29 Ways I Used to Center Men (That Embarrass Me Now)

Hi friend,

If you’re here reading my work, then you probably already know how damaging internalized patriarchy and self-objectification are on your body image.

You already know that thinking of your body as “decorative” or “existing for the male gaze” leads to feeling ashamed of perfectly normal body parts, obsessing over your appearance, and feeling like you need to be thinner, prettier, younger, smoother, and hotter in order to be safe, acceptable, and worthy of love, respect, or desire.

And you probably also know that unlearning and divesting from internalized patriarchy and self-objectification is desperately important if your goal is to make peace with your body, feel confident and worthy as a person, free up your time and attention for more important things than thinking about how you look, and actually enjoy this one wild and precious life you’ve been given.

But what you may not have spent as much time thinking about are the myriad other ways that patriarchy and self-objectification have been negatively affecting you and your life—ways that have absolutely nothing to do with your body image or appearance.

Because self-objectification isn’t just about looking at your body through the eyes of other people, worrying about whether or not you’re “attractive” enough, or needing the attention, approval, or desire of men in order to feel confident and worthy. It’s also about thinking of yourself as a provider of pleasure rather than an experiencer of it, and a provider of labor and care rather than an equal recipient.

Self-objectification convinces us that we exist for other people’s consumption, comfort, support, or enjoyment, rather than as a whole human being with our own needs, desires, preferences, boundaries, and priorities… and then it convinces us to feel good about ourselves when we’re adequately supplying other people with the positive experience we’ve learned they’re entitled to.

Once you understand that, you start to see all the different ways this nasty bit of conditioning is still shaping your life, often in ways that are unconscious, subtle, or so normalized as to be practically invisible.

Maybe you automatically hold your legs together on the bus or plane when the man sitting next to you is manspreading, even though you’re the one being crowded out of your own seat.

Maybe you spend hours listening to your male partner talk about his interests, watching his favorite shows, hanging out with his friends, or participating in his hobbies, even though that time and effort isn’t equally reciprocated.

Maybe you find yourself smiling, laughing, or staying silent when a man says something that

makes you uncomfortable, either because your habit is to always protect men from feeling embarrassed or ashamed, or because your survival instincts kick in and tell you that bruising a man’s ego can be dangerous.

Maybe you do more than your fair share of the cooking, cleaning, emotional labor, or childcare at home, despite having communicated a million times that you need more support. Maybe you filter what you say around specific men whose approval you want, downplay your accomplishments so you don’t seem intimidating on dates, or pretend to want (and enjoy) sex that you don’t actually want or find pleasurable.

Maybe you find yourself taking responsibility for men’s feelings, managing their egos, anticipating their needs, and making endless little adjustments to your behavior in order to keep them happy, comfortable, and interested in you.

And maybe, if you’re like a lot of women and AFABs who read my work, you’ve done enough work on your body image that you no longer consciously believe you need to be prettier or thinner or younger to be worthy… but you’re still unconsciously organizing big chunks of your behavior and life around making yourself more palatable to men, in a way that really pisses you off when you notice it.

This is one of the things I find so fascinating about self-objectification: it doesn’t just teach us to judge ourselves through the male gaze. It teaches us to prioritize the male experience over our own, often so automatically that we don’t even notice we’re doing it.

We learn to treat men’s desires as important, their discomfort as urgent, their interests as inherently interesting, their approval as valuable, and their disappointment as something we need to prevent or repair.

And I say all this without the slightest bit of judgment, because I used to be the most extreme kind of self-objectifier myself.

Throughout my teens and early twenties, I was—as the kids would call it now—a “male-centered pick-me girl.”

Gross, I know. But it’s true, and I think it’s important to be honest about how hard I used to simp for the patriarchy, both because I need you to see that this disease can affect anyone, and that it is absolutely possible to break completely free.

So buckle up kids, cuz I just released a This Is (Not) About Your Body podcast episode called “29 Things That Would Put My Former Self-Objectifer Self Into a Coma,” and it’s both incredibly embarrassing, and extremely important.

Because the consequences of habitually centering men and objectifying ourselves extend far beyond our body image and self-worth.

• It decreases our ability to relax, rest, connect with other women, experience joy, and feel safe in the world.

• It detracts from our ability to concentrate, learn, compete, and be creative.

• It impacts how much time and energy we have to spend on our own interests, ambitions, desires, and pleasure.

• It negatively affects our sex lives, our boundaries, our capacity for authentic self-expression, and our ability to build intimate relationships in which we are genuinely valued as whole people, rather than as supporting characters, providers of sex and emotional labor, care-takers, or whatever other “role” we’ve been cast in.

It also affects the world around us.

Every time we override our own discomfort to protect a man’s feelings, we teach him that his comfort matters more than ours.

Every time we take on extra responsibilities at home to make up for where he’s falling short, we reinforce the expectation that women will do the work of making his life easier, and the fallacy that we’re just “naturally better at it.”

Every time we suppress our needs, downplay our brilliance, reject our desires, or make ourselves smaller so that a man can feel important and masculine and good about himself, we participate in unconsciously maintaining the very system we consciously want to dismantle.

Healing our relationship with our bodies is an essential part of rejecting the patriarchy, and I will obviously continue talking about it.

But I also want us to start talking more about how it would look like to stop organizing the more subtle layers of our lives around men’s approval, comfort, desire, or validation.

What would happen if we all stopped treating their feelings as our responsibility, their preferences as a priority, their desire as valuable, and their approval as important?

In what ways would our lives (and the world) improve, if we all dove deeply into the work of decentering men, divesting from self-objectification, and breaking up with patriarchy at the deepest levels of our consciousness?

Check out my newest podcast episode by watching the YouTube video here, or listening wherever you get your podcasts to see what I mean… and hopefully you’ll be both appropriately disgusted by where I came from, and inspired by where I ended up when it comes to centering men.

Also, if you want support unlearning and rejecting self-objectification or decentering men in your life, I would love to work with you!

Apply here for 1:1 coaching with me, or just hit reply to let me know you’re interested in this topic! I’m putting a little something together for all the present and former self-objectifiers, and I’m curious how many of you resonate with this!

Big hug,

Jessi