How Men Objectify Themselves
Why we all need to learn the language of our bodies and practice healthy embodiment and sensuality instead.
Right before she stabbed me in the back with another needle, Jane asked, “Weren’t you writing a book?”
“Yes,” I said, between gasps of pain on the exam table, “Good memory.”
Jane, my physical therapist, was literally poking and prodding (via dry needling) my seized up back muscles, trying to coax them to relax.
“The book comes out next week. Which is why I’m here. Somehow in writing a book I managed to ruin my back.”
It was true. No big dramatic trampoline flip or epic mountain bike jump preceded it. No sir. Turns out all those hours sitting to write and meet deadlines and sitting even more as a therapist all added up. And I woke up a week before book launch with my back seized up.
“Well, whatever you did, you put your back muscles in fight or flight,” Jane said, “And we need to support them to relax.” That comment brought home so strongly the reality of what I’d been doing to my body.
If I’m honest, I felt this impending back injury for a couple of months. Because writing hours are workout hours and I had editing and marketing deadlines to meet, somewhere early in the year I stopped working out. And though my back ached more and more, giving me early warning signs of a growing injury, I chose to keep pushing myself to the end.
And I knew better. That’s the whole reason Jane knew I was writing a book. During the pandemic, when my gym closed and I counseled crammed in a shed in my backyard, I experienced this very same back injury. It was all too familiar in seasons of great stress and little body care.
I knew better. But I kept pushing anyway.
The Language of the Body
When I ask men in counseling, “What are you feeling in your body?” I usually get a head tilt and confused look, like what did you just ask me? You’d think I’d spoken in a foreign language. And in so many ways, talking about what we feel in our bodies is a new language to most men. Sometimes a man will say outright, “I have no idea how to answer that.” Or they’ll pushback with, “What? I’m fine.”
I’m fine.
As men, we have few places to not be fine. Or so it seems. We are so used to soldiering on in life, to staying on task and meeting deadlines, that we don’t stop to check in on how our bodies are doing. As long as they still function (enough), we keep going. Like an athlete in the heat of a never ending game, keep us in coach.
It’s not that we always want to keep going. But we feel we must. Part of this drive is a really good thing in a man. Men who push through hard things to show up to their lives are admirable. Suffering is a part of life after all. As Jesus said, in this world you will have trouble (John 16:33).
A good and intimate marriage will require you to step into vulnerable and tough conversations. Raising resilient, self confident children will require your patience and endurance and presence. You were made for meaningful work too. And truly good work in the world—a well crafted house or business deal or launch of a book—comes with struggles and setbacks that require a lot of grit and heart and perseverance.
Sometimes staying in the game really does matter.
But where and when and how do you rest? Where do you let yourself receive care?This is where the problem lies: When men don’t step off the field of life for healthy restoration and replenishment.
There is a Jewish law that said, “Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.” (Deuteronomy 25:4). In other words, God instructed the Israelites to not treat their cattle simply as a means to an end. Literally, do not abuse them by treating them as objects. Remember your ox is a creature and let it enjoy pleasure, replenishment, and reward within its work.
And yet as men, we often treat ourselves worse.
While speaking at a men’s retreat last week, I asked the guys to raise their hands if they regularly skip or work through lunch. Nearly every man raised his hand. What a micro picture of this struggle. I know food is fuel and so you either need it or don’t. But how many men stop to check in with their bodies or, even if they do eat, stop to taste their food. We don’t even give ourselves the dignity afforded the oxen.
By seeing our bodies as a means to an end and rarely an end in themselves, we actually objectify ourselves. We don’t often care for our bodies until they start screaming in pain, as my back did that morning. And sometimes we don’t even listen to the pain, refusing to see the doctor or change our diet or exercise our bodies. And we do this with our emotional lives too. We wait until something is on fire to get help.
We don’t have a lot of honored ways in our masculine culture to truly pursue restoration and healthy rest and pleasure. Women struggle here too in their own way, no doubt. But this is how it plays out in the masculine world.
Numb
Here in Colorado, our mountains conceal old forgotten ghost towns—vestiges of the bygone gold rush days. I’ve explored several of them. And I’m always struck by the unbelievable, back-breaking hard work these men performed. And I wonder, how did these men cope? What did these men do to rest themselves? Again, what was given these men to enjoy as the “unmuzzled” fruits of their labor? When you walk these towns, the answer emerges quickly.
Saloons and brothels. Numbing.
I doubt these men slow-sipped their whisky to savor its oaky sweetness and talk deep with their buddies. Rather, as the lore of drunken bar fights implies, they drank them down to numb. And sex with a “lady of the night” obviously had nothing to do with relationship, love, and fidelity but stood as a chance to get physical release. Yes, these men were guilty of objectifying women. But in the process, they objectified themselves too.
Author and therapist Chuck Degroat offers care to pastors. He recently shared about the ways these pastors cope with their stress and emotionally regulate their bodies. Want to guess what tops the list? Alcohol abuse. I would guess a close second is porn use. According to Barna research, 57% of pastors have a current or past struggle with porn use (though only 14% say its chronic).
Again, these are not restorative practices, but quick forms of relief. In the words of John Eldredge, there’s a difference between practices that simply relieve us and those that restore us. We often settle for relief. These are not kind acts to the body or heart, like unmuzzling an ox, but the equivalent to injecting your oxen with pain killers to keep it working.
Of course it’s not simply that men are doing this to themselves. The wounds in our stories can set us up to ignore our bodies as a response to trauma. For example, statistically speaking, boys as infants are held less. Our stories shape our relationship to our bodies. Our stories are still held in the cells of our bodies. And of course, along with this, there are systems in play in the world that want to grind men up and spit them out. Too often the forces of capitalism and industry and masculinity and the manic pace of culture gladly use a hard-working man for as much as he’ll give.
My dad is a project manager in construction. He told me a story of greeting a cement contractor one morning, “How are you today?” The man replied, “They went down easy last night!” Turns out the guy drank an entire case of beer in one night and yet somehow woke up functional enough to keep going. Which was only possible because he’d built up his tolerance by doing this regularly. That’s how he took the edge off the high stress and long hours of managing a high rise commercial building project.
My God, that man’s body! Yes, this man is being chewed up in the churn of his job. But he is profoundly abusing himself in the process too. Somewhere every man has to decide how he’ll treat his own body and face his own self-abuse.
Abusing our own Sexuality
Poet Rainer Rilke once mentored a younger military cadet wanting to become a poet. They exchanged letters about a lot of things. In his advice on sex, Rilke linked healthy sexuality to how we treat our bodies and all the sensuality in our lives.
“Bodily delight is a sense experience, just like pure seeing or the pure feeling with which a lovely fruit fills the tongue; it is a great boundless experience which is given us, a knowing of the world, the fullness and the splendour of all knowing. Our acceptance of it is not bad; what is bad is that almost all men misuse and squander this experience, and apply it as a stimulus to the weary places of their life, a dissipation instead of a rallying for the heights. “
Catch that last line: A dissipation rather than a rallying. Do you consume simply to dissipate or numb your pain? Or do you let something in you open and rise to healthy sensuality and restoration? Are you present to your body and allow it to receive good pleasure? Or are you numbing and squandering? Is it relief or is it restoration?
Yes, men can objectify even their own sexuality and push their body to get sexual release rather than engage sexuality as a place for love and connection.
A man wrote to me recently, “I tried what you said in your book and it messed me up.” He was referring to my invitation to practicing healthy sensuality. So right in the middle of using porn, he decided to pause and let himself take in the beauty of the performers. And it ruined the moment. He couldn’t finish and simply had to just shut his computer. In other words, by pausing to check in with his body and let all his sensuality show up, he discovered his porn ritual had nothing to do with sensuality. He was simply hot wiring his sexual arousal to get some sort of body release. But it didn’t hold real connection to his body.
It is possible for a man to abuse his own sexuality, pushing himself through the arousal cycle, to get quick physical release. This sex is not relational or bonding or even all that sensual or pleasurable. Its simply a means to dissipate pain.
And when we objectify ourselves, it makes it much easier to objectify others.
Unmuzzle the ox
To truly care for our bodies, we as men must learn to befriend them again. That requires learning the language of our bodies. And we must engage the stories and cultural forces that keep us dissociated from our bodies. We must also infuse our lives with restorative practices and healthy pleasure. This is how we bless our body as a creation of God’s.
I mentioned the men’s retreat I got to teach here in Colorado., where we talked about our mistreatment of our bodies. Thankfully I also got to teach these men healthy sensuality as restorative practice. Say what? Yes, men, your senses are not simply tools for surviving life (like avoiding freezing to death or eating rotten food) but as a means of restoration and pleasure. We walked through several exercises intended to help men practice this.
So we got up early, hiked up a mountain, and soaked in the immersive beauty of a sunrise.
And later, we took off our shoes and felt the meadow grass under our feet. We ate a piece of chocolate until it melted in our mouths, remembering that food is more than simple fuel. It can taste good too and be savored. We walked in the woods and took in the mountain air. We even picked wildflowers and studied them with the eye of an art critic.
One man said with tears, “The last time I had my shoes off and soaked in the beauty outside like this must’ve been in boyhood. I did not realize how much I miss it.” What a powerful return to his body.
And the very next day after that retreat, for the first time all summer, I returned to CrossFit and working out. It was amazing. My body felt like a golden retriever let out of a cage that got to run and play. I felt so human again.
Men, your body is talking to you. What is it inviting you to do to actually give it care? You haven’t fully recovered and healed as a man until you’ve recovered healthy embodiment and healthy pleasure within it.
Thanks for reading!
Want to talk with me about this post? Monday, October 7th, at 6:30pm MT/8:30pm ET, I am hosting a Zoom conversation exclusively for paid subscribers, where I teach a little more and answer all your questions. These are such rich conversations for me! To join us, upgrade your membership (see below) for $5 a month (cancel anytime). The email with the Zoom link goes out soon.
You can still get a BOGO copy of my book The Sex Talk You Never Got just by going here. Buy the audiobook or kindle and get a free paperback for yourself or give the free copy to a friend. You’ll also get a free ebook on How To Give A Sex Talk.
If you’ve read my book, I’d be so grateful if you write a review. Its super easy. Here’s a short explainer video. You can write the review here: Amazon | Goodreads
Here’s my latest run of podcast interviews around my book: Java with Juli, Enneagram+Marriage, Recover Your Life, Confessions of a Crappy Christian, Axis Culture Translator, and Sexy Marriage Radio (and I may be forgetting some). Podcasters are amazing humans and I’ve loved the uniqueness of every conversation! People want to talk about men and healthy sexuality. For that I am grateful!
Great article Sam! Wish I could join the conversation on the 7th - next time!
Amazing