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The Sexual Commodity of Beauty

The rise of self-promotion and narcissistic endeavors is ever growing. The public sharing of ones life is the modern day equivalent to having access to 500 million pen pals. We have less and less face-to-face interactions with people due to the popularity of twitter, facebook, and texting. And in this growing stage of self-promotion, patience, beauty, and humility are virtues easily becoming replaced by immediate gratification, sexiness, and a see-me-hear-me-want-me attitude. The substitution of beauty and pretty for sexy and hot is a concerning trend in media today.

A few months ago I read a great article about how to talk to little girls. Instead of focusing on their outward looks, dress, or appearance, the author encourages us to engage little girls in their mind, imagination, and other aspects that are “non-physical” in nature. This article set a good stage for me in shaping how I want to encourage and engage with my daughter about who she is, not what she looks like. This perspective is quite counter-cultural. Most ads in the media are helping to shape the pervasive stereotype that women are only to be concerned with their looks and outward appearance. A few decades ago, the virtue of beauty wasn’t tied to how much cleavage you had, or how young a woman looked. Today, the trend is for women to be concerned with being all-sexual, or “hot” as Pat Archibald suggests in a recent blog post. Before reading his post, I hadn’t considered defining pretty as a virtue, but compared with the cultural push towards hotness it strikes me as a worthwhile conversation. I especially appreciate Pat’s connection with the drive towards hotness as ending with women becoming a commodity instead of a person.

It’s not uncommon for men to tell me that women are difficult to be seen as anything other than a sex object. Conversely woman often explain the tension they feel in the need to be like a sexual goddess (no doubt influenced by the overwhelming use of porn by men and women) for her husband. Both of these relational realities create huge issues of objectification. It’s impossible to have a functioning relationship, intimate or not, when one is viewed as anything other than a person.

There are two issues here. First is the need for women to transcend the message that to be sexy and hot is to be beautiful. To take it one step further, women need to reject the notion that beauty is synonymous with being sexual. Some of the most beautiful people in the world would never be selected to appear on the cover of a vanity magazine. Capturing and extending external beauty is a losing battle. It’s not just the women’s responsibility to reject this, it also requires men to engage beauty and sexuality in a mature and person-centered manner.

Men need to develop sexual integrity. The statistics are numbing as to when boys/men are exposed to sexually explicit material (average age is 11 for exposure to pornography). These statistics show that the ease by which men can move into sexually unhealthy behavior only supports the previously discussed biases that women are only to be viewed as sex objects. The development of sexual integrity will help men to reject the notion that women are sex objects and that they are only motivated in life by sex. Despite popularly held beliefs, men are more than just a sex organ.

With issues as difficult as this, it’s be easy to play the blame game. This often happens where women suggest that men are the problem because of their hyperactive and aggressive sex drive. Conversely men often say women are the problem because they dress in a suggestive and provocative manner that is impossible to ignore. Unfortunately, the reality is that sexual objectification happens to both men and women. Regardless of the cause, this is a problem that faces every relationship, parent, and person. Thankfully the responsibility of this issue falls on both sexes. It will take action, leadership, and wisdom by both sexes to change the course we are currently taking. Waiting for the other to take the first course of action is choosing to remain silent, and silence does not promote truthfulness.

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Kids, Language, and Wisdom

A few weeks ago I was cooking dinner and noticed that my oldest was reading the dictionary. Curious, I asked him what he was learning. He told me that he’d gotten the dictionary at school and he was just “looking around” and continued to flip pages. I noticed that he had stopped in the “S” section. I had a hunch what he was looking for.

“What words are you looking up,” I asked. “Oh nothing really,” he said with a sheepish and somewhat embarrassed look on his face.

We bantered back and forth a bit until he told me that one of the kids at school had spelled “shit” during lunch and everyone giggled. I asked him what that word meant, and he shrugged saying that’s the word he was looking up in the dictionary.

As we continued talking, it was clear to me that he and his friends were learning new words that had already, at age 8, been deemed “bad” words. Bad and Good aren’t very helpful categories in life, especially when dealing with the immaterial, and thus I wanted to help him understand that words are neither good or bad. I explained that words are like trees — they just are what they are. How we choose to use these words determines if it’s helpful or not. We can use trees to make houses, paper, furniture and a host of other things that can have helpful uses. In the same light, some people could use wood for harmful uses such as arrows, a battering ram, or as a bat/club to hurt someone.

As parents, its our responsibility to help our kids learn how to engage with the world that they live in: Not necessarily to protect them from it. It might have been a lot easier to take the dictionary away from my son, or to tell him not to look up those words for fear of how he might misuse them. But this reaction would only reinforce his curiosity about these words as taboo topics.

Parents need to help their kids deconstruct cultural meanings ascribed to certain words and help them fashion a wisdom-oriented approach to using language. Not everyone who knows the definition of “shit” can be wise enough to know when and how to use it. Sometimes, there are appropriate uses of words that have otherwise been labeled as “bad”, just as there are times where the use of that word can be damaging and harmful to others: It takes wisdom to know the difference.

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Parenting as a journey with kids

Lately I’ve been studying and researching on the nature/effect of shame in our lives. There are a number of fantastic resources that have provided a lot of help for me personally and professionally as I consider shame-based systems. One of the systems I’ve been considering lately is the family.

One clear sign of a shame-based family is the drive for perfection. Expecting family members to be or behave “perfect” is the penultimate form of performance. And while most, if not all, parents would admit to not expecting perfection from their children more often than not rules, demands, and expectations parents place on children are absorbed as the need to be perfect by the children. The pervasive underlying message is that in order to be accepted, one must perform above the fold of satisfactory behavior. Judgements are quick and plentiful that create lifestyles with hidden desires and actions.

Recently I had a conversation with a family to help with their oldest son and his use of drugs, alcohol, and sex while in college. During our conversation, I explored the rest of the family interactions and relationships. They explained to me that the two younger siblings were not a problem because their behavior was respectable and good, but the oldest was sinning and betraying the family.

The more the parents talked, the more clear it became that all of the children were responding to the expectation the parents had of their family being perfect. There was a sense that both mom and dad needed their kids to live a life that looked mature and respectable. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but left unchecked this “need” from your kids could leave some difficult issues to deal with. Living in the middle-Tennessee area, a very wealthy and affluent region, is difficult for a lot of families even if they do not realize it. There’s an expectation to have it together, be wealthy, and not have any personal cracks/issues in life (this reality is not just limited to this area of the country, but happens to be quite strong here).

The parents wanted only to focus on the oldest child’s behavior and how to curtail the rebellious spirit. I challenged the parents to first look at themselves and how they have perpetuated an environment where the son would “act-out” in this way. Their response, which is understandable and quite normal, was to focus on the actions of the son. While his actions certainly need focus and attention, the larger issue at hand was that of the family values, system, and roles.

Parenting is about guiding, engaging, and journeying alongside your child in order to help them become who they were created to be: Not who parents want them to be. The most difficult part of parenting is that children cannot be controlled. No matter how hard parents try, kids will ultimately do what they will do. And this reality is difficult and painful.

Kids break things, hurt others, express themselves in ways that do not conform to the cultural norm , and push the boundaries. The common thread in all of these seemingly “errant” behaviors is that they are exploring themselves and their world looking for way to to be connected to what and who is around them. There are obvious limits that parents need to set for children, but as they mature and get older they need to be allowed them to have more freedom and expression of their lives.

The most relationally adept parents that I see are those that come alongside their kids in walking with them in their journey through life. When parents and kids can meet together at the intersection in the disappointment of life, powerful relationships are built.

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Autobiography in 5 Short Chapters

Autobiography in Five Short Chapters
Chapter 1
I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I am lost … I am helpless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.
Chapter 2
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I am in the same place.
But it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.
Chapter 3
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in … it’s a habit.
My eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.
Chapter 4
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.
Chapter 5
I walk down another street.

~ Portia Nelson ~