Babblings of a Muppet-Loving Freak

I've been pondering this topic for a while and finally typed out my ideas in a somewhat coherent essay.


Recently I needed to bring my car back to the dealership to be worked on due to a problem with the brakes. As it wasn’t supposed to take too long, I opted to sit and wait while the car was fixed. Unfortunately they had severely underestimated how long the repairs would take, and I wound up finishing the book I had brought. Rather than being subjected to a truly inane talk show, I began to wander around the dealership and look at some of the new cars that I knew I could not possibly afford. Still, it was fun to see what colors were popular and some of the new features they had. After a while, I decided to sit outside on a little bench they had near the cars, tucked out of the way, and just enjoy the sunshine and the nice weather.

That’s when I heard them.

“Oh, baby, look at the rear end on that one!”

As all women learn to do by age sixteen, I immediately switched to a defensive mode and looked for the threat; however, the situation was not what I had originally thought. A group of males, too old to be called boys but too immature to be men, were wandering around the lot, looking at cars. The object of their attention was not a woman but a highly expensive Corvette.

I watched them, inconspicuous on the bench that was half-hidden behind a cement pillar, but more importantly I listened to them.

“Man, I would love to get my hands on that one!”

“Baby got one sweet ass!”

“Like to get that one up and running.”

“I would love to take her home.”

“Beauty, beauty, this one’s got my name all over her!”

Her.

It wasn’t a randomly picked pronoun. These post-adolescents would never have referred to the cars in question as “him.” Their banter, accompanied by loud laughter and high fives, was identical to catcalls women get every day. In this case, they were regarding the various cars with a level of enthusiasm that didn’t just border on sexual but was obvious to anyone within earshot. I doubted any of them were seriously considering purchasing one of the high-end sports cars, but they were “appreciating” them by shrieking at them with vulgar innuendos.

Eventually, one of the salesmen came out and asked them if they were interested in any of the cars. His tone strongly suggested that he found that unlikely, and sure enough, the group declined the offer, walking back into the dealership with looks over their shoulders at the cars they couldn’t get, staring at them with lust.

It was almost funny, except that it wasn’t.

I had an epiphany at that moment that some men view women walking down the street, in the workplace, anywhere, exactly the same way those cars were viewed. Unless the woman has an “owner,” a boyfriend, husband, brother, some male figure, she is seen as up for potential sale, and the male in question feels completely justified in yelling obscene comments at her. Bizarrely, when men are called out on their behavior, they tend to state they were only being complimentary when I have literally never met a woman who finds their behavior appealing. So what are they complimenting if the woman is obviously not happy with the statements? It is more like the loud “appreciation” of the cars in the lot.

Some people may think this makes catcalling sound like a perfectly acceptable behavior, that it is light-hearted, an attempt to appreciate the beauty of the female in question, or only an example of harmless male behavior. After all, the group of “bros” in this case was not actually doing anything criminal, only being rather impolite.

It’s technically impossible to be impolite to a car, unless, of course, the car is occupied. At which point, the comments start to become much more disturbing. An occupied car, say at a stop light, that gets someone else to roll down their window and yell, “I want to take your ride home” could well be an overture to a carjacking, let alone some of the more colorful statements these males were making.

A large portion of men see women as unoccupied cars. The outside physical appearance of the car or the woman, the object, is a thing to be observed and, if deemed worthy of comment, remarked upon, either positively or negatively, sometimes confusingly even both at the same time. Again, the majority of catcalling men do not expect to “get” the woman, only to yell obscene so-called compliments at her. If the men are in fact discussing an inanimate object, a car, a motorcycle, a boat, etc., aside from being rude enough to tip off a salesman that trouble might possibly occur, they aren’t doing a great deal of harm.

In the case of catcalling, there is a problem largely because women are not inanimate objects. There is a person inside of the body. Weirdly, the response many men give when their behavior is criticized is to comment that the woman should have expected the kind of attention they gave her due to her clothing, her hair, her make-up, or her body type. None of this is the real reason behind the catcalling as can be seen by the simple fact that women wearing anything from a bikini to a burka are catcalled, women with short or long hair of any color, women with a full face of makeup or none, women who are slim to women with ample curves. What they are actually saying is that if she did not want to be accosted with unwelcome “compliments,” she should not have a body.

Let me repeat that. The problem is that the women were supposed to somehow leave their bodies at home.

As it is ludicrously impossible for a woman to walk around as a disembodied spirit, this rapidly moves to discussions of where women’s bodies do or do not belong and at what time of day. A female doctor getting out of work at three in the morning after a long shift will be accosted, or a female teenager at the mall, a mother walking out of a supermarket, a woman going for a morning jog, or a schoolgirl having lunch with her mother could all equally be the recipient of these situations, so the setting has no real effect.

The last example I just gave happened to me at age 14 when three truckers followed my mother and I into a restaurant, commenting all the time about my yellow denim shorts and how “that ass is too young to have been with anybody yet.” The emphasis was on the word yet.

They were commenting on my buttocks, which were fully clothed and covered with a print of innocent daisies, as though they were not connected to a human being with feelings. They saw my body as an object that did not belong to a human, at least not “yet,” and therefore was open for ownership by anyone. My mother somehow did not hear these comments. When we were seated in the restaurant, I began to cry, feeling as though somehow I was the one who had done something wrong. When my mother asked what was wrong, I said that I felt sick, which was true, and wanted to go home. She immediately left with me.

I could hear them still laughing obscenely in the background as we left.

I took a women’s studies course in college, and the instructor, who was an adamant feminist, at one point told the women in the class that she strongly suggested we buy fake wedding rings if we intended to travel to other areas of the world. She had used this device in Italy, and if a male became too frightening in his loud verbal assaults, she would turn around and flash the ring, at which point the vast majority of the time the man would immediately apologize and walk away. He was not apologizing that he had made her uncomfortable or treated her like a thing; he was apologizing because he hadn’t realized someone already “owned” her. He wasn’t apologizing for harassment; he was apologizing for envy and possibly attempted theft. Unfortunately, she said, this rarely works in most areas of North America as the woman is considered “up for grabs” unless the male in question is physically present, not merely symbolically via a ring. This was the only time she ever told us to lie about our marital status in order to be full people, and the mere fact she of all people would suggest it made me realize how serious the situation was.

So, if a ring doesn’t help in the good ol’ U.S. of A., even a fake one that suggests ownership, and choices of clothing or other characteristics do not actually affect the outcome of the situation, and place, time, even age or the presence or absence of companions do not really prompt these catcalls, then what does?

Chillingly, it is that women are perceived as objects by a large number of people, and objects are not supposed to have an opinion about being owned.

To some extent, this parallel with the car goes further yet. The group of males backed down immediately when approached by an authority figure because they did not have the capital to buy the car in question. When a woman’s body (I will not say the woman herself) is harassed in this way, if the actual woman inhabiting the body states that she has no interest in being “owned” by the male in question, rather than backing off, many of them will instead become angry to the point of becoming openly threatening. In this case, the male assumes he has the capital to be worthy of the woman’s body: money, a good car, attractive looks, being “cool,” whatever the status symbol is that he believes she has found inadequate. By saying no to him, by the car refusing to be bought, he regards it as the same thing as her saying he is not good enough in some way: ugly, poor, too old, too young, whatever flaw he perceives she is finding insufficient. Again, a car is not supposed to say that it does not want to be bought, and a woman, who has the temerity to be walking around in a female body, is not supposed to say she is not interested in providing her body to the male in question. It’s regarded as being rather like what would happen if one of those males actually had the money to buy the Corvette, but was told by the dealership that they would not sell it to him. The anger in that case would be entirely justified. However, again, the woman’s body is not an object. The body is already owned, by her. It is not for “sale,” and she is not required to justify why she is saying no to a man who views himself as her potential owner.

Taking the automobile comparison further, throughout history women have indeed been bartered for, bought literally via dowries and bride prices, often without their knowledge or consent. They were and in many places still are given by male owners, usually fathers, to other male owners, usually husbands, and the consent of the female is often not a necessity. She is, again, an object. Objects are not supposed to have opinions on who owns them. A good object, or woman, goes where she is told, does what she is told, and does not cause any problems about it. In short, the person inside the body is told she should not exist. There is a disturbing sense that many men would be very happy to have women who are actually robots, devoid of any personality save the ones given by their owners, and that this is the recipe for a happy relationship: the woman ceases to be a person and is solely a body that does as it is told in all things, and if she does not, she is a bad girlfriend or wife, possibly sinful, and definitely deserving of derision and even physical or mental punishment.

Because she’s not being an object.

Looking at various documents in human history for ages past, it becomes obvious that women were very literally objects. They are counted as commodities looted in times of war, bartered for supplies, valued for their purity (and if that was tainted via rape then married to their rapist) largely due to ensuring the man’s bloodline is continued through his offspring as opposed to someone else’s via his wife (though males engendering children with women not their wives was seen as perfectly normal). Even the lovely passage in the bible that states a virtuous woman is worth more than rubies is still saying she is an object with a monetary value, albeit a very high one.

So what happens when the woman as object is not desirable anymore for a variety of reasons? What happens when her blue book value drops, so to speak? What happens if she ages and is no longer an attractive object to her owner?

She disappears.

Finding women in film, television, or books who are not basically human cars that occasionally get stolen and need to be redeemed is rare enough, but try to find women who are over the age of 40 at all. They simply dissolve. Even in crowd scenes, the extras are all or nearly all younger women. Similarly, very few characters are married women since they are already owned and therefore no longer interesting for plotlines. If the female is no longer performing its function as an object of making men want to own her, then she becomes invisible. Perhaps one of the few exceptions to this is the series The Golden Girls, which focused on four female characters over the age of 50 and largely concentrated on their issues being older women. Granted, with the exception of the character of Sophia, who was about 80, the other women probably would not have spoken so much about their advanced age had they been men since society views men in their fifties and even sixties as still being in their prime while women of the same age are seen as ready for the scrap heap.

Because women are seen as objects, and usually art objects, their value as humans is largely decided by their physical appeal. Unless the woman is unusually good at her other duties, such as cooking, cleaning, or providing child care, she is regarded as less valuable once she is no longer as attractive as she was at the time she was first acquired. If a man remains with her despite this, often the woman is told she should be very grateful for his continued attention since she essentially no longer deserves it, even if that attention also includes being told regularly that she is not a pleasing enough object anymore, many times requiring the acquisition of a newer model to take over as a showcase item. Hence there are any number of cultures that support the idea of older men with multiple younger wives or older men taking younger mistresses, but very few that involve older women with multiple younger husbands or older wives taking whatever the male equivalent of a mistress would be. It appears there is no such word in English.

In some cases, the object or the inconvenient driver inside it is seen as too much to bear and is either physically abused or murdered due to her inadequacy. Perhaps this is due to her refusal of the man in question. If the man then kills her or goes out and starts shooting people in anger over her refusal, a surprisingly large number of people blame the woman for his actions because she was not a good enough object. The fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast,” charming as it is, essentially states that a good and of course, as stated in the title, beautiful woman is capable of making any man, regardless of how bestial, into a prince. In fact, in the original French version, Beauty is scolded for not succeeding in fixing the Beast more quickly, largely because she does not enjoy being locked up and separated from her family and is happy to see her original home again. She is called cruel for this because she is not fulfilling the purpose of her as an object, which here is to somehow atone for the Beast’s sins by magically transferring her goodness to him. In short, a really good woman makes a man into his best self, and if she doesn’t, she isn’t a good woman. The man’s intention to be his best self is not necessary; if he fails, it is the fault of the woman he kidnaps, largely because she has denied his marriage proposals and will not love him. Look at the scenario presented. What woman in her right mind would love a Beast who threatened to murder her father and keeps her imprisoned? Pity, maybe, but not love. This is the same philosophy put forward when abused women are told that if they were just good, if they did as they were told, if they were the object their husband or boyfriend desired, then that husband or boyfriend would go through a metamorphosis into a prince. He is not to blame for his actions; it is her fault because a good woman makes a man good. Many women also take this to heart and assume if they are mistreated it is because they have not been good enough, that their “punishment” for whatever their perceived fault is has been justly earned, and they are ashamed of themselves for not being good enough objects.

This is where the parallels with men’s appreciation of cars stops. No object is expected to feel shame at a perceived failure, particularly one it is incapable by nature of producing. A Corvette would not feel shame over its inability to fly even if it were sentient as it is not within a car’s ability to fly. This is the one time that the living being inside of the body-shell is useful to the male. She can be made to suffer, believe the suffering is her fault, and attempt to fulfill impossible goals, often at the risk or her physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health. When she fails, as she must, the male can then use it as a reason to dispose of her in whatever way he sees fit, take the opportunity to feel more powerful by pointing out her failure or punishing her for it and thereby bolster his own esteem while blaming his shortcomings on her, or make her feel worthless by explaining to her how lucky she is to still have him despite her failures.

Let me state this very clearly one last time. Women are not objects. They have physical bodies that exist in the material world, yes, but the person who lives inside the body is the woman. That body is hers. It is not meant to be harmed, purchased, or punished by others simply because of its existence. Catcalling, much like the coarse “compliments” of the gang of males at the dealership, would not be hurtful or frightening in most cases if it was being done to a thing. Women have clearly stated on many occasions that this behavior is disturbing and unwanted, but many men state that the women’s complaints are ridiculous. Why? Because a thing shouldn’t have an opinion on how someone speaks about it.

Let me close this with a statement about the treatment of literal objects. I love dolls. From the time I was a little girl, I loved them. I can honestly say I do not remember mistreating a doll ever in my life. I find it frightening that there are men who would treat their objectified, real women with less consideration and kindness than I would treat an actual object.