Ever since I was a little girl, I would hear people talk about objects like cars or boats and always refer to them as "she." It never really clicked in my head what that was actually doing or that there was anything wrong with calling your car "she." I never understood how demeaning and disgusting it actually is to gender an object until I was older.
Then one day it really hit me. I was in the movie theaters watching a brand new movie when they referred to the ocean as "she." Of course, the first thought in my head was “did they really just refer to the ocean as she? What attributes did the ocean even carry that the writers of this movie thought it would be OK to refer to the ocean as she.” A few moments later, it really hit me, they were referring to the ocean as she because they were talking about the dangerous and unpredictability that they ocean itself carries, apparently just like women do.
So let’s get down to what this is all really about, being possessive. Men don’t just call things "she" out of sheer obliviousness. It is an internalized aspect of our patriarchal society. It is an instinctive and possessive act to keep a hierarchy over women. We live in a world where for hundreds of years women have been seen as property or a seen as a trophy, something that needs to be won or owned. Women aren’t seen as people; we are seen as objects. We are seen as just a pair of breasts or a pretty face. We are never seen as being intelligent or having a great personality or even seen as all of these attributes put into one like a man is and if we are given any personality attributes they almost always negative.
Where does it all start you may ask? Well in "Killing Us Softly 4: Advertising’s Image of Women," a documentary discussing the effects of advertising, Jean Kilbourne says it perfectly, “We all grow up in a culture in which women’s bodies are constantly turned into things and objects … And this is everywhere, in all kinds of advertising. Women’s bodies are turned into things and objects. Now, of course, this affects female self-esteem. It also does something even more insidious — it creates a climate of widespread violence against women. I’m not at all saying that an ad like this directly causes violence, it’s not that simple but turning a human being into a thing is almost always the first step towards justifying violence against that person. We see this with racism, we see it with homophobia, we see it with terrorism. It’s always the same process. The person is dehumanized.”
Society is continuing to dehumanize women to be able to keep a hold over them. It is not allowing women to be seen as a human being but seen as pieces of a human being, but never the complete thing.
