For years, I didn't fully realize how much of my attention around women was organized around sexuality. I had started watching pornography at 14, during some of the most formative years of my understanding of sex, women, and relationships. Over time, pornography, movies, cultural messages, fantasy, and my own repeated behaviors helped create patterns in the way I looked at women and related to them.
Even after I stopped watching pornography, I began noticing that some of those patterns were still there. I noticed where my eyes went when an attractive woman walked past, how quickly attraction could become fantasy, how much importance I sometimes placed on whether a woman found me attractive, and how differently I could relate to women depending on whether I was sexually interested in them.
I had stopped consuming pornography, but I hadn't completely stopped consuming women in my mind.
Recognizing that was uncomfortable, but it became an important part of transforming my relationship with women. I began to understand that quitting pornography and stopping the sexualization of women were related, but they weren't the same thing. More importantly, I discovered that changing the way I saw women wasn't about becoming less sexual. In many ways, it opened the possibility of experiencing women, relationships, love, and eventually sex at a much deeper level.
You don't need to learn to want women less. You need to learn to relate to women more.
A note before you begin: This guide will help you begin changing the way you see and relate to women, but transforming patterns that may have developed over many years requires more than intellectually understanding them. The deeper work involves changing how you respond to attraction, fantasy, desire, sexual conditioning, validation, intimacy, and your relationships with women in everyday life. In From Consumption to Connection, my 12-week men's immersion, we work through that process systematically through structured exercises, weekly practices, live sessions, accountability, and brotherhood.
What Does It Mean to Sexualize Women?
There is an important distinction between finding a woman sexually attractive and sexualizing her. If you see a woman you find beautiful, you may experience an immediate physical or sexual response. I don't believe men should feel ashamed of that, nor do I believe the solution is to somehow train ourselves to stop finding women attractive.
Sexualization is different. It happens when sexuality begins to dominate the way you perceive another person. Instead of encountering a complete human being who also happens to be attractive, you begin relating primarily to her body, her sexual desirability, what she might look like naked, whether she might sleep with you, or whether she finds you attractive. The person gradually disappears behind the attraction.
This is why I think it is important to distinguish between attraction, desire, and consumption. Attraction is not objectification. Sexual desire is not sexual consumption. Noticing that a woman is beautiful is not the same as mentally consuming her.
The problem isn't that you noticed her. The question is what you choose to do next.
Why Do I Sexualize Women?
If you've found yourself asking, "Why do I sexualize women so much?", I don't think the answer is necessarily that there is something inherently wrong with you. For many men, these patterns have been practiced for years, often beginning long before we had the maturity to understand what we were reinforcing.
Pornography can be a significant part of that conditioning. If you repeatedly expose yourself to images in which women exist primarily for sexual stimulation, I believe that can influence the habits you develop around attention, fantasy, novelty, and the way you experience women's bodies. But pornography isn't the only influence.
Many of us grew up with movies and television in which male sexual success was presented as evidence of status or masculinity. We absorbed advertising that used women's bodies to sell almost everything imaginable, and we heard other boys and men evaluate women according to their bodies and sexual desirability. Today, social media can provide an endless stream of sexualized images without a man ever deliberately opening a pornography website.
Then there are the patterns we reinforce ourselves. Every time you stare, scan a woman's body, deliberately develop a sexual fantasy, or seek out another sexualized image, you are practicing a particular way of directing your attention. Eventually, something you've practiced thousands of times can begin to feel like something you simply are.
But a learned pattern does not have to become a permanent identity.
Sexualizing Women Can Become Automatic
One of the things I had to become aware of was how automatic some of these behaviors had become. A woman walks into a room and you immediately evaluate whether you find her attractive. Your eyes automatically move toward certain parts of her body. You notice an attractive woman across a restaurant and continue checking where she is. You see someone on social media and within seconds you're looking through her photos.
There may not be a conscious thought that says, "I am now going to objectify this woman." That's what makes the pattern difficult to see. It can simply feel like attention.
One of the distinctions that helped me was recognizing the difference between noticing and searching. You will notice attractive women, and trying desperately not to notice them can become its own form of obsession. But noticing someone is different from continuing to search her body for stimulation.
The first moment may happen automatically. What happens afterward is where your responsibility begins.
Stop Scanning Women's Bodies
If you want to stop sexualizing women, one of the most practical places to begin is with your eyes. Start paying attention to what you actually do. When a woman walks past, do you look back? When you're speaking to an attractive woman, does your attention repeatedly move toward her body? When you enter a restaurant, gym, office, or party, do you immediately scan the room for the most attractive women?
Don't use this awareness as another opportunity to shame yourself. You're gathering information about a pattern you're trying to change. Once you can see the pattern, you can begin practicing something different.
Learn to notice without consuming. If you see someone beautiful, you can acknowledge that you find her attractive without needing another look. You don't have to collect more visual information, mentally photograph her, or turn the moment into a fantasy.
At first, this may require conscious effort. Over time, it can become a different way of moving through the world.
Stop Feeding the Fantasy
You cannot control every thought that enters your mind. A sexual thought may appear when you see someone attractive, an image may come into your mind unexpectedly, or you may remember someone you've slept with before you've consciously chosen to think about her. I don't think the answer is to become frightened of your own thoughts.
The important distinction is between having a thought and feeding a thought. A thought appears, and then you add something to it. You imagine what she looks like naked, imagine sleeping with her, create a scenario, and perhaps return to it later. At some point, you are no longer simply experiencing a spontaneous thought. You are participating in the fantasy.
This is where choice enters. You can notice what your mind has done without condemning yourself and return your attention to something else. Changing your relationship with women doesn't require controlling every thought. It requires becoming more responsible for which thoughts you repeatedly choose to develop.
Pornography Can Shape More Than Your Pornography Use
This is one reason I believe quitting pornography is so important. I don't believe pornography is harmful only when a man becomes severely compulsive around it. My concern is also what pornography trains us to practice.
Pornography presents people primarily through the lens of sexual stimulation. Novelty is immediate. If one woman no longer interests you, another is a click away. There is no relationship required, no emotional intimacy, no vulnerability, no patience, and very little reason to think about the inner world of the person you're watching.
For me, quitting pornography was necessary, but it wasn't sufficient. I eventually realized that pornography could disappear from my screen while some of the way of seeing it had helped reinforce remained in my mind.
That was when the deeper work began.
Clean Up the Sexualized Content You Still Consume
A man can quit pornography and continue consuming an enormous amount of sexualized content. Social media makes this particularly easy. If your feed is filled with women you follow primarily because you find them sexually attractive, I think it's worth being honest with yourself about what you're actually doing.
You may not call it pornography, but if you spend an hour moving from one attractive woman's body to another, you're continuing to practice sexual novelty and visual consumption. Unfollow accounts, stop clicking sexualized content, tell recommendation algorithms you're not interested, and remove apps for a period if necessary.
This isn't about hiding from women or becoming frightened of sexuality. It's about deciding what you want to train your attention to seek.
See the Woman, Not Just Her Body
One of the most powerful shifts for me has been learning to consciously remember something that should be obvious but can become surprisingly easy to forget: there is an entire person there.
Every woman you pass has a life as complex as yours. She has parents, friends, memories, insecurities, talents, heartbreaks, dreams, responsibilities, things that make her laugh, people she misses, and questions about her own life she hasn't answered yet. Maybe she has children. Maybe she has a relationship with God. Maybe she's carrying something difficult that nobody around her knows about.
Her body is part of her, but it is not the entirety of her.
When you sexualize someone, your perception can collapse all of that complexity into a much narrower question: What does she do for me sexually? Learning to see women differently means reversing that reduction. Instead of desperately trying not to notice the body, expand your perception to include the person.
Become Genuinely Curious About Women
One practical way to change your relationship with women is to become genuinely curious about them, not as a technique for getting women to like you and not because asking questions is a good dating strategy, but because you're actually interested in the person in front of you.
What does she care about? What does she find funny? What is she building? What does she believe? What has shaped her? What does she want from life? When you begin relating this way, you may discover how limiting it was to experience women primarily through the question of attraction.
Women become much more interesting when you allow them to become whole people in your perception. If your attention has been heavily organized around sexual attractiveness, you have been experiencing only a fraction of who women are, and that limitation affects far more than dating. It affects your ability to listen, connect, learn, collaborate, form friendships, and simply enjoy another person's company without needing something sexual to happen.
When every interaction with an attractive woman carries the background question of sexual possibility, genuine connection becomes much harder.
Separate Female Validation From Your Self-Worth
I think this is one of the deeper parts of the work because sometimes sexualizing women isn't only about wanting sex. It's also about what being desired by women means to you.
If an attractive woman wants you, perhaps you feel more masculine, successful, desirable, or important. If she rejects you, perhaps you feel the opposite. Women then aren't only being used as sources of sexual stimulation. They're also being used as mirrors through which you measure your own worth.
If you need women to desire you in order to feel like a man, your relationship with women will always carry an invisible demand. You need something from them, and that can affect how you date, how you handle rejection, how much you perform, who you pursue, and how you behave when you aren't receiving the response you hoped for.
Self-respect has to be built somewhere deeper. I believe it grows through integrity, keeping promises to yourself, taking responsibility, developing meaningful relationships, doing meaningful work, and becoming a man you respect whether or not the woman in front of you chooses you.
The less you need women to prove your worth, the freer you become to actually know them.
Learn to Be Around an Attractive Woman Without Needing an Outcome
There is value in being able to speak to an attractive woman without automatically needing the interaction to become something. You don't always need her number, need to impress her, establish whether she's single, or turn an enjoyable conversation into flirting. Sometimes you can simply enjoy talking to another human being.
This doesn't mean you should never pursue a woman you're attracted to. If you like someone and want to explore something romantic, there is nothing wrong with expressing that interest. The question is whether sexual possibility becomes the condition for your interest in her as a person.
Can you appreciate a woman even if she isn't available to you? Can you respect her when she rejects you? Can you remain yourself around someone you find extremely attractive? Can you allow attraction to exist without immediately needing an outcome?
Being able to do that is another form of sexual freedom.
Attraction Is Not the Enemy
I want to emphasize this because men can easily take the wrong message from conversations about objectification. I don't want men to become afraid of sexual desire, and I don't want a man to notice a beautiful woman and immediately feel guilty. I don't believe healthy masculinity requires pretending you don't find women's bodies sexually attractive.
Sexual attraction is part of life. The work is learning how to integrate it.
A man can have a strong sex drive and sexual integrity at the same time. He can passionately desire his partner while respecting her completely, and he can notice an attractive stranger without turning her into pornography in his imagination.
Sexual desire and respect are not opposites. In a healthy relationship, I believe they can strengthen one another.
Can You Stop Sexualizing Women and Still Have a Strong Sex Drive?
Absolutely. In fact, I think this question reveals one of the biggest misunderstandings about desexualization.
The choice isn't between a highly sexual life in which you objectify women and a respectful life in which sex becomes dull, restrained, or shameful. I believe there is another possibility: you can become less sexualized and more capable of healthy sexuality.
Sexualization reduces a woman to something sexual. Healthy sexuality allows sex to exist within a relationship with a whole person.
That difference can completely change the experience.
Respect Can Lead to Better Sex
One of the things I believe strongly is that changing your relationship with women can improve the quality of your sexual relationships rather than diminishing them. The more you respect a woman, the more interested you become in her actual experience. You begin caring about what she enjoys, what makes her feel safe, what allows her to open up, what she desires, what makes her uncomfortable, and what sex means to her emotionally.
Sex stops being something you do to achieve a particular outcome and becomes something you're creating together. Respect can create the conditions for trust, trust can allow greater vulnerability, and vulnerability creates the possibility of deeper intimacy. I believe that intimacy can make sex significantly more fulfilling because you are no longer interacting only with another person's body. You are sharing an experience with someone you actually know.
Pornography taught me a version of sexuality heavily centered around stimulation and consumption. Real intimacy asks for something completely different. It asks you to be present enough to encounter another person rather than simply using her body to produce an experience for yourself.
I don't believe that makes sex less passionate. I believe it creates the possibility for sex to become much richer.
Better Relationships With Women Can Create a Better Life
This extends far beyond sex. Women make up an enormous part of the people we encounter throughout our lives, and if your ability to relate to them is constrained by sexualization, you're limiting an enormous part of your human experience.
When you stop evaluating women primarily according to sexual attractiveness, your capacity for relationships with them expands. You can listen differently, learn from women, become more emotionally open, date with greater curiosity, handle rejection with greater maturity, and become a better partner. When you fall in love, you also have a greater chance of loving the actual woman rather than the fantasy you've constructed around her.
This is one reason I don't see desexualization as deprivation. You're not giving up your relationship with women. You're expanding it.
You aren't learning to want women less. You're learning to relate to women more.
I believe that can lead to better relationships, a richer love life, more intimate and fulfilling sex, and ultimately a more fulfilling life.
Treat Sex as Something Intimate
I also think we have lost something by treating sex as though its value is primarily recreational. I don't believe sex is meaningless. Sex is one of the most intimate ways two human beings can connect, involving vulnerability, trust, desire, the body, emotion, and the willingness to allow another person extraordinarily close to you.
When sex is treated primarily as consumption, novelty, conquest, performance, or validation, much of that depth can disappear. For me, developing a healthier relationship with sexuality has meant treating sex as something more intimate rather than something less enjoyable.
Those aren't opposites. The more connected sexuality becomes to respect, trust, presence, and love, the greater I believe its potential becomes.
Better sex isn't necessarily more novelty. Sometimes it's more intimacy.
Lust Asks a Different Question Than Love
One of the distinctions at the center of my philosophy is the difference between lust and love.
Lust asks, "What can I get from you?" Love asks, "How can I honor you?"
That doesn't mean romantic love is required before you can treat another person with respect. The principle applies much more broadly. Consumption asks what another person can provide you, while connection asks who the other person actually is.
When you sexualize a woman, your attention tends to move toward what she can provide you, even if the entire interaction is happening only in your imagination. When you begin relating differently, another person's humanity becomes more important than the experience you might get from her.
That is a profound shift.
Develop Healthy Relationships With Women That Aren't Based on Sex
One of the things that can change your understanding of women is having meaningful relationships with women in which sex isn't the basis of the relationship. Through friendships, family relationships, work, community, and everyday life, you get to encounter women's inner worlds in ways pornography and sexualized media never allow. You hear how women actually experience relationships, what matters to them, what makes them feel respected, what they struggle with, what they value, and how differently they may experience situations that you have only ever considered from a man's perspective.
But I want to add an important qualification here: I don't believe every man can or should try to be friends with every woman he finds attractive. Sometimes attraction is simply too strong, feelings develop, or one person secretly wants something the other doesn't. In those situations, the mature response may be a boundary rather than trying to prove that you can maintain a friendship.
Don't deliberately become friends with a woman you're highly attracted to as some kind of test of your self-control. And don't call something a friendship when you're secretly waiting for your opportunity, hoping she'll eventually change her mind, or using friendship as a way of remaining emotionally close to someone you actually want romantically or sexually. That isn't necessarily healthier than openly acknowledging what you feel.
Part of self-leadership is knowing yourself well enough to recognize when a boundary is necessary. Sometimes respecting a woman, and respecting yourself, means accepting that a genuinely platonic relationship isn't realistic and creating some distance. The goal isn't to prove that you can surround yourself with attractive women without acting sexually. The goal is to develop a healthier and more honest way of relating to women.
At the same time, if you discover that you have no interest whatsoever in knowing women unless you are sexually attracted to them, I think that's worth examining too. Women can be friends, colleagues, mentors, teachers, business partners, creative collaborators, family members, and people whose company and perspective enrich your life. Learning to value women outside the question of sexual possibility is an important part of moving from objectification toward connection.
Don't Turn Respect Into Another Performance
There is another trap worth mentioning. You can learn all the correct language about respecting women and still secretly be doing it because you want women to like you. In that case, respect itself becomes another strategy for validation.
The goal isn't to perform being "one of the good men." It's to actually change the way you relate to women. That means respecting women who aren't attracted to you, women you don't find attractive, women who disagree with you, women who reject you, and women who cannot offer you anything you want.
Character becomes particularly visible when there is no reward attached to doing the right thing.
Take Responsibility Without Hating Yourself
When you begin seeing these patterns more clearly, you may feel ashamed of how you've thought about women in the past. I understand that, but I don't believe shame is the foundation for lasting change.
You can acknowledge that you've objectified women, that pornography affected you, that you've treated sex selfishly, or that you've sought validation through women. You don't need to minimize those behaviors, but you also don't need to decide that they define who you will always be.
Understanding how you became conditioned gives you context. Taking responsibility determines what happens next.
Changing the Way You See Takes Time
If you have spent years reinforcing sexualized patterns, don't expect them to disappear simply because you intellectually understand that women are whole human beings. You already knew that. This work happens through repetition in the ordinary moments of your life.
Every time you notice without staring, you're practicing. Every time a fantasy appears and you choose not to develop it, you're practicing. Every time you talk to an attractive woman without needing her validation, you're practicing. Every time you choose connection over pornography, see the person rather than only the body, or keep a promise to yourself, you're practicing a different way of being.
Eventually, a different way of relating can begin to feel more natural. This is part of what I mean when I talk about desexualizing your brain. You aren't trying to remove sexuality. You're retraining your attention so sexuality no longer dominates your perception.
From Objectification to Connection
The deepest change for me came when I stopped asking only how I could control my sexual thoughts and started asking a bigger question:
How do I actually want to relate to women?
I want to appreciate beauty without needing to consume it, experience attraction without being controlled by it, and enjoy sex without needing endless novelty. I want women to feel respected around me. I want to be capable of emotional intimacy, to experience sexuality as something increasingly connected to love, and to build relationships with women that make both of our lives richer.
I also want my private thoughts and behavior to increasingly reflect the same values I claim to hold publicly. That's a much bigger goal than simply trying not to look at women's bodies.
It's the movement from objectification to connection.
What You Gain When You Stop Sexualizing Women
I think this is the part that gets missed. This work isn't primarily about restriction. It's about what becomes possible when women stop occupying the strange position of simultaneously being people, sexual objects, sources of validation, and measures of your masculinity.
You can become more relaxed around women because you're no longer constantly evaluating or performing. You can become curious, listen, connect, and experience rejection without allowing it to determine your worth. You can experience sexuality without being consumed by it, love without needing to possess, and build relationships in which sex becomes an expression of intimacy rather than a substitute for it.
The more I learned to respect women and relate to them as whole human beings, the more I came to believe that this doesn't diminish a man's experience of women. It expands it. Your friendships can become richer, your relationships can become deeper, your love life can become more fulfilling, and your sex life can become more intimate because you're learning how to connect with another person rather than simply consume an experience.
Something changed for me when I began doing this work. Women became more human in my perception, and in the process, I think I did too.
From Consumption to Connection
Changing my relationship with women became part of a much larger process for me. Over more than five years, I worked on desexualizing my brain and changing my relationship with pornography, fantasy, attention, desire, intimacy, women, integrity, and myself. My experiences in men's circles, retreats, programs, and men's work also convinced me that this process can become much more powerful when men do it alongside other men.
Those experiences eventually became the foundation for From Consumption to Connection, my 12-week men's immersion. The program isn't about teaching men to suppress their sexuality or become ashamed of attraction. It's about helping men develop a healthier relationship with desire, rebuild self-command, understand the emotional patterns underneath consumption, change the way they see and relate to women, and build lives increasingly grounded in integrity, connection, brotherhood, and purpose.
I chose twelve weeks deliberately because I don't believe changing patterns that have often developed over many years should be reduced to a quick detox or challenge. The goal is to give men enough time to begin practicing a different way of seeing, relating, and living alongside other men doing the same work.
Ultimately, I don't want men to leave simply wanting women less. I want them to become capable of experiencing women more fully, with more respect, more connection, more intimacy, and more love. And yes, I believe that can mean better sex too.
The goal isn't to eliminate attraction. The goal is to restore respect.
When respect, intimacy, desire, and love begin working together rather than against one another, I believe both men and women gain something far greater than what sexual consumption could ever offer.
If you're ready to do that work alongside other men, you can learn more about From Consumption to Connection, my 12-week men's immersion.
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