“Girls, we do, whatever it will take
‘Cause girls don’t want, we don’t want our hearts to break in two
So it’s better to be fake, can’t risk losing
In love again, baby.”
~ “How to be a Heartbreaker,” Marina and the Diamonds

The phrase “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is common in modern society. It says that something is only determined to be beautiful by the viewer, the beholder, bringing subjectivity to the idea of beauty as a whole. In today’s community, this saying has much broader and more detrimental implications. It has become a combination of two thoughts. “It’s only worth what I think it’s worth” brings an external sense to the phrase, and “I’m only worth what the outside thinks I’m worth” brings an internal sense, both of which are problematic. The negative self-image produced by this idea has become a large-scale issue, ranging from extreme amounts of money spent on physical alteration, to self-harm and depression, to sexual objectivity, the last of which will be focused on here. This idea of sexual objectivity is also highly contributed to by the external view of the phrase, as well, giving a person license to judge how they may, without ever having to consider the emotions and integrity of another human being.

An article by Fight the New Drug (FTND), an anti-pornography organization that aims to educate, describes the results of an Australian study. Titled “Sex Before Kissing: How 15-Year-Old Girls are Dealing with Porn-Addicted Boys,” the article describes the horrors that young women are now forced to deal with due to our current, porn-saturated society. In Australia, adolescent boys are responsible for 20 percent of the rapes of adult women, and 30 percent to 50 percent of the sexual assault of children. Through teaching “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” we’ve unintentionally taught that people can think and take as they please, because it only matters what an individual finds good, beautiful, and pleasing, taking away any inherent, objective value from what is being viewed, and removing the requirement for respect of an equal. Because pornography has so twisted the idea of healthy and beautiful sexuality,

“the main marker of a ‘good’ sexual encounter is only if he enjoys it. Girls and young women are under a lot of pressure to give boys and men what they want, to become a real life embodiment of what boys have watched in porn, adopting exaggerated roles and behaviors and providing their bodies as mere sex aids.”

Seventh-grade girls are now more concerned about a boys feelings while rejecting nude or near-nude photo requests, rather than evaluating their self-worth and objectification in the request for the photo in the first place. These same girls are asked for sexual favors in turn for signs of affection as minimal as kisses, hence the title of the article. They are crying out for social change, with girls as young as 15 saying, “I want better education regarding sex for both boys and girls and information about pornography and the way it influences harmful sexual experiences,” and “We need some sort of crack down on the violent pornography that is currently accessible to boys and men. [It] should be illegal to make or view… as we clearly have a problem.” Childhood and young adulthood can no longer be spent in the youthful innocence it once had the capability to be spent in.

This subjective view of beauty also fuels the global sex trafficking industry, through both the physical use of prostitutes and slaves, along with the digital use of prostitutes in the creation of porn. An informational video made by FTND, How Clicking Porn Directly Fuels Sex Trafficking, describes the connection between the ever-growing pornography industry, with the international sex trafficking crisis. In nine countries, 49 percent of girls surveyed said that porn was made of them during their time in the prostitution and slave industry. These women are often satiated with drugs, alcohol, and other substances to hold off the pain of the lives they’ve been deceived into and to keep them unable to escape. In addition, they’re exposed to every existing sexually transmitted disease, due to the deprivation of protection in the production of such videos. Making an excellent comparison in relation to current events, the video states, “This generation fights sex trafficking more than anyone ever has, and more than anyone ever has, this generation consumes porn. Fighting human trafficking and then watching porn is like protesting a corrupt politician and then donating to his campaign.”

A prime example of this degradation of human integrity occurring in the American culture would be the current court case of People v Turner also referred to as the Case of the Stanford Rapist. In this case, Brock Turner, a student-athlete at Stanford University, was caught in the act of sexually violating an unconscious woman. He was indicted on January 30, 2015, on two rape, one attempted rape, and two felony sexual assault charges. The case concluded on March 30, 2016, with three charges of felony sexual assault. The maximum sentence he could have received would be 14 years in jail. He was later recommended a six-year sentence by the prosecutors, and finally settled at a six-month jail sentence with three years probation, offered three months with good behavior. As usual as this case may seem, the deeper problem lies in the reasoning for his actions and how his actions were treated. His father, in writing a letter to the judge, is quoted as saying, “His life will never be the one that he dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve. That is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life.”

His father, Dan Turner, finds it appropriate to synonymize the violation of a woman’s unconscious body with “20 minutes of action.” If Brock Turner had been on trial for public sexual acts, maybe then would “20 minutes of action” be appropriate phrasing. With labeling sexual assault as such, he is enacting the external sense of “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” He is telling his son that things are for his benefit and pleasure. Lessons like this to the upcoming generation are what cause the bigger issues in our global society. In the beginning of his quoted statement, Dan Turner also makes the case against the effects it will have on his son’s life, and he entirely disregards the life of the woman he violated. Here, it is only Brock that matters. What about his life? Don’t his dreams matter? Won’t his life be ruined? We must begin to teach, from a young age, that all living things hold beauty and demand respect, whether one thinks they do or not. Only then will cases like this begin to lessen and, hopefully, cease entirely.

The world, as a whole, has become so saturated with personal sexual desire that a person is now only worth whatever they’re worth to another person. Individual worth and human integrity have been forgotten and tossed to die with other antiquated, traditional thought processes. With this, our once sensitive and chivalrous society has fallen to the ashes of its former self, leaving the bare bone remains of a simplistic, self-centered community whose only desire is to pleasure one’s own senses. If this continues, we will only degrade further. We will become a nation of the people we most despised, and due, in every sense, to our own faults. To avoid this ever-present issue, we much educate our children, both male and female, that they are to be nothing but treasured, and are to treasure others. You may only feel your own emotions, but that does not mean that emotions don’t exist in others. If we begin to truly use the golden rule of treating others how we want to be treated, then we will be on the road to recovery as both a nation and a global community.