(You’ll want to follow this post up with Aftercare)

A feminist left a comment on my Brock Turner post the other day that really got me thinking. Here it is:

 

It was the absurdity of the statement that got the wheels in my head turning. Of course women, as human beings, are objects – we’re physical beings, blood and skin and hair and cartilage.

The most ethereal things about humanity; the arts, great works of fiction, poetry, scientific discovery, etc. issue forth from our very object-ness; our brain matter, neurons, hormones, etc.

We are objects. Human beings are objects. That feminists like Nikki deny this fact testifies to how much feminism has evolved into a religion. The dogma of feminism is that women possess a brightly burning, otherworldly spiritual value that cannot be extinguished or even diminished by any negative choices, attitudes, or behaviors – except for the heresy of denying feminism itself.

Let’s be clear: If you are a human being reading this post, whether you have a penis or a vagina, you are an object. Your value isn’t lurking somewhere outside of your physical existence, it’s located solidly within it. What you do with the raw material of your body – your thoughts, your face, your voice, your emotions, your hormones, your muscles, your sexual organs — this is where you produce value, or lose it.

What feminists hate about this glaringly obvious truth is that it means women have a burden of performance – just like men do. Of course, feminists are glad to evaluate men as objects with the potential to add or lose value. Are they utilizing their physical strength to protect women while they’re out drinking themselves into incapacitation? Are they misappropriating the raw material of their minds on video games and porn? Are their emotions in line with what feminists like to see, or are they ensnared in “toxic masculinity”?

While feminist perception of what men’s burden of performance is is as absurd and baseless as the rest of their dogma, they’re not wrong that men have a burden of performance. They’re wrong that women don’t have one too.

The female burden of performance is sometimes just as heavy as men’s. We’re expected to provide beauty for this world – to be beautiful, to be thin and lovely and stylish, and to create beautiful spaces. We’re expected to be kind and people-oriented, and so provide a kind of social glue. We’re expected to be quieter and more gentle, and so add a restful balance to the roughness of masculinity. We’re expected to be mothers, and use our reproductive capacities well to literally propagate our heritage.

When we misuse our reproductive capacities in the forms of casual sex, multiple partners, abortion and the like, we hemorrhage value — because our existence as objects is so heavily tied to our bodily capacity to create and sustain human life. But to acknowledge this thread of common sense that has run through human history would get in the way of feminism’s goal of expanding female power ad infinitum, regardless of the consequences.

The truth? By failing to live up to the burden of being an object – by being fat, slovenly, loud, aggressive, slutty, or selfish – women truly can lose value. Just like men.