On fuckability mandates, and knowing your own limitless value

Commodification is the process in which something is turned into a mere commodity - something that can be bought and sold on a market. By definition, a commodity has to be replaceable, disposable. It cannot have inherent value, but is instead limited to whatever external (market) value is assigned to it by its owners.

Individuals can also be commodified – as is the case, for instance, with animal exploitation. When we use non-humans as our resources, however “humanely” we may (claim to) do so, we necessarily treat them as if they were mere objects. Their lives and their well-being become inconsequential. No recognition is given to the fact that they are sentient beings who value their own lives – every and any interest of theirs, no matter how important it is to them, can be sold for a price tag. They become nothing more than means to our ends.

Today I’d like to talk about another kind of commodification – the commodification of women in our patriarchal society, which is pervasive and very harmful to us (women). I am going to address some topics that are of a much more personal nature than usual, and in doing so, I hope that I do not offend anyone who may have a different view on the topic. My intention is not to denigrate or alienate anyone, but to (hopefully) to get you thinking.

In our patriarchal/phallocentric culture, we (women) derive a huge sense of our self-worth from how men value us. From television ads bombarding us with an endless stream of cosmetics that we (allegedly) need to buy, to pop magazines telling us that we’re too fat, to bikini contests and beauty pageants telling us that we’re not worth looking at if we don’t look like pornified barbie dolls, the importance of being hot and fuckable (to men) is constantly drilled into our heads. The actual standards for looking “right” are constantly changing and, unless you have a lot of money and a very high tolerance for pain, generally unattainable.

Most of us know this, and we know that this is done on purpose, in order to keep us coming back to buy more “stuff” in a never-ending quest for the mythological beauty standard. We know that this harms us. We know that heels hurt our feet (and restrict our movement), that waxing hurts, and that the (often toxic) chemicals in make-up would take an encyclopedia to fully cover. We know that teenage girls often have issues with eating and with their weight (regardless of whether or not they’re actually at a healthy weight). Those of us who are politically progressive are often critical of this endless stream of commodification, and we often shun at least some (if not most) of these fake “beauty” standards. But we rarely ask the more radical question: why is it that we (women) derive our sense of self-worth from men to begin with?

Under patriarchy (which has been the order of the day for thousands of years), women have been (and continue to be) second-class citizens. As a sexual class, we lack the economic resources that men have; we are under-represented in politics, in academia, in literature, and in the media. Gender roles and stereotypes (what we consider to be “masculine” vs. “feminine”) are all social constructs, but under patriarchy, the social construct of “woman” is often reduced to her utility to men. “Woman” is made synonymous with sexual services and child-bearing (or some mixture thereof).

This might sound like abstract theory, but it’s really not – it affects us in very real ways. We might not like to admit it, but the reality is that a woman – no matter how smart or successful or accomplished she might be in her own right - is often thought to be worthless if she is not valued in some way by men. When we go out into the workplace, how we look is often just as important (if not more so) than how well we do our jobs. Elderly women (who are neither fuckable nor looking after children) face an enormous amount of discrimination, and are marginalized. And even if you, as a woman, have a university degree and work a full-time job, you probably still make less money than the hot “babe” with her breasts hanging out and her ass rubbing against a pole at the local strip club.

I don’t want to vilify men, or to suggest that women should leave men (not that there’s anything wrong with spinsterhood if that’s the choice that some women wish to make). But the question needs to be asked: why? Why do we insist on letting other people define our value for us? Why don’t we have enough self-respect to realize how demeaning all of this is; to see that we really have immeasurable, inherent value that cannot be traded away? Why does our sexual class spend its (already diminished) economic resources on fuckability mandates that are intended to objectify us and keep us in our place – i.e., that of second-class citizens? Why do we allow our whole, sentient selves to be reduced to a series of disconnected body images for others to “consume” (just as the butcher’s knife reduces a whole, sentient non-human individual into a series of body parts meant to be consumed)? Why do we allow ourselves to be treated like pieces of meat? Why do we confuse the short-term benefits of being “liked” by our civil superiors with real empowerment – the kind of freedom that comes from the honest and unapologetic ownership of one’s own body?

Having extrinsic value (i.e. having your value defined and measured by someone else) is necessarily inimical to having inherent value. It necessarily means being inherently worthless. Being treated like a generic object for someone else’s unilateral gratification is necessarily inimical to being a fully autonomous, unique, and self-realized individual. Needing to be a passive recipient of someone else’s approval is necessarily in conflict with being an active agent that goes out into the world, does things for herself and pro-actively constructs the meaning of her own life.

Having been reading some feminist literature recently (which I hope to blog about more in the future), I’ve decided to ignore fuckability mandates altogether. I no longer own make-up or heels. I’ve thrown out the short skirts I used to own. I’m no longer shaving my legs (our phallocentric society’s obsession with hairlessness on women is meant to infantilize us). No more pedicures or manicures. I’m still doing my hair and otherwise looking after my physical health and hygiene, but I’m just not playing into the standard, misogynistic “beauty” standards that have nothing to do with real beauty and everything to do with devaluing women.

In the short-term, this will cost me. People will whisper and make judgements about me. I’ll lose out economically/at work. Men (who own a disproportionate portion of the power in this society) will pay less attention to me. This is particularly true of many of the immature men boys of my age (I’m 21).

But frankly, I’m OK with that – because what I will get in return, over the course of my life, is infinitely greater: my full/complete sense of personhood that is not quantifiable or replaceable; a sense of self-worth that is not rooted in being treated like an object; full control/autonomy over my own body; and the ability to pro-actively create and define my life on my own terms, rather than on ephemeral, consumerist trends. The short-lived fuckability standards that we (women) are taught to chase after seem empty in comparison, don’t'chya think? ;)

Striking at the roots of patriarchy

December 6th marks the anniversary of the École Polytechnique massacre in Montréal. On this day in 1989, a lone gunman – Marc Lépine – walked into the school and specifically targeted women for shooting. After killing 14 women and injuring 14 other people, he committed suicide. His suicide note blamed “feminists” for ruining his life. As Canadians the country over commemorate this tragedy, we are encouraged to reflect on how violence against women continues to permeate our culture and negatively impacts all of us.

According to Statistics Canada, the average woman still only makes 71% of what the average male makes, and that gap has not changed substantially in the past decade. The overwhelming majority of spousal abuse victims – 8 out of every 10 – are women, and 1 in every 4 women in North America can expect to be sexually assaulted as some point in her life.

Although men who commit sexual assault are in the minority, their actions occur within the larger context of a culture that relentlessly commodifies the female body at every possible turn. From bikini contests to strip clubs to the use of supermodels to “sell” consumer goods, the message is clear: the female body exists for the sexual gratification of men. Thinking, breathing, feeling human beings are reduced, in our consumer culture, to a means to someone else’s ends. This hypersexualization of our bodies creates a tremendous amount of pressure on us to look and act sexy all the time, because we are told (implicitly and explicitly) that our primary measure of worth lies in our ability to please men.

The idea that some bodies exist for the gratification of others is, of course, obscenity. Yet all of us – male or female, feminist or not – subscribe to that very idea, not only through our constant pornification of the female body, but also through something else, as well: our consumption of animals and animal ‘products’.

By virtue of their sentience, all animals – human or not – care about their lives, and wish to avoid suffering and death. Despite having no nutritional need to consume animal ‘products’, and for the sole sake of our gastronomical pleasure, we sentence 665 million ‘farm’ animals (not counting fish) to miserable lives and hideous, premature deaths every year in this country alone. As we pause on this day to challenge the obscenity of men presuming ownership of the bodies of women, how many of us will challenge the equally obscene (and mutually reinforcing) notion that the bodies of non-humans exist for the gratification of humans?

When a sense of ownership over someone else’s body is presume from the get-go, it results in a power balance that invariably favours the ruling group at the expense of the disadvantaged. We’ve all heard of cases where men have walked out of sexual encounters feeling that all was fair and consensual, while their female partners were left feeling abused. A possible conclusion to be drawn here is that at least some men have a sense of entitlement when it comes sex, acquired over a life-time of indoctrination that equates masculinity with aggression and power – the latter being defined, in our patriarchal culture, as the capacity for violence and subjugation. And that’s exactly why it’s absurd to claim, as some do, that women can empower themselves by participating in their own commodification. Sure, the woman at the strip club ‘chose’ to work there. But that ‘choice’ was made in the context of a culture in which women do not have the economic resources that men have; in which she was taught, from a young age, that it is her job to please men; and in which the men who pay to watch her degrade herself have been taught, from a young age, that they are entitled to sexual privilege over women. Victim-approved exploitation is still exploitation.

The same thing applies to our relationship with non-humans. “Humane” exploitation – which is a misnomer, because all animal use involves unspeakable violence – is a delusion that ignores the structural dimension of said exploitation. That is, ‘domesticated’ non-humans are genetically manipulated freaks of nature who exist in a permanent state of vulnerability. Bred into existence for their utility to their human owners, non-human individuals – who are nothing more than chattel property in the eyes of the law – are continuously tormented and abused for the duration of their short and miserable lives, right up to the moment of slaughter. That last moment – at which point we rob them of their lives – amounts to a brutality that no words could condemn strongly enough. The idea that hideous violence inflicted upon vulnerable beings can be reconciled with anything that can be coherently described as “humane” is sheer fantasy. Along with the ‘choice’ of women to self-commodify in a patriarchal society, or the ‘choice’ of workers in a capitalist society to toil in an exploitative work environment, “humane” non-human slavery seems to be the latest in a series of moral delusions serving to reassure an oppressing group of the supposed legitimacy of their oppression over others. 

The connection between patriarchy and non-human exploitation becomes especially obvious if we look at the use of female animals. Hens, who would only lay a few eggs a year in nature, have been genetically manipulated by humans to lay several hundred per year. Since laying an egg depletes nutrients from her body, her utility to humans is dependent on the extent to which her female reproductive system can be exploited, and her body harmed. And once her productiveness ends at a fraction of her natural lifespan, she is slaughtered.

Similarly, ‘dairy’ cows are exploited for their ability to lactate. Because cows, like all mammals, need to give birth before they can lactate, they are restrained annually on something called a “rape rack”, where they are artificially inseminated. When their baby is born, he or she is taken away, and the mother’s milk that was meant for that baby is instead stolen by humans. The horrific grief that this separation causes both mother and calf, and the agony of the aggressive milkings that follow, are far beyond anything to which mere words could do justice. Interestingly, this milk – meant to help a calf gain several hundred pounds in the span of a few months – has a high fat and hormone content, which is linked to increased estrogenicity and breast cancer tumor growth in women. We exploit the breasts of bovine women to obtain a “product” that harms the breasts of human women.

If you’re a feminist, and you’re not a vegan – why not? If you’re against exploiting the vulnerable, and you’re not a vegan – why not? If you care about justice and non-violence, and you’re not a vegan – why not?

Condemning gratuitous violence against a disempowered group is easy to do when it’s someone else that’s doing it. But if we’re ever going to sort out the chaotic mess that is our world, the onus is on every single one of us to re-evaluate and ultimately reject the “might makes right” paradigm of violence and domination that we have come to accept as being “in the natural order of things”.  All forms of injustice are related and mutually re-enforcing. As long as we tolerate oppression of any kind, we will necessarily be tolerating – and re-enforcing – oppression of every kind.

This December 6th, say “no” to violence against women by rejecting the notion that some bodies exist for the gratification of others. Say “no” to patriarchy by rejecting patriarchal violence at its root.

Got feminism? Go vegan.