Sexual Objectification Quotes

“Female knowledge of objectification usually stops at a necessary but superficial understanding: beauty is rewarded and lack of beauty is punished. The punishments are understood as personal misfortune; they are not seem as systematic, institutional, or historical. Women do not understand that they are also punished through sexual use for being beautiful; and women do not understand the lengths to which men go to protect themselves and their society from contamination by ugly women who do not induce a lustful desire to punish, violate, or destroy, though men manage to punish, violate, or destroy these women anyway.”
― Andrea Dworkin

“Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.”
― John Berger

“Every human body has its optimum weight and contour, which only health and efficiency can establish. Whenever we treat women's bodies as aesthetic objects without function we deform them.”
― Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

“Women aren't my competition because male attention and sexual objectification are not prizes for me.”
― Miya Yamanouchi, Embrace Your Sexual Self: A Practical Guide for Women

“Sexual objectification doesn't get oppressive until it is done consistently, and to a specific group of people, and with no regard whatsoever paid to their humanity. Then it ceases to become about desire and starts to be about control. Seeing another person as meat and fat and bone and nothing else gives you power over them, if only for an instant. Structural sexual objection of women draws that instant out into an entire matrix of hurt. It tells us that women are bodies first, idealised, subservient bodies, and men are not.”
― Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution

“Female competition is when you are with a guy you like and you look around, see that you're the prettiest girl in the vicinity and feel a huge sense of relief that there's no one to take the attention away from you. (Female competition is a result of women feeling like their greatest sense of self worth , identity and influence comes from their sexual appeal to men. Many women don't even realise they are feeling this way and it's a subconscious thing, but they notice themselves getting jealous when they see other women who they think men would find sexually appealing.)”
― Miya Yamanouchi, Embrace Your Sexual Self: A Practical Guide for Women

“The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.”
― John Berger

“And still you'll hesitate to tell him, won't you? Why? Because you're a woman? Is your destiny such a small thing then? To keep your legs open and your mouth shut?”
― A.J. Hartley and David Hewson, Macbeth

“Moreover, some of the images covered by the definition go far beyond what can reasonably be considered pornographic. For example, "women's body parts . . . are exhibited such that women are reduced to those parts." This description would include everything from blue jean commercials which zoom in on women's asses to cream ads which show perfectly manicured hands applying the lotion-the sort of advertisements that have appeared in Ms. magazine. Although it is commonplace to criticize such ads for using sex to sell products, it is a real stretch to call them pornographic.”
― Wendy McElroy, XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography

“When female stories are muted, we are teaching our kids that their dignity is second class and the historical accounts of their lives [are] less relevant. This lowered value carries over when women face sexual objectification and systemic brutalization from inside and outside the community.”
― Aurin Squire

“In fact what is pleasing and instills a sense of control in girls and women isn't sexualisation but the power. Several studies show that the positive emotions experienced by women who self sexualize in social media for example are not actually correlated to the degree of self sexualisation but to a specific motivation - being admired, attracting attention, the likes and followers of social media. Those are symbols of influence, and Status that is a far more accurate reflection of what women are reporting as is the fact that sexualisation remains the most available, Albeit a very narrow, route to power for girls. Power and empowerment are not the same. Neither is sexual objectification and sexuality which are often confused.”
― Soraya Chemaly, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

“Be that kind of girl who smiles when you walk past other girls instead of casting a dirty look. Don't buy into the notion of female competition that society so heavily promotes.”
― Miya Yamanouchi , Embrace Your Sexual Self: A Practical Guide for Women

“Time is male
and in his cups drinks to the fair.
Bemused be gallantry we hear
our mediocrities over-prized,
indolence read as abnegation,
slattern thought styled intuition
every lapse forgiven, our crime
only to cast too bold a shadow
or smash the mold straight off.”
― Adrienne Rich, Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose: Poems Prose Reviews and Criticism

“To get upset by an image that focuses on the human body is merely to demonstrate a bad attitude toward what is physical. If I concentrated on a woman's sense of humor to the exclusion of her other characteristics, would this be degrading? Why is it degrading to focus on her sexuality? Underlying this attitude is the view that sex must be somehow ennobled to be proper.”
― Wendy McElroy, XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography

“Pornography, it is said, presents false images about women. Pornography is a lie, because it presents women as large-breasted nymphomanics. If this accusation is true, the remedy is not to ban pornography, but to recruit a wider variety of women into the industry.”
― Wendy McElroy, XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography