Photo by oedipusphinx — — — — theJWDban
I have been surrounded by women all my life. My father taught me from early on to respect and honor women. I grew up as the only son with four sisters. I work with struggling teenage young women and their families in a company where about 75% of the people I work with are women. And as if that weren’t enough I have a daughter as my first-born!
I am concerned that occasionally some women in our world lose sight of their worth and divinity. I am concerned that in the face of continual bombardment by negative media and degrading media-driven philosophies about femininity some of our sisters falter in their assessment of themselves.
Shame is toxic. Women become poisoned with self-pity, inordinate guilt, and feelings of inadequacy. We can and should help the women and girls in our lives to thwart the debilitating effects of shame by encouraging them to engage in three rejuvenating, shame-alleviating activities:
1) developing healthy relationships with other women with like values;
2) cultivating spirituality through activities that re-connect them with their higher power; and
3) teaching them effective ways to self-nurture, then allowing them time to do it.
Women and girls don’t “need a man” to feel better. They don’t need a chocolate sundae. They need relationships of trust which inspire a sense of love and hope in their souls again. That’s why the three suggestions above deal with the three most important relationships a woman can have: female friends, higher power, and self.
Photo by Julien Haler
My wife, Mia, was at the neighborhood pool with my kids ages 3, 5 and 9, and two of their friends ages 9 and 12. She noticed that a very sexual 15-year-old girl kept flirting with five teenage boys. Before long, the group of hormone-laden boys had taken over one end of the pool. The boys were chasing the giggling girl around, cornering her, yanking on her bikini top. They began flicking each others’ pecks and then flicking her breasts.
The 12-year-old boy who was with my wife stood staring at the whole event, obviously not knowing what to think. My kids, luckily, were too young and too busy playing to notice. What kills me is that the pool was packed with fathers and mothers who did NOTHING! My wife was steaming mad over this.
Mia stormed over to the lifeguard on duty and said, “You better watch this, because I’m going to do something about it!” Then she turned her glare onto the group of teenagers, who had now been trying to get the girl’s pants off, and yelled, “Hey! That is totally inappropriate! You boys stop touching her body like that!”
The boys, shocked, immediately backed away from the girl, leaving her alone on that side of the pool.
There was no stopping Mia: “She is a beautiful girl and you should have more respect for her body than that! I don’t want to see any more of this today.” To the girl she said, “You are a beautiful girl. Don’t let them touch you like that.”
The girl looked sheepishly at my wife and said, “Thank you.”
As my wife walked back to my kids, the lifeguard gave her a high-five. No more problems in the pool the rest of the day.
This incident got me thinking about the blatant sexualization of women and girls in our society. Everywhere we look, we see images of women which are designed to induce sexual feelings or – at the very least – which have sexual connotations. It used to be that the grocery store was the place you couldn’t escape it. You know – right up by the check-out stand, on the covers of the magazines. Today, it’s all over the social media we use – Facebook ads, Ning ads, even Twitter is getting spammed with sexual ads.
This sexualization of women damages teenage girls. It misguides them just as they are struggling to define themselves. It blunts their intuition. One young woman told me she had been taught “through life experiences” (read: overly sexual relationships with boys) not to trust her own instincts. It took months for us to help her correct that. If we take away a woman’s intuition, what guides her?
So, turn over the magazine at the check-out counter. Report the sexual spam on Twitter. Most of all, let’s inspect ourselves and change the way we interact, speak about, and treat the girls and women in our lives. Let’s not tolerate our society’s sexualization of women!
