When women say “But I like to be objectified! Doesn’t everybody, sometimes?” it used to annoy me, but now it just breaks my heart a little. Because she can’t disentangle being desired or loved from being treated like a thing. And she’s right. That’s the world we live in: We cannot conceptualize desiring a woman without dehumanizing her. That is sexuality under heteropatriarchy.
And what did Margaret Atwood say about women and girls internalizing the pornified, heterosexual male gaze and becoming their own voyeur. We are socialized to have a false conscious.
The psychologists call it self-objectification.