COMMENTARY: Patricia McLaughlin...Succeeding as a sex object may be hazardous to health

Research indicates that failing at it is also unhealthy; isn't it time we quit telling girls that how they look is all that matters?

"This ad objectifies women." Back in the 1970s, when feminism was in flower, women would scrawl those words across sexist billboards. Or more often, they'd write: "This ad insults women." Easier to understand.

The word "objectifies" is so abstract and counterintuitive. How could a living, breathing, seething human being be turned into an object - a thing! - by a mere advertisement? What could that really mean? And how het up could you get over a supposed transaction that seemed so improbable? And what was the big deal anyway? Didn't we believe in freedom of speech, even for slimeball ad men? And what's so wrong with being sexy?

Crucial error: We allowed our culture to conflate being a sex object with being sexy.

And eventually, the whole sex object thing, like feminism itself, came to seem prim and slightly overwrought.

Women were strong, we were tough, we could stand up to the presumed stress of being "sex objects," whatever that meant, and even enjoy it, and still be plenty of other things, so there! The new idea was to Have It All: Be a successful sex object - perfectly dieted and exercised body done up in call girl underwear under the Prada suit - while also succeeding in a career, being truly and deeply loved by a man, raising happy and successful children, creating a warm and vibrant home, contributing to one's community, making buckets of money, baking wonderful French bread, growing prize delphiniums, blah blah blah.

Big mistake. And now, according to the American Psychological Association's Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, our daughters and granddaughters are suffering for it. They're little girls and young women, not so tough, liable to be damaged by a culture that teaches them to see themselves as sex objects, and to judge themselves by how close they can come - face, skin, hair, body, clothes, etc. - to looking like a pop star or movie star or TV star or supermodel, whose status as a successful sex object is ratified by her ability to sell millions of dollars' worth of concert or movie tickets or TV commercial minutes or designer whatevers. (Which, come to think of it, really only proves she's a successful marketing object. But sex and marketing are so intertwined in our experience that it hardly occurs to us to try to separate them.)

The recent report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls found that virtually all the media girls are exposed to - movies and television (including movies and TV made specifically for kids), music videos, magazines for teenagers, advertising, video games, fashion, even sports coverage - increasingly portray girls and women in ways that "sexualize" them. Which means: Girls and women are valued purely or principally for their sexual appeal, with sexual appeal defined in terms of an extremely narrow standard of physical beauty, and they are portrayed as objects of male perception, delectation, desire, aspiration, use, abuse, derision, whatever, rather than as subjects with their own independent desires, aspirations, perceptions, agendas, etc.

"Girls today are swimming in a veritable sea of toxic messages about what it means to be female," according to Eileen Zurbriggen, the report's lead author. Most of those messages tell them that what matters most about them is how good they look and how sexually desirable they seem. In music videos, for instance, "women more frequently than men are presented in provocative and revealing clothing" and "typically serve as decorative objects that dance and pose and do not play any instruments." Even in Disney cartoons, one study found, "female characters today (e.g., 'The Little Mermaid,' 'Pocahontas') have more cleavage, fewer clothes, and are depicted as 'sexier' than those of yesteryear (e.g., 'Snow White,' 'Cinderella')."

Where would we be if society had told Einstein - and Leonardo DaVinci, Thomas Jefferson, Beethoven, Abraham Lincoln and the Wright brothers - that all that mattered was how good they looked and how sexy they seemed to women? What if they'd wasted their lives worrying about their love handles or split ends or, in Lincoln's case, a face so exceptionally homely he couldn't've been elected dogcatcher if they'd had TV in the 1800s? We'd still be living in caves.

Why are we still wasting the time and attention of the female half of the population on such superficialities?

One study poignantly proved what any half-bright woman could have told you: A girl can't add and worry about whether her stomach sticks out at the same time. College students were asked to try on either a swimsuit or a sweater and keep it on for 10 minutes in a dressing room. To pass the time, they took a math test. As you would expect, the women in the sweaters did significantly better on the test. (When the experiment was repeated with young male subjects, the sweater/swimsuit performance difference disappeared.)

Beyond the waste of female brain power, the APA report found evidence that sexualizing girls tends to correlate with loss of confidence in and comfort with their bodies, with symptoms of depression, with increased incidence of eating disorders, with low self-esteem, with feelings of shame, anxiety and self-disgust. (In the swimsuit/sweater study, girls left alone in front of a mirror in swimsuits expressed "disgust, distaste and revulsion.")

Beyond that, both ironically and predictably, girls brainwashed to believe that sexiness is all about how they look to somebody else may never learn to enjoy sex for themselves.

It even hobbles them physically: One study of softball throwing found that, the more girls focused on how their bodies looked, the more likely they were to "throw like a girl" - i.e., weakly.

How is it that, after all these years, we're still putting up with this nonsense? In fact, it's actually getting worse. Isn't there something we should be doing about it?

As the report notes, if it's this damaging to little girls and preteens and teenagers to be told they're worthless if they aren't as fresh and thin and pretty and perfect as Scarlett Johansson or Beyonce Knowles, what effect must this message be having on the mental health of 60-year-olds who still aspire to look like Audrey Hepburn? But that's another column.

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McLaughlin is a syndicated fashion columnist. She may be contacted c/o Universal Press Syndicate, 4520 Main St., Kansas City, MO 64111 or patsy.mcl@verizon.net.