sex object

for centuries, women have been treated as sex objects ("piece of ass"), things ("skirt," "doll"), possessions ("my woman"), and commodities ("birds," "chicks"). Heavily reinforced by advertising, which uses women's sexuality to sell everything from razor blades to cars, this concept has had invidious results: prostitution, rape, laws and societies that "protect" women and relegate them to the status of children, words and attitudes that label women solely by their sexuality, even murder when the mythic cultural promise that women exist for the sexual pleasure of men goes unfulfilled. Men absorb the message that they must compete for women—as if women were passive things for the having. Watch for subtle ways in which women are treated as sex objects—and delete them. See also gender roles, owner, score, success object.