I’ve come to hate the term “self-respect.” It has gone from simply meaning someone’s respect for themselves to people using their own standards to measure how worthy you are of their respect. People often conflate how little respect they have for you with your own self-respect. It is inaccurate for people to feel they are entitled to determine someone else’s self-respect simply because they do not respect them themselves.
People regularly make the argument that a woman who “does not respect herself” is not worthy of respect from others. Now, a logical person would ask, “If self-respect is determined by the self, how can they determine if she respects herself or not?”
Great question.
They can’t.
When people say statements such as that, they are usually saying that because the woman presents herself in a way to opposes what they believe an ideal woman should be. If a woman is not clothed enough to people’s liking, you can hear people patronizing her with remarks about her needing to respect herself. If a woman is sexually active, past what is considered socially acceptable, people also wag their finger at her and tell her she needs to respect herself. Notice how it is less about how the girl feels about herself and more about how people feel about her?
That’s the thing though. When people claim a woman needs to have SELF-respect, people do not consider her own standards for herself. People don’t even consider her at all in the determining of her “self-respect.” People are only considering what they believe a “respectable” woman is and if a woman veers away from that ideal, she obviously does not respect herself, in their minds.
As I mentioned before, people are taught what the ideal woman is--”modest.” Where a woman fits on the scale of modesty, in people’s minds, determines her morality. Seeing as that is what people are conditioned to believe, when they see women who do not fit into what “modest” is, their first thought is that this woman is immoral and does not care for herself or her image.
What people do not ever consider is that a woman’s self-love is determined by the SELF. It is determined by her. What one may not consider a self-love, another woman may. For example, a woman who likes to reveal a lot of skin might do so because she loves her body and loves showing off her body. Another example would be, a woman who is sexually active finds self-love in treating her body to pleasure. Maybe for a woman who genuinely likes to be discreet, “modesty” is what she prefers because for self-love, to her, it means only allowing herself to see the beauty of her body. Self-love means different things to different women. It is important for people to remember that just because you do not respect a woman, for whatever patriarchal reason, it does not mean she does not respect herself.
Also, not for nothing but let’s be hypothetical here. Even if a woman does not respect herself, supposedly, why would you want to knock her when she is already down? “Oh look, this girl feels terribly about herself. Let me go and make it even worse.” Sounds to me that people are just searching for an excuse to disrespect women because they do not even value women, whole fully, to begin with.
It is important that women determine their own self-respect and what that looks like. That is a vital part of a woman’s agency. People need to cease with conflating their own standards with the standards a woman sets for herself. People also need to not confuse the level of respect they have for a woman and the level of respect a woman has for herself. A woman’s self-respect is hers and it is not up for debate.