Objects of Desire

            The first thing that struck me and bothered me when I arrived at Brigham Young University for the first time was the way that women are treated. In public, men treat women with all manner of chivalry; doors are opened, places are given up in line, conversation is polite and respectful. What drew and continues to draw my resentment, however, is the way that women are treated when they are not present. There they are measured, weighed, and assigned values in a manner similar to that found at a butcher’s amidst the various cuts of meat. The only word to describe it is objectification. They are no longer people; they are goals or feelingless items designed purely for the enjoyment of men. This disgusts me.

            It was with this in mind that I began to craft the short stories that would later serve as my presentation. I wanted to show the dehumanization and objectification that occurs every day around us. I was aided by the ideas demonstrated by the photos of Sternfeld, which were so incredibly powerful due to their connotation. I wanted to take images and words and weave them together in such a way that they can only achieve their true power when they are seen together.

            The final stitch that helped me finalize my project was a work by Grace Brown entitled Project Unbreakable, in which she photographs sexual assault victims with quotes from their attackers. I found this very powerful and disturbing and wanted to incorporate this idea into my project. My main goal was to “deobjectify” women by presenting images and stories in which women were objectified. With this in mind, I drew no faces on any of the images and removed the face of the subject from the second to last one. The only image in which a woman’s face can be seen is the last one but I felt that this solidified the message I wished to convey. I decided to use photograph’s rather than drawings for the last two images because I felt that I could not properly convey in a drawing what I wished and that it would be disrespectful to do so.

            I found it difficult to do this project because it is something that is very personal to me, having grown up with three sisters and having seen the pain in several of my friends that accompanies sexual abuse or assault.