KOCHI: March 8, celebrated as the International Women’s Day, is a focal point in the movement for women’s rights. Focusing on the theme ‘Balance for Better’, the objective is to build a gender-balanced world. Every sphere of life is undergoing signs of changes as more women are entering into sports, politics, boardroom. Albeit these positive changes, an important issue still needs to be resolved to reap the fruits of empowerment – the perception of society on women per se. For instance, during the Rio Olympics in 2016, the discussion about female athletes who won gold medals was on the basis of their physical appearance or relationship status.
On the other hand, men’s performance was characterised in much more heroic terms. This instance shows us how we perceive women’s achievements. On the other side, a major section of modern society perceives women as a ‘sexual object’. This attitude seeps into many aspects of our life such as advertisements, movies, television shows which sexualise women.
At the workplace, women’s appearance mostly dictates how they are treated. For instance, even though 50 per cent of Chinese billionaires are women and women hold 34 per cent of all senior management positions, according to Women’s Index data, one in ten Chinese women quoted ‘being attractive’ as their most important life goal.
Sexual objectification occurs when a woman’s body parts are isolated from her whole physique and treated as objects simply to be looked at, desired, or touched. Women experience objectification on a daily basis in the form of a sexual gaze - someone staring at their physique. Perhaps due to its prevalence, sexual objectification of women has become normal and natural and this informal social norm has even been accepted as a formal one. For instance, some of the justifications put forward to support the restriction on women’s entry during the age of menstruation to a religious place in Kerala is the best example of portraying women as a sexual object.
Objectification is so pervasive in society that women often take objectifying comments to heart and use them to evaluate themselves. Thus it ends up undermining women, and not providing the empowerment they seek. Now the majority of the young women pay their attention and energy more on shaping their body to become attractive or to get acceptance of the society in order to avoid body shaming. The worst thing here is that the professed women’s body structure is defined by the patriarchal society in such a way to confine the women and to use women’s body for their pleasure.
Even in households, women are expected to be subservient to the male members and work for the latter’s happiness and satisfaction. Here we may think it’s natural to be attractive to another gender. Admiration does not focus overwhelmingly on a specific body part or a body type but in viewing them as part of a whole personality.
Although there is no easy solution, to resolve this problem we should understand how men become so successful in projecting women as a sexual object without an effort. The objectification and body shaming provide business opportunities for bodyshaping/slimming clinics and hospitals. Even though these are gender neutral, the objectives differ, as men aim to become healthy and strong and women focus to become slim and stay in shape or zero size with no intention of being physically strong.
The sad truth is that a majority of married women are under pressure from their husbands or in-laws to stay in shape always. Women are even forced to become thin after childbearing through skipping/thinning meals, which results in severe health complications in the future. In reality, if a woman gains weight she loses her mental peace just because she is not fitting into the body shape chart insisted on her by society.
This can be easily resolved by shifting the women’s focus from maintaining the ‘body shape’ to maintaining the ‘body health’ by staying physically fit and having a diet which makes them stronger.
Once women become physically and mentally strong then the doors for other empowerment will freely open up. Projection of women as sexual objects will subsequently vanish from society. Leena Mary Eapen is associate professor at Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode. The views expressed by the author are her own.