Today is July 7, 2026. I wrote this in 2018 as a newly single woman. I LOVE this post. I had a take on women and men’s roles that is unique. We just need to love each other and not be a subject or an object. 💕
I’m on this planet to act, not be acted upon and that’s not selfish. It’s what we all need to do; act on behalf of ourselves in our own lives so we can unconditionally give to one another.
Remember diagraming those sentences in school? Subject, verb, object. “What is the subject of the sentence and how does it act (the verb) on the object?”
There is much hoopla made of women being sexually objectified but when these issues come up, I always try to think about it intuitionally as well as rationally because it’s so easy to stereotype based on gender.
It is widely observed that males do tend to be the subject of most movies, books, sporting events, commercials, anchors on the news, utility companies, Presidents, and CEOs. The male perception of things does, in fact, run the planet. That’s patriarchy.
But does that mean that men are never objectified? Think about the system of patriarchy a second. Patriarchy is about usage and consumption. It’s about money, power, death, and oppression, control and victory at any cost. There isn’t much good about it. I’d say there is nothing good about it. In a system such as that, militarism, monetary debt, toxic waste, pathological lying, corrupt government leaders and religion are rife. It doesn’t do much good on the planet. But both women and men shore up patriarchy by accepting their roles of subject-object, rarely reversing them. They could reverse them, or in a loving partnership, both of them are subjects and never objects. So, in that scenario, isn’t it reasonable to assume that:
“Patriarchy eats everything”; Subject/verb/object. Men are consumed as well by the monster. They, in turn, are taught and expected to consume woman.
No one escapes and no one wins really. That means men are objectified too by the system as being set up over and over again as the subject of every last, damn, thing. They are, after all, most of the millions dead from two World Wars. Just watch TV with pen and paper and make two columns Male/Female and make a vertical slash every time you see a woman, every time you see a man and watch the men’s column pile up. That’s not a good thing for men or for women. It’s unbalanced! I personally wouldn’t want all that focus. It’s too much pressure.
When women are portrayed on TV they are rarely if ever portrayed as subjects or the ones acting first in the sentence. If they are it’s as a conniving wench, a bitch, a sweet mother or a nurse. Patriarchy doesn’t allow for women to be portrayed as a strong subject; a female lead. Hillary Clinton did that and she was crucified. The message, “Women, don’t ever try to be the subject of the sentence in the United States of America.”
I’ve had too many men say to me, “You just want attention.” My response, “No, I’d just like to be the subject, not the object being acted upon by you most of the time.” But somehow, I doubt most women even know they’re the object being acted upon. They take it for granted that it is their role because they follow system dictates unconsciously. The media and the church do the brainwashing.
For the first time in my life, living in the house I own, I am the subject of my own life and I am able to give focus and make each of my patients that come here the subject in my office. I started out my physical life as a child being extremely objectified by my parents, then school, then college, then my parents literally threw me to a Chicago curb when I was eighteen like so much garbage, then men, on and on for half of my life. Women are not seen or known or even wanting to be known by anyone as people! But are men either? They have that subject role to carry around all the time like a rock in a backpack. Not even our other women friends who are too busy being objectified by their families that define them, want to spend time with me.
Well, in my house, “The patient receives therapy from me.” Subject/verb/object. I guess I’m a pronoun in my office. That’s just fine because I’m the subject of my life for the rest of the time because I have important work to do and I’m doing it.
Synchronicity is the Source of Consciousness 
“I’ve experienced rabid reactions from men numerous times in relation to points 3 and 6. (in the article). Both of those points are related. Just conversing in terms of normal average level of intelligence in a spirit of shared understanding in a social situation has resulted in men lashing out immediately with paranoid and derogatory accusations that what I am really doing is trying to make out that I “know something”. Apparently, as an adult woman I am not allowed to “know something”. I am talking about just normal conversations referring to every day things. If I try to point that out to defend myself all they do is continue to accuse me of trying to make out I “know something” by referring to everyday things, as if that made me a rotten bitch.
These men would never explain to me what their problem was, and I was always unprepared for this crap because it is so irrational, but it relates to the idea that many men don’t think their theory of mind relates to women, so in their mind we would never be ‘able’ to have a normal conversation for real, so therefore it must be some kind of trick that we are playing on them.
I wondered if it might just be men of low socio-economic status that had this faulty thinking. Then at one point I dated a CEO and founder of a software company. He prided himself on an image of himself as a man of extra high intelligence, so I thought he would know better. Unfortunately not. On a day out were in a shop that sold games that tested intelligence. He wanted to go in but I have no liking for those kind of games so I went into another shop and he was in there on his own and he and another guy spent 20 minutes trying to figure out how to extract this piece of metal out of a glass bottle. Apparently it’s rigged so you have to be pretty smart to figure out how to get it out.
By the time I walked in to the shop he and the guy had given up. They handed me the bottle, and after looking at it for about 30 seconds I figured it out and extracted the piece of metal. My CEO boyfriend says to me “If we (he and the other guy) couldn’t figure it out how could you do it” – with the emphasis on the word ‘you’. He was really shocked and kept going on and on how it would have had to be a fluke that I got the metal bit out and that I couldn’t have really solved it for real. It was really insulting, yet he seemingly had no recognition that he was being insulting and derogatory to me. I politely explained to him that to get the thing out I actually had to work out the only way it could come out, I didn’t just randomly jigger with the thing and fluke it – but he vehemently objected to the idea that I could have been able to do any such thing, and when I asked him why he thought that he said that he didn’t believe that I could be smart enough to do even one single thing that he and another guy couldn’t do. When I asked him to explain why he would think that, he couldn’t explain. That made two things he couldn’t figure out in 20 minutes for someone who proclaimed himself to be so incredibly intelligent. It’s obviously a delusional theory of mind, and it’s a very common experience that I have had with men and it’s disgusting. It’s made me stay away from relationships, and social situations altogether where I will come in contact with men.”
I’ll stop there. All I can say is I can relate. Also note, there are very intelligent women out there who play dumb because it makes a man feel more secure. It manipulates his ego. That’s one way to play it. I don’t waste my time with that.