Last week I noted that to truly love is to revel in the other’s very existence. That is, to love that person for who he or she is, not how they make you feel or what you can gain from them. The opposite of that love is use, which I’ve also talked a lot about here in the past (here, here and here), mostly in terms of pornography and using the other’s body for one’s own physical gratification. Because of pornography, we tend to think of the objectification of human beings, especially sexually, as a problem of the male gender. But, women are just as capable of using men as men are of using women and often in the same ways. In fact, more and more women are using pornography.
For the most part, however, the ways women objectify men are more emotional and subtle, though still contrary to real love. Simcha Fisher outlines some of these ways in her recent post for The National Catholic Register:
I want to emphasize that even loving people can be selfish from time to time, without committing a mortal sin or wrecking their marriage. I have, however, seen a woman whose radical objectification of her husband brought their marriage to an end. There was no other way to describe it: she treated him like a thing until he couldn’t stand it any more.
This is how women, without even realizing it, often objectify men.