Your host Leslie sits down with political scientist Dr. Caroline Heldman to discuss the role that female body objectification plays in sex and a woman’s role in society at large. Issues related to advertising, media, and culture are discussed. Warning: This discussion contains graphic discussions of pornography that includes descriptions of sexual assault. This conversation isn’t suitable for very young children, and survivors of sexual assault should listen with caution.
Your host Leslie sits down with political scientist Dr. Caroline Heldman to discuss the role that female body objectification plays in sex and a woman’s role in society at large. Issues related to advertising, media, and culture are discussed. Warning: This discussion contains graphic discussions of pornography that includes descriptions of sexual assault. This conversation isn’t suitable for very young children, and survivors of sexual assault should listen with caution.
Links mentioned in the episode:
You're listening to the first episode of the Third Season of The Nature of Nurture, a podcast for your mental health. I'm your host, Dr. Leslie Carr, and we are starting strong here in season three. Today's conversation is with political scientist, Dr. Caroline Heldman, and holy cow, am I excited to share this episode.
Dr. Hellman is an absolute force to be reckoned with, and since I'm fortunate enough to call her a friend, I will refer to her from here on out as Caroline. She does so many things that's honestly a little hard to know where to start with her resume, but she's a professor of critical theory in social justice at Occidental College here in Los Angeles.
Her research specializes in media, the presidency and systems of power, including race, class, gender, and sexuality. Caroline is the Executive Director of the Representation Project, which uses media to challenge harmful gender norms and stereotypes. I'm a huge fan of their work, by the way; I came to know Caroline from her work there. And, she's a senior research advisor for the Gina Davis Institute for Gender and Media.
She's also, I'm not done yet, an author and a filmmaker. She's been featured in several popular documentaries, including Misrepresentation, the Mask You Live In and The Hunting Ground, just to name a. She's also been active in politics as a professional pollster campaign manager and OnAir commentator for CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and then some.
And she's the author of seven books, including her Most Recent, the Sexy Lie, which is mostly what we talk about in this episode. I wanna keep this intro short and get right to it. So I'll just tell you a little bit about this book and why I wanted to talk to Caroline about it.
The sexy lie is about the objectification of the female body. Even more specifically, it's about the role that women play in our own objectification. The lie that we tell ourselves is that it's empowering to be sexy or to feel sexy.
Caroline makes her point in this book very compellingly, that this is so intrinsic to our culture, so infused in the very air that we breathe, that it operates largely unconsciously, and that really no one in our culture is completely immune to it.
From a nature of nurture perspective, this is big. We're in deep here with what it means to grow up female and to even relate to female bodies. This is true in Western culture and throughout the developed world. But perhaps we could narrow it to the United States more specifically because it's arguably at its most extreme here. No one gets out unscathed.
Now, I want you to know that you should not listen to this episode with children in the room, and if you have sensitive ears or a history of sexual assault, take care of yourself. This conversation contains some graphic discussions of pornography, including the kind of pornography that's violent and degrading towards women, and pornography that actually constitutes assault.
There are a couple of curse words, and I'm not gonna bother to beep them out because they are nothing frankly, in comparison to other elements of the content. It's an excellent conversation, in my opinion, and I'm not trying to compliment myself here. I owe it all to Caroline, so I hope you'll listen to this, but take care of yourself.
I will also add that it's worth listening to, even if you're not a woman or don't identify as female. Quick comment to the men out there, just in case you imagine this episode doesn't apply to you, I cannot emphasize enough how much it does. This conversation is directly about every woman in your life, every woman you know or have ever known, and it's also about how you relate to us, whether you know it or not. So I'm gonna drop you in right after I ask Caroline my first question.
I made a comment to her about how I can see, because I know her, that this issue has impacted both of us, despite the fact that we're women who have made a lot of investments in our interiority. We've both pursued advanced degrees, et cetera. Nonetheless, we're both women who are subjected to the male gaze, so to speak, as all women are. It really highlights to me how no one is immune to this, but I read the first lines from her preface back to her, and they are : "this book is for every woman who hates her body. In other words, this book is for every woman I have yet to meet a woman who loves her body."
And I asked her how she first had the idea to write the book.
Well, I've been studying objectification really since I was a kid without knowing what the name was. And I will say, I have an unusual perspective in that I wasn't allowed to watch media or consume media as a child because I was raised by religious extremists. And so when I was exposed to media, I'm going to say that I, I had a, you know, kind of first eyesight. If I was raised with media as a child, I actually don't think that I would be able to look at it and kind of interrogate it in the ways that I've been able to.
So I'm, you know, that I feel like that's a gift. And then of course, as you noted, going on and getting advanced degrees to study it further. Now, mine was in political science, but my interest has always been power. And when you talk about gender and power, which you know, I write extensively about women and leadership and women presidents and you know, intersectionality and looking specifically at marginalized women and power, you can't help but talk about sexual objectification. Because if you're talking about our value in the culture, it's just one of the primary ways in which we buy it into our own devaluation. And so I, you know, have been curious about women's place in the world, in our power in social, economic, and political settings. And then as a researcher, I wanted, uh, in graduate school to interrogate how it is that.
Our status as sex objects affects our personal and political power. And then I did a TED Talk, which ended up going viral. Which spoke to me about the need for, for having this conversation, and of course I didn't start this conversation. In fact, I wasn't even early on the, the early cusp of it.
These are researchers in the sixties and seventies. We labeled them today "radical feminists," right? Who identified the link between the ways in which, you know, women's this sex, gender binary. Plays out in the ways in which we construct that in terms of our own value and worth. And so radical feminist place, the body as one of the fundamental ways in which women are devalued.
And sexual objectification is just one aspect of that, of course. Lacking control over our reproductive rights in, you know, they're all, all sorts of great and series and ideas about this, but at the end of the day, I'm fascinated by sexual objectification because. It affects every woman, as far as I know. Again, haven't met one who loves her body, even the most valuable sex objects, you know, high-end fashion models.
But beyond that, it's something that we embrace. It's a part of patriarchy that we embrace, and in fact, we defend it. And I would argue that, You know, really since diving into this the last two decades, it's, it's gotten far worse. Women, young women in particular are especially defensive of the idea that they can gain power through sexual objectification, and it's just, it's fundamentally, it's just not possible.
Yeah. It's amazing. And I'm thinking about how this idea that it's this thing that we participate in, kind of whether we like it or not, but yet to your point, a lot of us seem to either like it or convince ourselves that we like it. And it's also interesting to think of it as this thing that we can't really opt out of, which is to say that I think we live in a culture that objectifies women so profoundly, and in a second I'm gonna, I wanna kind of get into the ways in which you unpack that in the book. But that we live in a culture that does it so profoundly and so seamlessly that you either on some level, participate in it willingly, or even if you are, if you try to be kind of a conscientious objector, like I'm imagining a woman who puts no emphasis on her looks.
Certainly there are women in the world that don't put any effort into their present. But they end up getting viewed in the world through the same objectifying lens. Right? So, you know, right now I can't even help but think about women in politics where it's like you cannot be a woman, a female political leader that shows up on a debate stage with like no makeup on.
Not yet, right? Like maybe someday, hopefully a girl can dream. But we don't yet live in a world where a woman can do that and be taken seriously. Which starts to kind of highlight how much we all swim in these waters, whether we want to or not.
Absolutely. I mean, the fact of the matter is we boil women's value down to their bodies. We teach little girls at the most important aspect of their value is their body and how much, essentially heterosexual attention they can get. Male attention. The male gaze, and this, I, I found this with queer women as well, although to a a lesser extent. So as you're pointing out, these are, this is a systemic problem. And I would argue it's a systemic problem in the way that we value girls and women.
What's interesting about like makeup on the debate stage is not only do women have to present a certain type of femininity or a certain type of, you know, a, a, a base standard of being quote unquote 'made up,' we find that in positions of political leadership, like in the, in the workplace, That secretaries or women in, in, uh, jobs that have less power, they can wear as much makeup and have a, you know, it, it be sex objects in the workplace and it doesn't affect their status. But the moment at which, uh, more high, high powered woman in a position of leadership shows cleavage or is heavily made up or is is objectified, she loses status.
So on that debate stage, while we don't have good studies of this, I can imagine that, you know, you have to wear a certain amount, you have to present yourself in a certain way, and Hillary Clinton talked about this having to wake up about an hour earlier than her male competitors on the campaign trail in 2008 and 2016. But as she, but, but then she was held, you know, to a different standard where she, she showed a little cleavage, right?
So it's, it's not just that you have to meet this standard, it's also that you can't, you know, it's very narrow. You can't go, you can't go too far, you can't objectify yourself too much. And just to kind of link in some other studies here: The issue, the reason why objectification, uh, isn't empowering, I think is twofold.
One is, um, the theoretical argument, right? That, uh, when we think about sex objects we're, we, we use these cues and we use, you know, binaries to simplify the world. And the binary that we are operating within when we're talking about sex objects is the subject-object binary, right? So sexual subjects act and sexual objects are acted upon, so.
Right.
If you wanna be a valuable sex object and you wanna achieve that status, and you do, you're still in a position of relative powerlessness in the sense that others are validating you, others are acting upon you, whether it's visually or otherwise. You're still on the object side of the subject, object binary.
You're still on the less powerful side of that. I, I argue that, you know, women are just constantly give their power away by being concerned about what others think of their appearance. And yet, you know what, what's the alternative? We are evaluated that way.
But then the other kind of big piece of this is it's not empowering because the more you believe you're a sex object, the more you suffer from depression, eating disorders, lower self-esteem, your cognitive load. When, when objectification is triggered or, or launched in your brain, whether it's because you're being told you're gonna meet a man or you look at a, a magazine that's objectifying, you're cognitive load is impaired. I mean it has profoundly negative implications at a personal level. So when people tell me that it's empowering, I'm like, well, it's theoretically, you know, logically not empowering, and it's also empirically not empowering. We have plenty of data to show this. It's not about morality. I'm not interested in telling women what to do with their bodies.
What I am interested in is, Is giving girls and women tools so that they can identify the systems of patriarchy, which are in relatively invisible so that they can navigate it. And I'm right there with you, Leslie. I don't, you can't get rid of it. You can just navigate it, right? You can put on some armor, you can go to war. And I talk, I use all of these war metaphors of the book, right? Because I believe it's, it's a war on women's bodies and this is how we fight back.
Yeah, it's amazing this, the subject object thing is so critical to me here because I think that one of the things that, um, I think about a lot, and I really thought about a lot when I was reading your book, is just this idea that in being objectified to this degree, one of the things that gets minimized is a woman's sense of her own sexual agency. You know that it's not that sex as it is displayed in the media, most certainly displayed in porn, but even a very, pornified media universe that we live in, it isn't about female sexual pleasure. It's about a woman being served up as an object that is effectively being devoured in some way.
Being consumed by someone who holds more power.
Mm-hmm.
That's it. That's the bottom line.
Yeah. Being consumed is the word. Mm-hmm.
Or, or how it acted upon, there are lots of different, you know, ways to think about this.
It's that the evidence is unequivocal, right? So my big question is, well, why do we still hold onto this? And you bring up a really important distinction, Leslie, which is the distinction in my mind between being sexy, which means your sexuality exists for others, and being sexual, which sexuality exists for you, and I'm all about girls and women having lots of sex and lots of unique sex.
Totally.
And doing what they want with their bodies.
Mm-hmm
I just challenge the notion, well, two things. I, one, I challenge the notion that, that it's fully our choice when we are drenched in patriarchy to engage in practices that are overtly patriarchal and, and two, I challenge the idea that most of the things that we do, you know, in objectification culture, in order to become, uh, more valuable sex objects have much to do with our own sexuality.
You know, so for example, and I'm gonna sound super judgey right now, but it's, it's data driven. You know, women who, um, people who get breast augmentation surgery, right? I'd wanna live in a world where we don't have to go under the knife and have risky, expensive procedures that reduce our sexual pleasure in order to be more valuable in that society. Also, there's plenty of data finding that rates of depression actually go up after breast augmentation surgeries. That it's primarily young women who are getting these, so lots of social pressure and social media's put more pressure on young women than ever before. And also, most importantly, it reduces sexual pleasure.
So when you're telling me you're doing this because you made a choice to do it, and it's about your sexuality and it reduces your sexual pleasure, I've gotta put a big question mark up because the logic falls apart when you really take this apart. And again, not individual women. I love women. I'm here supporting.
I want women to have a lot of great sex. I also just wanna live in a world where we don't have these sorts of pressures to, you know, put on our lives at risk and reduce our central pleasure in order to be more valuable sex objects.
Absolutely. And just to make sure that we're being super clear for the listener, you're talking about like reduced nipple sensitivity, right? That it's the surgery. Is that the kind of pleasure that you're talking about?
Absolutely. There a vast majority of people who, you know, get, get a boob job, find that there are health concerns. Long term, they have to be replaced, right, every X number of years, depending upon the type you get. But also more importantly, reduced sensitivity and pain and recovery.
And of course, anytime you're getting the surgery, there is always a threat of something more serious.
Mm-hmm. Absolutely. And one of the things that you write about in the book quite a bit is labiaplasty too, and how prevalent that's become.
Yeah, I, you know, I am a big advocate for, messy tangly, labia man. Right? Isn't this just, isn't this just like the analogy for our sex, right? Like, I don't want my sexuality to be tidy. Don't tell me don't, don't tidy it up. Don't make an adolescent pre-pubescent. Yeah. I, I want to live in a world where we acknowledge and celebrate wild labia.
Yeah. And the way that a woman's body naturally looks, however it is.
I mean, it's amazing to think that, you know, if, if women are having reduced sensitivity in their nipples from breast implants, it's very hard for you to imagine a universe where women are having labioplasty and not experiencing like less sensitivity in their clitorises.
It's absolutely the case, right? And on their, their vaginal opening.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, I just feel like we are so squarely at the center of this issue right now, which is just to say that if women are so focused, some women, but whatever. If, if, if women are sometimes so focused on the way that they are presenting sexually, that they are literally having reduced sexual pleasure, something is completely imbalanced, upside down, messed up. Right?
Absolutely. And, and I was thinking a lot the section that you wrote about with porn too, because I have such serious concerns these days for, especially people that are generations younger than us, where their access to porn came through so thoroughly, which is to say, you know, full access to iPhones, the internet, all of that stuff at a really young, impressionable age.
Where I was reading some statistics the other day about how things like choking in sex and male-female sex is a lot more common now than it ever has been before, and it's interesting to think that, you know, similarly wanting to be a good feminist here, it's like if a woman is sincerely finding that pleasurable, that's one thing.
But I am extremely skeptical that the rates of that are increasing because women themselves are finding it pleasurable. It feels far more so like it's something that somebody watched in a porn and then wanted to replicate. And you know, we don't have to do a super deep dive on this because a lot of it is really graphic, but I will, for the sake of the listener, just let people know that you do a pretty incredible deep dive on porn in the book and what in the industry they call Gonzo porn, which is porn that is extremely violent. And there's some really striking stuff where female porn stars have come out later to talk about the ways in which they were injured. You know, you don't see that stuff on the videotape, but that part is extremely distressing.
You know, it reminds me of a, a quote from a radical feminist that when you're rape becomes entertainment, right? Your value in society, your, your erasure in society is complete. And I'm butchering that a bit, but. Again, this feels like a moral argument, but it really isn't. You're hitting the nail on the head that all of a sudden you have a trend in sexual activity that some people might enjoy. When you think about what pleasure is in sex and how we tend to define it as, as humans as species, it doesn't quite fit. Right? Something is a little off.
And so we look at these trends and absolutely they're coming from porn and I will say there's plenty of data about the content of corn and how so a couple of things just in terms of the market. Because mainstream media content has become just more pornified, right? Whether it's HBOmax or it's Showtime, or it's streaming services, you're gonna see soft core porn all over mainstream media now in a way that it just didn't used to exist. A couple, you know, 15, 20 years ago. And so what has happened is that Pornographers proper have had to differentiate the market. They have to offer something different than what you're gonna get on a streaming service.
And the, the roots that they have gone to go make it more violent and, and make it more degrading. So we know that, uh, the vast majority of content, almost 90% has verbal or physical abuse in heterosexual gonzo porn aimed at women. Just under half of the most popular gonzo porn has something called ATM, which is ass to mouth, which is literally taking a penis, you know, covered in or with, in contact with fecal matter or if that orifice at the body directly under her mouth and, you know, I don't know if we can curse, but it's symbolically and literally, you know, eating shit. And so you also have, you know, growing popularity of, uh, rape porn. Pornhub is now actually under investigation and many. There's a global movement against a lot of its content because it's literal, non-consensual, it's rape porn. And so Robert Jensen, great scholar, likes to say, you know that not all orgasms are good orgasms, so what are we being asked to orgasm to? I think very interesting trend that is happening in with my students who are, you know, young people, college students in, uh, the sex classes that I teach or classes on gender, sex and sexuality, is they're actually opting out of sex by and large. And again, this is anecdotal, but I just wrapped a class in the spring where they were journaling and telling me a lot of information about what they're experiencing. Heterosexual women are afraid of sex, or many of them are, because of the themes that are coming from porn.
So if you look at the market mechanisms driving that, and you look at the age at which boys and girls and gender nonconforming folks are developing their sexual imago, and of course your sexual imagination and identity and practices and beliefs are formed by your culture.
The fact that pornography is the number one sex educator and the average age of accessing it now is 11 years old for boys in the us. There are a lot of, of frightening things that happen when you let profit-seeking corporations take charge of something as fundamental as sexuality. And we are seeing a, a pretty rapid decline in young people, uh, the rates of having partnered sex. It's that it's not the only factor in term driving this. The violence and sexual acts that are much more prevalent now as a result of being taught by porn. But I think it is a factor. My students tell me. It's a, a big factor in that they're constantly essentially having to educate their partners that things that they see in porn are actually not pleasurable.
Mm-hmm. Absolutely. It is really interesting to think that I knew about the rates of decline in sexual activity for younger generations. I assumed that more of it was a result of people spending more time on the internet and that kind of stuff. Younger people spending more time, you know, at home, maybe like on their phones, watching Netflix not connecting with one another.
But you're bringing up a really good point that there are reasons why young people are feeling disincentivized from having sex, literally afraid of. And something that I just wanna make really clear is that you're describing some of the stuff that is more extreme for people that are looking for novelty.
But one of the things that really disturbs me is that it feels like there's a, a very mundane routine way in which women are treated poorly in even the most just pedestrian forms of porn, you know, where like a blowjob is made unnecessarily aggressive. You know, it's like in the back of a woman's throat until she's choking. Like it's, and that's just sort of pretty mainstream run-of-the-mill porn.
So it's just disturbing to think about what young people are being exposed to. And no wonder young girls are afraid.
And we sound like, you know, all these kids these days, right? Except that what drives me is the environments we're creating for the kids these days, and then what I'm hearing from the young adults, my college students, and the trends that, you know, you could sort of see unfolding.
I would not want to be, I, I wouldn't wanna be a young person today with the pressures of social media. With the pressures to perform and be a different person online versus in real life. I definitely wouldn't wanna be a young person today who has to face the challenges of, of foreign scripts driving my sexual life.
I don't think it's a mystery as to why we see the highest rates of unipolar depression that we've seen, right? As, as a nation, of course, the pandemic is driving this, the rates up tremendously in the past few years, but we have a, a mental health crisis and the idea that we beta tested social media on a whole generation and are now seeing some of those results. I think that's one of the factors driving it, but also looking at, looking at the content of pouring, looking at the content. It's not just the ways in which young people are constantly connected 24 7, that alter the brain, alter their interactions with other human beings. Again, beta testing that technology on them. It's also the content of what you know, what they're being exposed to. And again, I just want people to have really good, fun, pleasurable sex that reflects some part of their identity, and we can never truly, you know, transcend our culture. But I think it's important to recognize what has been banked to us or taught to us from the culture that doesn't serve us, and, and finding our own way through that. And so I, I think it must be very difficult. I know it's, it's very difficult for young people to figure out what to do with sex.
But even getting on that path and realizing that, that everything you've learned about sex, you've been taught by, you know, patriarchal capitalist pornographers who are interested in cutting through, through clutter and, and making a profit. I mean, I think that's the first step. And just one more quick thing to add that.
In the most popular type of porn, right? Gonzo shoots, over half a women porn performers end up seeking some sort of medical care afterward that lets you know the level of violence. And it reminds me of back in the day, you know, when, uh, you know, Monday night wrestling was. A thing and you know, parents sort of knew what it was.
And then two decades later you have, you know, women scantily clad, their face is being shoved and shit backstage as part of the gang. You have this degradation of women and objectification of women that just takes over that genre. And I think it's the same thing with porn. That if, if you are a little bit older, you probably don't have much of an idea of just how violent and degrading it is.
Yeah.
And one of the things I ask my, my, uh, parents to do when they're concerned about their kids and I'm working with them on something is go watch some porn and, and buckle up because this is what they're being exposed to. And I think we need to understand that as a culture.
Absolutely. Because one of the things that it makes me think of is that, it's just, it, it brings me back to the idea of pleasure, right? That this is just not, not only are women being degraded in this manner, they're also not experiencing anything resembling real pleasure. And it, it really highlights the objectification in the sense that it's almost as if, it's almost as if the thought that women would experience pleasure from sex becomes an afterthought. You know, like
Absolutely an afterthought.
Mm-hmm.
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So just to sort of take us out of that for a moment and bring us more into mainstream media, I think one of the things that is really incredible about the experience of reading the book is all of the images.
So I just really wanna draw the reader's attention to the idea that even going and finding this book in a bookstore and looking at the images, it's incredibly compelling. Not to mention you should also buy it. But even if you don't, just go and take a look at the images because there is a picture that gets painted over the course of the experience of reading this book, where you're talking about the way, the ways in which women are sexualized and objectified in advertising and film, in television, in all of these ways.
It's so blatant, but also so pervasive that it becomes really insidious. Like one of the things that I found really shocking in some of the images is seeing ad campaign after ad campaign where I've seen these ads before, but it's not until you see them all together that you realize how women are being portrayed
So the kind of stuff that I'm talking about is ad campaigns where, you know, a man is standing over a woman's body and the woman is, you know, like let's say in a bikini or something like that and all boiled up and then like bound and you know, unable to move. And it's like an advertisement for a cologne. And you know, I don't know. I guess I'll have to think for a minute about sort of what my question is here, but I guess I wanna take us out of the realm of porn and just into mainstream media and say there is an element of this that is so pervasive in our culture. It's really unbelievable.
Yeah. And I think it's a continuum, right?
From the degradation and sexual object objectification, the reduction of women. So let's be clear, sexual objectification is the process of turning, uh, a human being into a sex object. One who exists for the pleasure and consumption of others, right? And so we see a continuum in, in all of these different mediums from, you know, the, the snuff and the, the beating and the things that are happening in porn, in the anal prolapse where you literally have, you know, rose budding where the whole point is to get a, a woman's anus to prolapse, meaning destroy her anus. It's so, so causing so much parge that her anal lining comes out of her body and then, you know, oftentimes there's putting honey on it or eroticizing it. Literally causing probably lifelong medical issues as a result of that, right?
So eroticizing, that level of violence and the continuum to women's sexual objectification and mainstream. Media. I, I see it as being continuous in the sense that it all serves the same primary purpose, which is to reduce women from subjects to objects, to reduce their power.
And, and it's what's fascinating to me is when you talk about, oh, well, sex sells, it's actually not sex selling. We have some really good data that sex doesn't sell. It might sell in very specific instances to certain people, but by large people don't like to see sexual objectification. And they especially don't like to see it when it's being used to sell things that have nothing to do with that because it feels like a cheap shot. Right? And we're always critical of, of being manipulated by advertisers.
One of the, the kind of obvious points of logic against the idea that sex sells is that women are sexual beings. And 93% of women identify as heterosexual. And so if it was just about markets and sex selling, then we would be surrounded by sexually objectified male bodies, but we're not.
So when you say sex sells, It. That's not what's being sold. I actually think something very different is being sold and the the fact that we have scantily cloud women's bodies everywhere, and we've totally normalized that. I think it's selling power. I think it's selling a very subtle reminder that it doesn't matter where you are as a man, you might be marginalized in other ways, but, but your status as a man will always, you're, you're, you look at these sexually objectified images and you will be reminded that you're always in a position of power over women who are sex objects, right? Or sex objects who are women, the two being inextricably entwined.
So I think what selling is actually an idea of power. It's a reminder that you're in the driver's seat. It's a reminder that you have more value in society. It's a specific reminder that you get to be the great validator. And men get to be the great validator of women's bodies and their worth. They also get to be the great validator of other men and their worth.
So when women are coming into play, you know that. The, the idea of a high status woman or a, you know, high status sex object that's about getting heterosexual male attention, right? So men get to be the great validators of everyone, and I think being surrounded by normalized images of hypersexualized girls and women just constantly lets you know that you're, you're in charge.
That's amazing. I mean, it, it brings me full circle to the notion of the sexy lie too, which is just to say that, can you explain a little bit about how women have been led to believe that they should participate in this for their own wellbeing.
Well, we're taught from a very early age, right, that our bodies are our most valuable asset.
And so that becomes ingrained. I think the most common thing we say to little girls, actually, we say it to infants, we find out what the sex is, right? And we say, oh, she's so pretty. And then we continue that. We, we pass that torch. All of us and women, you know, primarily do, we're the primary caretakers still a majority in the United States.
So we pass that, that value set down. I argue in the book, well before we're conscious of being conscious, right? So it's like our software goes in and, and essentially becomes hardware at some point, and that it, it becomes part of our social DNA to mix all of the metaphors. And so it's really difficult for us to see that this value system, because we've been so inculcated in it, and I am using the example in the book of, you know, my, my young, younger students can't have a really hard time identifying sex. They can't even, they can't even spot it. It's so, you know, part of the air they breathe, they can't even spot it. And I use this example of, of doing a media study where I, I wasn't getting in a rate of reliability, which is this research test for everybody agreeing on what they're seeing.
They just weren't picking up sexual objectification. And so I showed them this clip with a protagonist who's a coach and a football player, and they're walking along the sidelines and there's this crotch shot where a cheerleader comes by and you just see her crotch and her legs close again. You don't see her face. And I said, did everyone get that? That's, you know, gratuitous, gratuitous, sexual objectification. And they didn't. And they're like, no, no. That's just what happens on the sidelines in the football game. And I'm just pulling my hair out thinking, you can't even see it. Right? Like it's being, it's like being raised in a red room, being pulled out of that room and being asked to describe the color red. You can't do it.
And so, It's, so, I think the first thing is we don't even really know what it is. And then the second thing is it's, we have been sold a bill of goods. We've been set up, right? We've been, we have, are playing a game and is absolutely stacked against us in so many different ways. And we, we can't even give it a name.
We can't even say that it's a problem. I also think that there's a lot of. We with the, the rise of choice feminism, which is the fallacy that anything that a woman does and then calls feminists is feminist. It's not actually how systems of power work, right? Yeah. Like I, it's just not how it works. The rise of that though has, uh, made it really difficult for girls and women to identify this as being a problem.
And I, I've laid out, you know, why it's a problem. It because it affects us personally, right? It just affects us, it, our mental state. It, it affects how we feel about ourselves, our confidence. We just have, you know, two decades of studies finding that the more you think of yourself as a sex object, the less well you are.
And so I think it's an easy sell to say, look, there's a reason you're feeling this way. But it's harder to say that this, you know it, it's harder to say that when you participate in the system, you're upholding the system. It's a problem. We all need to push back against it because in the moment, it feels very empowering, right?
And the moment when I'm getting validation from a dude at a stoplight I'll never see again. It feels really good, but that's actually how absurd our value is, right? That a complete stranger who will never see again is the constant source of our, what's called habitual body monitoring. We're always thinking about how we look, which by the way, cuts into our cognitive load.
We have some great experiments on that, but setting that aside, researchers at, uh, the University of Michigan find that the amount of time that women spend thinking about their bodies over the course of their lifetime, you could get a couple of PhDs. That's the amount of time we actually invest in that.
But my bigger issue is that we're investing in the validation of people by and large, who don't matter to us, and we're giving away our power by letting an external forces validate us. So there, there's just so much here that makes it really difficult to identify the problem and to act on the problem.
And as I argue in the book, I don't actually think we can ever get out of that. Not while we've got the system that we have. And I think the best that most feminists think of and imagine, I really hope we can push beyond this, but the best is to say, oh no, all by, you know, all women can be valuable sex objects cuz that's where we are. Right? We're like, I I, I don't wanna name the names of specific celebrities I do in the book and I do it with great reluctance cuz I understand that there are women making their way in industries that are male dominated and, and very hostile and expect a certain type of woman and product to be sold. But at the end of the day, like the best, pretty much most feminists imagine is saying, well, you know, so we're gonna broaden who gets to be valuable.
We're gonna say that, you know, all of these women who've been traditionally marginalized from having value in a system that really values skinny white women, so we're, we're gonna just broaden the net. And my issue is, okay, that's a good intermediary step, but it's doesn't fundamentally throw out the entire model, which is the problem.
That's amazing. I, I'm thinking about how women and particularly white women find their power in proximity to male power. Right. And it's interesting to think that, I think this problem is as pervasive as it is because for millennia, female survival was dependent upon being chosen by a man who would financially support you and take care of you.
So that a long time ago set up a dynamic where women were in competition with other women to be chosen. But to your point, it's amazing to think that even after several decades that in the big scheme of things, that's not a lot of time, even after several decades of reaching for a certain kind of parity, striving for a certain kind of parity, entering the workforce, getting jobs, PhDs, positions as justices, et cetera, that we still are striving for power through proximity to male power and by the, by the idea of having been sort of chosen by a man, validated by a man.
Yep. And doesn't matter what you do as a woman in our culture. It doesn't matter how high you rise in the ranks of money, political power, celebrity.
You will still be judged based upon your body. And in some ways, the more public you are and the more powerful you are, the stronger the pressure around that.
Absolutely.
It's, it's a game that is absolutely stacked against us, right? So it it's an, it's a, it's a way of being in the world that sets our value, that sets us up to have to be validated by others. So it robs us of our power.
It also causes us to, I would argue, focus a lot of time, energy on pretty vacuous, meaningless things. You know, I, I'm not a critique fashion. I think there's something to that, but like, the amount of time we spend thinking about our appearance is ridiculous. It, it's a time suck. And then it doesn't matter if you're a valuable object, like you've spent all of this time and energy and maybe you have surgeries and you achieve really high, you know, sex object status.
And even some women capitalize on that. They make money off of their bodies, but it's, you know, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction, by and large. It's most of us just believing that that's how it works, but it's not benefiting us. We're not making money off of it. And in fact, we're upholding systems that ensure that, that we don't have the same value and, and have wage gaps and are discriminated against.
And then you age out of it. So the system, like at some point, you know, you become, you're not fuckable anymore, and so your value, your erasure of value becomes. We go along with this. And in fact, many of us argue that, that this is empowering.
No, no, it's not. I mean, it is. It is a system that sets women up regardless of whatever else we do. It sets up our lives and our happiness and our words to be contingent upon something is fleeting and something is genetically determined as body and something as discriminatory as are you, were you born into a skinny, you know, white body genetically? You can dye your hair blonde. I mean, it's really this ridiculously racist, size-ist, ableist, ageist, classist form of you know, of, of women's existence, of, of our value.
And, and then to have so many young women, especially claiming that it's empowering, it's like we just need a national wake up call.
Mm-hmm.
I would love to see a massive rejection of this. Just like we're seeing a massive rejection of shareholder capitalism and exploitation on the climate crisis.
Like, I would love to see us really push back against the pollution of our, our media airwaves.
Uh, you are bringing me right to where I wanted to go next, which is just to say, how do, how do we stop this? How do we do that, Caroline?
Well, you know, there are lots of different approaches. I love free speech. I, as much as I am talking negatively about social media, wow, is it a double edged sword? It communi, you know, it connects us in ways that we just previously weren't able to be connected.
In the book, I make the argument that because our current system of normalizing women's objectification and degradation is a result of capitalism plus patriarchy, plus, you know, All of, all of the consumerist, well profiteering, I guess that's capitalism, but really digging in deep to this idea that the, the bigger the gap between where you think you are and where you think you need to be, the more stuff you will buy.
Like that's the model that's driving this. And so we're not gonna get rid of capitalism and patriarchy overnight. So the best way to, to address this right now in your everyday life is to recognize it, put on armor and navigate it. And I, you know, spend a lot of time thinking about ways to do that. I will say that I, my students have even better ways, but I talk about, you know, taking a sexy light cleanse where you actually stop consuming media, which is so at an individual level, you stop consuming damaging media. You keep a journal to track your habitual body monitoring.
And just to tie this quickly back into sex: people who engage in more habitual body monitoring during sex, something called spectator, they actually have less sexual pleasure. So beyond the physical thing of, of less sexual pleasure, perhaps from, you know, surgeries. If even if you haven't had surgery and you're what we call a high self-objectfier, which, you know, sounds like women are doing it to themselves. I don't really love that term. But the more you think of yourself as a sex object, the less pleasure you have on average during your sexual acts because you're constantly thinking about your body.
So I, you know, some really clear guidance in the book about how to detox essentially from a culture that teaches you to be a sex object.
And then at the individual level, we can also make very, you know, concrete changes. Like we can stop telling little girls that they look pretty, I mean, it sounds like a minor thing, but it, it's so fundamental, right, that what we need to do is talk to girls about choices that they're making and praise them for that.
Because I would love to live in a world where, you know, where it really is about what we do and, and not what we look like, not about our dress and appearance.
And then at, uh, you know, at a group level, there's a lot we can do to not compete with other women, to bolster other women, which sounds strange given that, you know, critiquing women who are kind of pushing back against this system.
But at the end of the day, it's actually not about critiquing individual women, it's about critiquing patriarchal practices. And also refusing to say that patriarchal practices are feminists when they're not. Because if something's not leading to the social, political, or economic equality of the sexes, it's actually not feminist.
So let's stop calling things that we just, you know, let's stop slapping that label on things. You could do whatever you you wanna do, just don't, you know, bullshit me and tell me it's feminist.
And then at a structural level, you know, there are, we could be monitor, there are things we could do. We could be monitoring social media better. I think the, the Facebook revelation, the study that came out, finding that their content inspires body hatred as a kind of general term. It inspires a lot, you know, self-esteem issues with girls. We could monitor the way that the algorithms are set up to produce that dissatisfaction. We could take some of the more toxic content out of our advertising, our film, our television, our video games, our pornography gets into some free speech issues. So I don't think it's necessarily, I'll say viable. Maybe it's a, it wouldn't be a great thing if we had a magic wand, but that's just not gonna happen. And so using consumer activism to put pressure on content creators who have especially egregious content, I think is important. Passing laws to provide funding for media literacy, I think is important.
At the end of the day, these are really big structures and individuals who don't wanna be negatively affected by them or have, you know, sons or daughters or, you know, Trans kids, gender nonconforming kids, maybe they don't fit the binary, which is increasingly happening and amazing. I'm loving that. But that's a different subject, right?
The gender-sex binary is, uh, unraveling with the introduction of social media and the fact that it's a social construct.
But getting back to the topic at hand, it's just there's so much we can do to, to, um, armor up essentially our kids and ourselves.
That's excellent and that you, you, you just did an incredible job of summarizing so much of what you cover in the book, but I, I will just let the listener know that there are a lot of great ideas in the book for how we can start to dismantle this stuff. And I think that a lot of it just has to do with what I would call consciousness raising, which is just to say that even in thinking about this stuff and reflecting on this stuff and how it applies to me, how it applies to you, how it applies to every single person that's listening to this, you know, changes are made by raising consciousness.
So I, I wanna shift gears a little bit because it, it might sound kind of a abrupt, but there's something that I just ha I have to check in with you about before we say goodbye today. And it is amazing actually at, at very deep levels how all of these things are super intertwined. And I'm thinking about what it's like to be a woman right now, just even on a political level.
And going back to your idea, you know, things are not just feminist, you know, let's say just because a woman does it or just because someone wants to call something feminist. You know, I'm thinking about the great Amy Coney Barrett and her rise to the Supreme Court and, and the idea that something could be feminist, let's say, just because we have a, a female Supreme Court Justice, right?
But here we are. Four days before the midterm election. So by the time people hear this, they'll have access to information that you and I don't have access to.
But I'm thinking about just sort of what it's like to be a, a woman, what it's been like to be a woman this past year. And I wonder if you just have any thoughts about the intersection of all of these issues.
You know, the sexy lie and sort of how it weaves its way into women, not just as sex objects but as breeding objects basically, right? You know that, that our sense of our bodies and our autonomy has been stripped away so completely in some, in some areas, in some states that, that we don't even have the right to bodily choice any longer.
Do you have any, it's a really big question and it's a really big shifting of gears, but I can't not ask my feminist friend her thoughts, right now.
Well, I was raised on the front lines of, of the, um, anti-abortion movement as a Pentecostal evangelical working with Operation Rescue. So I was actually raised on the other side, right to
Yeah. Wow.
Fight to outlaw abortion. And so it did not come as a surprise to me. And I will say there's one silver lining, and I will say, obviously I am very much on the other side of, of this now, and hopefully making, making up for what I was asked to do as a kid. It does not surprise me that we overturn Roe and one solar lining is that it exposes the fact that women fundamentally have far less value in our culture than men.
That is actually the definition of a patriarchy where we value men and what they do more than women and what they do and the feminine. We can add that in too. It's not just, you know, it's gender, sex and sexuality. So anything that's feminized or associated with women gets devalued and so, I think that we have never had, uh, much value in our culture. That the value that we do have is mostly in our heads. I think it is it, I think that women by and large don't understand how men think about us, how they're raised to think about us, how they're raised to base their entire identities on rejecting everything that we're supposed to be, and then somehow not fundamentally disrespect us.
I think it is really, really difficult to be raised in a patriarchy and think of women as full human beings. And so this is a wake up call. I think for, for women it would be crushing if we knew how little value me actually has. How, how folks think about us. Mostly men, right, think about us. I think there's a lot of inner dialogue that goes on, and I, I would, I think the same thing with the white supremacy system, right?
I think. It's really difficult to be raised in a white supremacy system like the United States and, and be a white person and view people of color, a person of color as a full human being. Same thing with patriarchy. It is just really difficult to be raised in the patriarchy and, and be a man and view women as full human beings.
And I think this comes out in a lot of different ways, but I think it's a reckoning. It brings us face to face with something that we sought it by, you know, a lot of women, by and large thought had disappeared. Anyone studying history, feminist studies, studying power knows that these systems don't go away.
What ends up happening is that they morph, and so it feels like they've sort of gone away. So the silver lining is that we are now confronted face-to-face with the fact that we simply matter less in this culture. Now we have all sorts of other signs telling us that too, right? Whether it's high rates of sexual violence, gender-based sexual violence, whether it's the wage gap, discrimination, the fact that women do invisible labor constantly all the time, that it's not compensated and not valued, it's totally devalued, homemaking, right? Care and domestic work.
We have all of these other signs that we don't matter as much in our society, but we have reproductive rights for a hot second, you know, for half a century. And, and now that's, that's gone for a lot of women and may soon be gone for all women in the United States. And I'm not talking about, you know, in, in fact cuz you know, we're rising up. We are creating networks. We have created networks and alternatives to push against this. But at the end of the day, the overturn of Roe and uh, with Dobbs, is just a very stark reminder that we simply matter less. And so the question is what we do with this quote unquote new information. I think it's probably gonna be a pendulum swing that goes pretty, pretty hard the other way.
W- will you say just a little bit about how, especially cuz I would love to leave people on an up note if we even possibly can. How, how, how does the pendulum swing backwards or what might that look like?
I think we're gonna see, uh, high rates of voter turnout and politicized mostly women going to the polls. We saw that in Kansas with the special election. I think my students', again, barometer, are not representative but can't believe it. It's kind of this interesting conflation of increased confidence with, with millennials and Gen Z'ers, where young women actually, you know, they, they, they have more confidence than previous generations. They just do, and I'm using that confidence as a shorthand, but they're absolutely shocked. Shocked that they, they could have their reproductive rights taken from them. And so what happens when you have an entire generation of women who is slapped in the face and told that they simply do not matter as much?
They were raised to think that they mattered just as much, which was a lie. They were raised to believe that their voice mattered, that they were full human beings in our polity and in our country. That was a lie. Like, all, all you have to do is like live in our world a couple of decades, and you figure that out and you know, when, when do women become feminists? They become feminists oftentimes when they become mothers and when they join the workforce and they realize the world doesn't work the way that they have been told that it works. We now a young, you know, generation of women who was told early on that it doesn't work for them. So, um, I'm imagining that the electorate is going to look very different in the next five to 10 years because conservatives and those who wanna control women's bodies and sexuality have absolutely overplayed their hand.
What a fantastic note to end on. Thank you so much, Caroline. It's been an amazing conversation with.
Thank you, Leslie. You're brilliant and I just love talking to you. You could talk for hours. Absolutely.
I could keep this going for a long time, but thank you so much.
You've been listening to the first episode of Season Three of The Nature of Nurture, and I wanna thank you for joining. You can find Caroline on Twitter and Instagram at Caroline Heldman, and her website is drcarolineheldman.com. If you would like to connect with me, I'm at Dr. Leslie Carr on Instagram and Twitter, and my website is leslie carr.com.
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Next up this season is an interview with health and Wellness icon, Quentin Veni. You talk about his life growing up in West Baltimore and his incredible journey in becoming the leader that he is today. It's a really special conversation, and I hope you'll tune in. Many, many thanks to my producer and sound editor, Amanda Rasco Mayo, and to Caroline for having this conversation with me.
Thank you as well to Donie Odulio for the artwork. And thank you to Steve Van Dyke, Lee and Tyler Sargent and Joe Potts for the permission to use their music. The band was called Clown Down.