When we say, “He objectified her,” we make it sound like mere casual disrespect.What really happens is extermination of recognition.She is
When we say, “He objectified her,” we make it sound like mere casual disrespect.
What really happens is extermination of recognition.
She is not reduced to a sex object.
She is reduced to nothing that could speak back. Silenced. Talked over.
And that difference matters.
Because women are not dying from “desire.”
They are dying from being mentally rewritten as disposable matter in someone else’s private mythology.
We live among people-men- whose fantasies are their command center.
His world is inside-out
He lives inside his fantasies the way other people live inside daylight.
They feel solid to him.
Authoritative.
More real than breath.
Her reality — her fear, her confusion, her pleading, her resistance — arrives to him like background noise.
Static.
A disruption.
He is not meeting her.
A moving target onto which he pins everything he cannot even tolerate about himself.
The “Soul Murder” reality
Some modern psychoanalytic frameworks call this extreme end of dehumanization Soul Murder.
Not because it is poetic.
But because it is precise.
The goal is not only to stop a heart.
It is to annihilate the inner world:
her memories
her voice
her sense of time
her private hopes
her right to be more than a surface
What terrifies him is not her body.
It is her interiority.
The fact that she contains a universe he cannot enter.
So he does not merely kill.
He tries to erase the evidence that such a universe ever mattered.
Well, welcome to our world.
This “soul murder” is not rare, exotic, or confined to criminal pathology.
It is familiar. It has been rehearsed in ordinary rooms, polite institutions, movements that borrow our songs, and systems that borrow our labor while refusing our voice.
Many Black women and other women shaped by histories of colonial conquest, enslavement, and enforced caregiving recognize this
violence not only in killers, but in cultures that consume our insight, our organizing, our tenderness, and our spiritual intelligence while denying the reality of our inner lives.
We are cherished as symbols, strategies, and shelters.
We are studied, quoted, leaned on, and depended upon.
Yet when we speak from our own interiority, when we name harm, set boundaries, or refuse disappearance,
we are told we are difficult, angry, ungrateful, or unreal.
This is the everyday architecture of soul murder: to be useful but not believed, visible but not witnessed, central to survival yet denied full human recognition. And still, we continue to insist on our inwardness.
Still, we speak against what pushes us to be smaller. Speak quieter and less.
Still, we remember ourselves by remembering the women that brought us this far and made us who we are.
COMMENTS