Women, not objects

A few days ago, I came across a video called Olympia. It was made by Deborah De Robertis, and recorded the reactions triggered by her stripping off in front of Edouard Manet’s painting Olympia, which portrays a similarly naked woman.

The aghast onlookers’ startled and scandalized expressions and the following arrest of the artist kept me thinking. Isn’t it ironic that in a society so obsessed with woman bodies (they appear even in burger adverts!) a naked woman in a museum can cause such a stir? Maybe it is just that the realisation women bodies are attached to an actual person makes people uncomfortable.

Though, we shouldn’t be surprised. It just takes a look into any magazine or newspaper to see women being needlessly objectified. Sadly, degrading woman to mere sexual objects isn’t the exclusive practice of the media. Last week, movie producer Ross Putman shared on Twitter some extracts from film scripts he gets sent, in which female characters were being described. “Blonde, fit, smokin' hot” or “athletic but sexy”, are only a few, but they basically sum up them all. Apparently, her sex appeal and whether she knows she has it or not is the best thing script writers can come up with for their female main characters.

Now, this relentless reduction of women to mere physical appearance should not be taken lightly. According to a report by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Body Image, girls as young as five worry about their weight, and one in four seven year old girls have been on a diet. Moreover, female students all over the world are being removed from class due to inappropriate clothing, which varies from shorts “too tight” that unveil girls’ thighs to t-shirts “too revealing” that show their collarbones. Outrageous at it is, the best reason most schools can come up with is that male teachers feel uncomfortable. What type of message is this sending to little girls, and boys?

When we put first men’s comfort to a children’s education we know we have a problem. It’s necessary that society learns, for one and for all that women are not just bodies or someone to have sex with, not objects or distractions.