We must reclaim our dignity

The big story on MSNBC last night was Ivana getting fired from Donald Trump’s reality show ‘The Apprentice.”.

Apparently Ivana felt her opponents in a contest to sell candy bars in New York had an advantage because they were wearing low-cut tops, so she upped the ante in one of the most disgusting and embarrassing ways I can imagine – she offered to drop her skirt and twirl around in her underwear if a patron would pay $20 for a candy bar.

In the board room, Trump appropriately told her he doesn’t hire strippers, and fired her.

What amazed me was an argument by one of the three experts on MSNBC (sorry, I can’t remember her name) who defended this kind of behavior as women being “empowered and entitled” and “expressing ourselves sexually.”

The segment also featured a Miller beer commercial in which two women rip off their clothes and wrestle in the mud, and several Abercrombie and Fitch ads which ingeniously sell clothing by running ads in which the models aren’t wearing any.

I try to believe everything the TV tells me, but strangely I didn’t feel empowered at all when I watched those two women wrestling. I didn’t think to myself, “how wonderful that those women feel free to express themselves sexually. How liberating.”

And I guarantee you that’s not what the men who created the commercial or the men who watched it were thinking either.

In the Army I’ve been in one all-male unit and one predominantly male unit, in which all the females except me live elsewhere. So I get to spend a lot of time around some pretty base males and I’ve become familiar with their thought patterns.

Trust me, women, when you behave like sexual objects, you are not empowering yourself. The men around you are not learning to respect you and treat you as equals. The thoughts they are having have nothing to do with love and respect. They are thinking about the degrading, disgusting things they want to do to you.

Especially since their expectations of what they should see in the bedroom are so perverted by the massive amounts of pornography they watch. They experience a frustrating paradox in which they want us to behave like the women in those videos, while simultaneously losing respect for us when we do.

As another woman on the show, the founder of a Christian women’s organization said, “The future husbands of my daughters are watching that.” She didn’t want those men to think that’s how women should behave.

The same woman on the show who said we were “empowering” ourselves said we were NOT “objectifying” ourselves by behaving that way. I hate to break it to you lady, but men see us as sexual objects.

But because we have the power to inspire lust, to make sleazy men want to have sex with us and to embarrass the faithful men out there, we convince ourselves we are empowered.

The truth is deep down we know we are being degraded. Otherwise we wouldn’t get so upset at men for treating us the way our dress and behavior implies we should be treated.

When I was a teenager (and thinner), I used to dress somewhat scantily myself. Yet every time I was walking down the road and some guy whistled out his window or shouted some banal remark, I got offended. How dare he?

You see it in movies all the time. The tough woman of the world with her breasts hanging out, demanding that the poor slobs “look at my eyes, not my chest.” What were you expecting him to look at? Why are they out if you didn’t want them looked at?

When I did dress that way it wasn’t because I was expressing myself sexually. It was because I didn’t have the self-worth to believe I was beautiful unless men confirmed it for me. How is that liberating?

Where is the empowerment in losing all your dignity? Where has the mystery gone?

Walking by an Abercrombie and Fitch store the other day I saw a shirtless guy who looked like he’d been airbrushed a stick-thin girl standing there modeling a very small number of the store’s clothes. Whatever natural beauty and innocence the girl had once possessed was gone, or covered with three inches of makeup. Walking by a second time I saw her draped over the male model, explaining to a couple of 12-year-olds that this was “hot.”

The TV is dominated by role models like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, who prove that “you don’t have to be poor to be white trash.” When I hear men talk about Paris Hilton they don’t say, “Gee, I’d like to marry that smart, sexy girl.” They say, “No, man, I wouldn’t date her, but I’d do her in a heartbeat.” And that’s toned down.

I heard a radio host belittle a woman who said she was staying a virgin until she met the right one. He told her she’d never find a man who would date her if she didn’t “give it up.” The concept of a man loving a woman who refused to have sex with him on the second date was so foreign to him it was laughable. Wow, I feel empowered now.

I’m not saying we should go back to the days when women couldn’t ride bicycles for fear of showing their ankles, but we have to stop pretending. There is something to be said for leaving a thing or two to the imagination.

I’m pretty sure most prostitutes don’t feel empowered by their ability to get men to pay them for sex. They feel broken, betrayed and filthy.

And it is not creative to strip for passersby. That’s not how you get a slot in a billion-dollar corporation.

We wonder why the guys refer to each other’s girlfriends and wives as “your bitch.” And why the guys they’re talking to no longer get offended or protective of the women in their lives.

I heard a friend of mine giving advice on girls the other day. “They like you to treat them like crap,” he said. “They won’t say they like it, but they do.”

Sadly, that’s true. We must put our clothes back on and prove we respect ourselves or no one will ever respect us. We must reclaim our dignity.