Sex Object review – Jessica Valenti shares a story women know all too well

It’s almost summertime, which means that it’s also time once again for many women and girls, particularly in big cities, to craft their journeys to work or school into tactical missions, planning out routes and schedules in order to avoid the hisses, grunts and catcalls that seem to multiply exponentially whenever women and girls dare to walk down the street in sundresses, shorts and halter tops.

Street harassment is never out of season, of course, and is not restricted to any particular country; a recent survey by ActionAidUK found that three out of four women in the UK, India, Thailand and Brazil have experienced some form of street harassment. And Sex Object, the new memoir from the author and Feministing founder Jessica Valenti, who is also a Guardian US columnist, is a testament to how what’s often brushed aside as “flattering” or “a miscommunication” or simply “boorishness” shapes the psyches of the women on the receiving end of such behavior.

Sex Object isn’t just about street harassment. Rather, it’s a chronological account of a life in which far too much effort has been spent navigating a wide-ranging gauntlet of assumptions, entitlement and expectations. In tracing her life from early adolescence up to the present, Valenti connects the dots between her sexual self-image and her psychological one in an eminently readable voice that ranges from briskly self-critical to deeply frustrated to sentimental. (This last is most in evidence when she expresses the desire to protect her young daughter from similar experiences.)

Since I, like the author, grew up in New York City, I wasn’t surprised to see my own adolescence mirrored in the anecdotes that pocked Valenti’s youth. The guy on the subway pressing his erection on to you in a too-crowded-to-move subway car. The one who whispers what he wants to do to you as you pass on the street, an ephemeral moment that can cling like grime.

The worst part is not simply that this stuff happens – although, as both Valenti and I can attest, realizing you’ve got a stranger’s semen on your back is a singularly awful feeling.

The truly rotten part is often that reactions from others end up normalizing these events as inevitable: my mother asking “What were you wearing?” when I came home in tears at 15 after a particularly nasty catcall experience. A friend being told that she should be “happy for the compliment” when a stranger grabbed and kissed her at a concert. Cumulatively, writes Valenti, these become unavoidable, “a series of surprise private moments that you can’t prevent or erase” – at least, not if you want to participate in public life.

This is one woman’s story, and Valenti makes clear that she can’t presume to universalize. But though her experiences may not align directly with those of, say, young women in India, or Russia or rural America, the central question she asks –what do we lose when we grow up believing sexual objectification is normal, unremarkable and expected? – resonates on a global level. Valenti is also cognizant that not all objectification looks the same. But Sex Object’s overarching point is that nearly all of us, to varying degrees, either perpetuate or tolerate a range of attitudes and behaviors that actively circumscribe the lives and the potential of girls and women. In the book’s introduction, Valenti recalls a high school teacher defining “identity” as “half what we tell ourselves and half what we tell other people about ourselves”. But, she adds, “the missing piece he didn’t mention … is the stories that other people tell us about ourselves. Those narratives become the ones we shape ourselves into.”

As one of America’s best-known and often divisive feminists, Valenti is surely all too familiar with hearing stories that other people tell about her, which makes Sex Object a bold undertaking. It’s also one that fits seamlessly within the feminist tradition of consciousness-raising. Among women, the naming and sharing of experiences that many times we’ve been told are individual allows us to turn anger and humiliation outward, rather than in on ourselves. Telling female-identified people that they are not alone – that they did not invite, ask for or “lure” others to treat them like objects – is a process that has been showcased in projects like Hollaback! and Everyday Sexism, shared globally via Twitter hashtags such as #YouOKSis and #YesAllWomen, and made startlingly visible in photo series such as Project Unbreakable. And yet our culture still defaults to questions – “What was she wearing?”; “Why were you alone?”; “Were you drinking?” – that inexorably shift the blame on to individual victims, because holding the perpetrators responsible makes all men feel attacked. (For the not-at-all-men crowd, a tip: instead of focusing on what you’re not doing – sexually harassing or assaulting women – consider what you could be doing to make the rest of the world follow your example. More simply: don’t tell women you’re “not that guy”. Tell other men not to be that guy.)

There is an ocean of difference between being admired and being objectified, but western culture has been unparalleled in conflating the two for fun and profit. We’ve got billboards full of disembodied breasts and legs, school dress codes that police girls’ wearing of yoga pants, tabloids that see no problem in making a blowjob joke about a picture of Kim Kardashian’s daughter.

But becoming inured to a constant hum of sexualization – on streets, in schools, in advertising, in politics – shouldn’t be the goal, and anyone who protests that “there are bigger things to worry about” either can’t or won’t see the connection between how cultural views of girls and women affect their ability to live and thrive. An alternative to teaching girls to shrink themselves, or suggesting they develop a bright, ever-hardening shell, is crucial. That alternative isn’t necessarily presented in Sex Object. (Indeed, the book goes out on a sour note, with a litany of horrible tweets and Facebook messages sent to Valenti in recent years.) And it won’t be realized without a shift that requires all of us first to believe that stories like hers, and millions of others, are real.