On Dehumanization, Conditional Worth, and the Cost of Being Measured

The Problem Was Never Me

I don’t know about you, but as a woman in America, I am exhausted from being viewed as nothing more than a face and a body.

I have been tired of it for a long time, but now I’m putting it into words. For you, for me, for our daughters, our sisters, our nieces, our granddaughters. For every woman who has ever felt the pain of being looked at but not seen.

For most of my life, I thought the problem was me. I wasn’t thin enough, pretty enough, or tall enough. I always wished I were more “normal” looking. The red hair, the short but not skinny frame. The freckles. The thick, coarse hair that gets frizzy too easily. The body that easily puts on pounds but struggles to lose them.

But that’s not it. That was never it.

The problem isn’t that I failed to measure up. The problem is that I was being measured at all.

Learning Early That We Are Being Measured

For most of us, it starts before we are old enough to push back against it. We are small girls when we first understand that our bodies and our faces are being evaluated. By family, by the culture we grow up in, by the casual, offhand remarks that nobody seems to think will stick. But they stick.

I grew up learning that a female’s worth was something you could rank. Who had the better features? Whose figure was more ideal? Comparisons made out loud, between sisters, between mothers and daughters, between women who had what men wanted and those who didn’t. Nobody called it what it was. It was just conversation. Just the way things were.

In 6^th grade, we had a raving misogynist for a gym teacher. When we were doing the presidential fitness test, they measured our body fat and recorded our height and weight. And they announced it. Loudly. For everyone to hear.

When I look at pictures of myself in middle school, I can plainly see that I wasn’t fat. I was a healthy weight. Yet, when I heard the weights of the other girls who were around my height announced, I became immediately insecure.

My dad didn’t help. He was always comparing. One time, when my family was in the car, my dad decided he needed to boost my sister’s self-esteem. So, he started pointing out all of her “ideal” features. I know there was more to it than this, but what I remember was that she had high cheekbones like some actress he mentioned. He ended this conversation by saying, “Cindy might have the hair, but (my sister’s name) has ‘the looks’.”

I’m in my mid-forties, and that conversation still echoes in my memories, and truthfully – it hurts. Not that I have any more concern about my dad’s ridiculous verdict (or maybe I do? – that’s a topic for another day…), but that he thought he needed to compare us or judge our appearance at all was dehumanizing. Those kinds of comparisons set me up for a lifetime of thinking I wasn’t enough.

When Worth Becomes Conditional

And then came marriage, and the lesson continued. With each of my babies, my body changed, as bodies do when they spend years growing and sustaining human life. But the message I received, in the way my husband’s affections fluctuated with my weight, was that my body was the only thing that was important about me. That my value as a woman, as a wife, was tied to my appearance.

I got divorced at 40, and over the years that followed, I worked hard to find peace with who I am now. After a few years, it finally started to click. I began to feel good about myself for the first time since high school.

And then, at 44, I found out my ex-husband was dating someone new. She was twenty-one years old and just a few months younger than our oldest daughter.

It hit me like a ton of bricks.

In an instant, the peace I had fought so hard for was shattered. Flooding in behind it came everything I had spent years trying to process. All the times his attention had gone elsewhere during our marriage, all the ways his affection had been conditionally dependent on my current weight, all the silent comparisons I had felt but couldn’t prove. I had thought I was done carrying all of that. Turns out I had just set it down for a while.

I’m sharing this because I think it needs to be said: his choices are not a verdict on me. What a man chooses to do, how he chooses to treat women, is a reflection of his character, not our worth. I am not less because he chose a woman younger than our own daughter. That is not about me. It was never about me.

The conditional affection, the wandering eyes, the warmth that came and went – none of that was my fault. None of it was something I could have fixed by being thinner, taller, or prettier. The problem was his behavior, and I deserved better than that.

So did you. Whatever version of this you have lived through, you deserve better.

Different Verdicts, Same Dehumanization

And then there is what the church added to all of this.

If secular culture told women our bodies were never quite good enough, religious culture, particularly the evangelical world so many of us grew up in, told us something that sounds different but comes from the same place: that our bodies were dangerous. That we were a threat to the spiritual lives of the men around us. That we were responsible for what our bodies provoked in others, and that the only appropriate response to having a female body was to cover it, control it, and be ashamed of it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard evangelicals claim that a woman or a girl dressing “immodestly” in front of men or boys (modesty in the Bible is about wealth, not covering our bodies, but we can talk more about that later…) is comparable to drinking in front of an alcoholic. Yes, they compared our bodies to alcohol. And they didn’t see the problem.

Whether you were told you weren’t enough or told you were too much (or maybe both), whether the message came from a father making comparisons, a husband whose affection was conditional on your weight, or a church that put the burden of men’s lust on your shoulders before you were old enough to understand what sexuality even was – the underlying message was the same: your body is the most important thing about you, and it is a problem.

We were handed that message in so many forms, by so many people, in so many rooms. And we internalized it the way you internalize anything that is repeated to you consistently enough: as irrefutable truth.

But Here is What They Missed

Men are not generally treated this way.

A man walks into a room and is assessed by what he says, what he does, and what he has built. His weight, his looks, his age – these are not typically the first or primary lens through which his value is measured. He gets to be a person first. He gets to be taken seriously before he has proven himself visually acceptable.

Women have to fight for that kind of acceptance, and, if we’re being really honest, it rarely comes.

I want to say plainly what I think it means: it is not a beauty-standard problem. It is not a body image problem.

It is a dehumanization problem.

When you reduce a woman to her body and her face, when those become the primary measure of her worth, you are not seeing a person. You are seeing a shell. And no human being deserves to spend their life being seen that way.

A Woman Is a Person First

Because here is what a woman actually is.

She is a mind that has been working, questioning, learning, and figuring things out her entire life. She is a heart that has loved people through impossible things. She is a person with passions and opinions and a specific, irreplaceable way of seeing the world. She has survived things. She has built things. She has shown up for people in ways that had nothing – nothing – to do with what she looked like when she did it.

She has a soul. And souls do not have a dress size.

We are Tired

We are tired of being looked at before we are listened to. Tired of walking into a doctor’s office and having our health reduced to our weight. Tired of being told our bodies are either not enough or too much, depending on which room we walk into. Tired of postponing our own lives until we look a certain way. Tired of the voice in our heads that sounds like everyone who has ever measured us and found us lacking.

We are tired of being seen as bodies and faces when we are so much more than that.

What the Exhaustion Really Is

And I want to say this as clearly as I can: the exhaustion you feel is not vanity. It is not insecurity. It is the entirely reasonable response of a human being who has spent years being treated as something less than fully human, and who knows, somewhere deep down, that she deserves better.

You do deserve better.

Not because you are beautiful, although you are. Not because you have finally reached the right number on the scale, or made peace with your reflection, or found a way to feel good about what you see in the mirror. But because you are a person. Because you have a mind and a heart and a soul and a life that matters. Because the people who love you well see you. Not your body. Not your face. You.

That is what you were always worth. Not a number. Not a reflection. Not a ranking against someone else’s cheekbones, complexion, waistline, height, or age.

You. The whole, complicated, irreplaceable, not-reducible-to-any-of-this you.

Refusing the Premise

This is not a quick fix.

I am not writing this from the other side of healed. I’m writing it from the middle, same as you. I still have days when the scale sends me into a spiral. I still catch myself hearing the old voices. I’m still rebuilding the peace that got shattered. Some days, that feels possible. Some days it doesn’t.

But I am done accepting the premise. I am done treating my body and my face as the measure of my worth. I’m done letting that be the question, even when I’m arguing about the answer. The question itself is wrong. And I am learning, slowly and imperfectly, to refuse it.

That’s what I hope for you, too. Not that you learn to love what you see in the mirror, though I hope that comes. Not that the number on the scale stops mattering, though I hope that comes too. But that you begin to refuse the premise. That you find the courage to say: I am not a body waiting to be judged. I am a person. And I will not spend one more day being reduced to anything less than that.

You Were Always Fully Human

You were fully human before anyone ever looked at you. You still are.