Last year, I worked as a Security officer in a Victoria’s Secret in the Seattle area.  It wasn’t a bad job considering the location and the people I got to meet and the women who worked around me.  There were some intelligent women working there and I enjoyed my conversations with them.  All in all, there are worse jobs to be doing.

One thing that troubled me at that store was the pictures they had on their walls.  They were pictures of women in lingerie.  They were all attractive and erotic looking but what bothered me is that they were objectified images of women.  The images of women were not complete images, featuring their whole bodies.  There were images of women’s breasts, their asses, their crotches, their faces and even images of women simulating sex acts.  None of the images was congruent with, what I heard, Victoria’s Secret message of empowering women.

In all of the store, there were no images of whole women.  The closest was one where the woman was cut off at the ankles.  This means, to me, that all the women who come into that store were being given a subtle message that they should value parts of themselves rather than the whole of themselves.  I think that message is wrong and here’s why.

I remember talking with a lady who said that her most attractive part was her back.  I wondered what she thought about the rest of herself.  That’s is the damage of objectification and marginalization.  Women are taught, from childhood, that viewing themselves as a whole is not what people want.  Men and women are bombarded, daily, with these messages of objectification and it becomes ingrained within society and it harms society as a whole.  Men are not viewed as objects as often women are.  Generally, men are viewed as whole.

If you look at images of men; they are presented as whole men, even if the object of the image is of their abdominal muscles.  By and large, images of men feature men from head to toe.  Even when the image is not of a whole male, he is still viewed as a whole.  I see that as an imbalance between men and women.

Why can’t we value women as whole?  What’s wrong with appreciating a woman because of more than a few parts of her body?  Women are just as complex and interesting as men are.  Women are capable of achieving whatever they set their mind to, just like men are.  Women  are worth being viewed as whole people rather than objectified.

Now, just to be fair.  I have done my share of objectifying women.  There are parts of women I enjoy seeing.  However, I make an effort to treat each and every woman as a whole person because that’s the correct way to treat women, in my view.  It’s not easy to do but nothing worthwhile is ever easy.  It’s amazing when you begin to view women as whole people.

You start treating women with respect and dignity when you view them as whole people.  You deepen your relationships with women when you treat them as whole people.  Society becomes stronger when women are treated as whole people.  Can you imagine how much better things could be if society, as a whole, treated women as whole people?

We, as a society, did this in the form of race relations.  We objectified and marginalized the various races that emigrated into the melting pot of America.  The worst example of this would be how we treat African-Americans, whose ancestors were brought here against their wills.  We, as a society, need to grow and overcome this as well.  The great Martin Luther King exemplified how we can overcome the injustice visited on members of our society by what he preached.  His use of nonviolent means and the teaching of love, in all forms, is a step in the right direction.  I believe it was his desire to teach society how to better treat its members.

Here’s my challenge to you.  Start treating women with respect, dignity and as whole people.  We will all benefit greatly, as a whole, from it.

Until next time…