11/20/2025
New blog post:
Men are taught early on to categorize women. We do this unconsciously and instinctively, often forming this approach in adolescence. It’s part of the socialization of masculinity — a system that teaches boys to relate to women not as full humans but as utility and function, with the mindset, “what can you do for me?” These categories, though invisible, shape the landscape of the way many men approach intimacy and relationships.
For many men, women fall into one of two primary categories: P**nified or Parentified. The P**nified Woman exists for pleasure — she is sexualized, objectified, and made for a man’s consumption, she is less human, and therefore easier to dispose of. The Parentified Woman exists for comfort — she is nurturing, selfless, and endlessly giving, she is here to serve and tend to my emotional needs. We often oscillate between these two, seeking the thrill of the erotic and the safety of the maternal, never learning to love a woman who is both sexual and loving at once.
In the P**nified lens, women become mere projections of our unhealed wounds. Using women to validate our worth, to prove a fragile masculinity, to provide the fantasy of control and power. She is the woman on the magazine cover with those piercing eyes, the one online who reminded me of my first girlfriend, the one who will make me feel like a man again after I have lost all courage. The pornified woman is consumable — praised for her beauty, objectified for her body, treated as a trophy and a conquest. She is commended for her exterior beauty but not truly known.
In the Parentified lens, women become caretakers — they exist to soothe, to forgive, to fix, to reparent the young parts within me. She is the mother figure, the one who holds all the emotional responsibility, the one who cleans up the mess behind me. I look to her for emotional regulation and guidance. The parentified woman is so needed yet often invisible, and once she ceases to be helpful to the fragile male ego, she is left. (Side note, when a parentified category is within a relationship, this kills all the sexual desire the women have for their partners; they feel like they are raising another child, and do not sexually desire a boy masquading as a grown man.)
Both of these categories are distortions of our God given personhood and who we are meant to be. The pornified woman is stripped of her dignity; the parentified woman is stripped of mutuality, both raised above and resented. The pornified man is reduced to a caveman with primitive sexual desires, the parentified man is stuck in his adaptive adolescence, never forced to grow into his authentic masculine strength. Healthy masculinity must learn to see women not as categories but as a whole. To recognize that she can be strong and soft, sexual and spiritual, powerful and tender — all at once.
The Cost of Categorization
If men live by these categories, intimacy doesn’t stand a chance. You cannot truly love what you are merely using. Objectification can’t co-exist with the Imago Dei.
These categories create emotional distance — the illusion of connection without the risk of vulnerability. They protect men from their own shame and fear of inadequacy. But they also prevent the very closeness we long for, and what many men lack. Genuine intimacy is born from the integration of our parts, not the projection of our underdeveloped parts. It comes when we stop dumping our unhealed stories onto the women we say we love and begin doing the internal work our masculinity has long avoided.
As men made in the image of God, our calling is not to shrink a woman to fit our wounds or our fantasies, but to expand our capacity to hold her complexity. To see her not as a role, a category, or a function — but as a whole human being, a full image bearer of the Divine, to get to know her is to get to know the God who made her.
