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I am
getting overly upset about society’s portrayal of women as sex
objects. . . . I would just like to be able to not have an
emotional reaction every time Howard Stern comes on, or I find the Maxim
magazine my boyfriend hid under the couch. I just want to not
care. . . . This is, obviously, having a negative effect on
my current relationship. I am interested in self-help. . . .
I don’t want the “easy way,” I want the cold hard
truth.
 ell, if you want the cold hard
truth, you shall have it. Sit down.
 To
begin with, imagine one group of women who do not concern themselves with
make-up, or fashion, or mindless chatting on their cell phones. They aren’t
troubled by how society “sees” women. They’re nuns, and they
have dedicated their lives to serving their God in devout prayer and selfless
service.
Now, maybe this image, as perfectly
Christian as it is, is a bit too difficult for you. So imagine another group
of women who also live in calm certainty about their lives: married women
who through Holy Matrimony have bonded with their husbands—as their
husbands have bonded with them—in devout service to their God. To them,
marriage is not a way to find self-satisfaction
but is an act of lifetime service to God through family with undoubted fidelity
and no escape clause but death.
Most likely, that’s still
an image that makes you nervous. In fact, it makes almost everyone nervous.
For example, most persons in this world today cannot sit in a car without
turning on the radio to drown out their emotional loneliness.
So let’s look at your real
problem. You say you have a boyfriend, and I can imagine that you are not
living in chaste anticipation of Holy Matrimony.
You’re involved in a sexual relationship, and
that in itself causes the very problem that troubles you.
Once you strip the concept of
“relationship” of its chaste and holy dignity and reduce it essentially
to a self-satisfying sport—a game designed to drown out your emotional
loneliness—then you place yourself on the playing field as a blatant
sexual object in full competition with all the other players. Any woman who
has a more pretty face or larger breasts or more shapely legs, or who is
taller or thinner or more rich or more socially connected or more glamorous
or more fashionably dressed is, by definition, a rival and a threat to your
security. And even if in anger you try to assault
the gaze of the world with body fat,
tattoos, body piercings galore, and purple hair,
you don’t really leave the playing field, you just take up new, sometimes
covert, tactics in the competitive game.
So, in the end, realize that
you can’t battle society itself. You can’t use
politics to change the
spiritual blindness of human society. All
you can do is change how you “see” yourself. And when you learn
to see yourself from the perspective of true love
and self-giving, not from the perspective of personal
desire, you shall have found the cold, hard truth
about genuine, meaningful life.
  
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Huh? Donations? Freewill
website?