
When we let objectification shape our responses to life we end up stressing the fragmentary in life, the living in and for a moment only, engendering reactivity instead of a wholeness
perspective. We lose the sense of the permanent, the multi-generational care and concern.
The spiritual practice of moving out of our reactions and into deeper responses, the shifting defaults of our mind needed in the getting out of our "lizard brain", as some put it, all necessary in order to grow the connections that make and keep the humane in being human is now being attacked by the rapid spread and rising intensity of objectification. I know this is not a new problem. Millennia of racism, sexism, classism tell us this, but all of those factors intersect now too in sex/porn and the myriad other addictions we face. So I find it not surprising that our culture now falls prey to growing objectification in our civic political and religious life as well as in our interpersonal life.
The emerging dominance of the World as Screen is the evolutionary development, the
singularity trigger, that unleashes the full impact of objectification, as a true virus in our
humanity.
This communication revolution and the drive to get and hold attention (so that attention is now transactional instead of the spiritual transformative habit it used to be known as) is the change that changes us. It could become the extinction level event for love itself.
The ubiquity and seeming innocuousness of the problem, as depicted in The White Lotus and so many other popular entertainments, is part of the problem in seeing the dangers and damage wrought by objectification. But so is throwing up our hands and saying objectification is too engrained by now and so is unstoppable now. Everyday people in recovery, in therapy, in relationship conversations with partners, along with researchers and thinkers studying all this, are learning how to resist it and renew life and the Love, the Thou, that is truly sustaining.