Your Body Is Not for Sale: Helping Young Men Resist Self-Objectification

“Chris Pratt welcomes your objectification.”^[1] That was the headline in 2017. Once known for playing the lovable, “chubby” Andy Dwyer on NBC’s Parks and Rec, Pratt had transformed his body for a string of Hollywood blockbusters. Now that he was on the cover of GQ, and his abs were all over the internet, reporters wanted to know how he felt about being objectified.

“I would say that objectification is good for me,” Pratt replied, “because when I turned my body into an object that people liked, I got paid a lot of money. My kids can go to college because I’m an object.”

It wasn’t the first time he had praised objectification. Two years earlier, in 2015, Pratt had suggested that the best response to the objectification of women in the media was “to objectify men just as often.”^[2] For equality.

“There are a lot of women who got careers out of [objectification],” he continued, “and I’m using it to my advantage. And at the end of the day, our bodies are objects. We’re just big bags of flesh and blood and meat and organs that God gives us to drive around.”

His imagery may be a bit distasteful, but Pratt was just saying the quiet part out loud. And in doing so, he gave us one of the most visceral summaries of the spirit of our age I have ever heard.

His call for more objectification of men may well have been tongue-in-cheek, but it proved prophetic. A decade later, women are certainly not being objectified any less. But the reverse has happened: men are racing to objectify themselves. Prestige television now overflows with graphic male nudity. Six-pack abs made waves last decade, but now it’s male genitals that generate the headlines.

Just last year, Pratt’s own brother-in-law appeared fully nude on a popular HBO show. Asked about the much-publicized scene, Pratt didn’t hesitate to objectify his brother-in-law.^[3] Clarifying that he’s not “blood related,” Pratt said his eyes went straight to his brother-in-law’s exposed genitals.

“I was like, ‘rock it, bro,'” said Pratt.

I suppose we can chalk that up as a victory for equality.

HBO, Thirst Traps, and OnlyFans

We might be tempted to dismiss all this as the depravity of Hollywood. But this same self-objectification is making its way into the devices, living rooms, and gyms of every town in America. And, like Pratt, increasingly more young men are welcoming it. They’re choosing to objectify themselves, if no one else will do it for them.

When a young man today watches that HBO scene, he is unlikely to look away in shame or bemoan “unrealistic body standards.” Sadly, many young men have seen too much pornography to be shocked by a naked body. He does not see that actor as a man made in God’s image, with a body meant to tell the story of God’s self-giving love. He sees exactly what Pratt described: a man driving his bag of meat and organs straight to the bank.

Very few young men will ever have a Hollywood agent. But nearly every young man has a phone, and every young man has a body. And whether he’s looking for affirmation, clout, sexual gratification, or just some spending money, the world is making him a clear offer: (1) Make your body an object people like. (2) Show it to us. (3) We give you what you want.

For too many young men, including in our churches, self-objectification is an offer too good to pass up. One youth pastor told me he has seen a sharp rise in high school boys posting shirtless “gym selfies,” ostensibly to share their fitness gains, but plainly intended to provoke envy or desire in their followers. There’s a name for this: the “thirst trap,” a post designed to provoke thirst (read: lust) under a veneer of plausible deniability. There are plenty of “Christian” thirst traps, too—the shirtless workout video with a Bible verse in the caption.

Whether flirty or faith-coded, social media is awash in young men’s thirst traps. One author calls them a “new form of self-advertisement in a digitized sexual marketplace,”^[4] and algorithms reward this “advertisement” handsomely, because thirst means attention, and attention means revenue. Many young men have figured out how to monetize this thirst through sponsorships and paid content.

Gym selfies are no longer just a way to impress your friends. If you know how to play your cards right, self-objectification can put you through college or maybe even make you a fortune.

None of this has happened in a vacuum. In a world that seems to have less and less use for a young man’s masculinity, his body still fetches a high price when it’s optimized, neutralized, and displayed safely behind glass touchscreens.

In a world that feels like it’s spinning out of control, his body is the one thing he feels he can control. He can’t fix the job market, but he can hit the gym, take the supplements, and follow the regimens. He can decide how much skin to show and just how far he’s willing to go.

Chris Pratt was not trying to make the case for young men taking their clothes off for strangers on the internet. But that is exactly where his logic leads—to cam sites like OnlyFans, where a man can sell pornographic images of himself to whomever will pay, whether women or, often, other men. If your body is an object people like enough to pay a fortune to see, why on earth would you say no? A customer is a customer. It’s just your body.

The Ancient Temptation of Self-Objectification

Technology has made self-objectification easier, “safer,” and more lucrative for young men than ever before. But it is not new. We need only go back two thousand years, to the earliest days of the church, to find a world that feels strikingly familiar.

The Apostle Paul wrote two letters to the church in Corinth, a Roman city steeped in centuries of Greek culture that worshiped the idealized male body. Walk through Corinth in Paul’s day and you would have seen it everywhere. The gymnasium was the hub of civic life, where the men of the city gathered to train and socialize in the nude. Young men honed their physiques and competed in the open, on display, measured against one another and against the gods, whose flawless marble bodies stood watch in every public square. To be young and strong and beautiful in Corinth was to be admired. Maybe even worshiped.

But these young men’s bodies were not only display pieces. In a culture that worshiped youth and virility, their bodies were currency. They were tools for giving and receiving pleasure. Chess pieces for gaining or surrendering power. Bags of flesh and blood and meat and organs to take you where you wanted to go. Who cared if he was objectified? That was the whole point.

Bought for Love

Many Corinthian Christians had absorbed this lie: that what they did with the body didn’t matter because God would destroy it anyway. Paul would not let it stand. “The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord,” he wrote, “and the Lord for the body.” The resurrection of Jesus was proof that the body would not be discarded but raised and made new.

In a city full of temples where the body was celebrated, worshipped, and sold, Paul told the Corinthians that their bodies were temples of the Holy Spirit. God had not created them as disembodied souls and then handed them bags of flesh to drive around. In union with Christ, they were the dwelling place of God himself, and wherever they went, they brought Jesus with them. To the gymnasium. To the brothel (1 Cor. 6:15–20).

“You are not your own,” Paul wrote. “For you were bought with a price” (1 Cor. 6:19b–20). Bought with a price. In a city where objectified bodies really were bought and sold, Paul takes the language of that marketplace of flesh and turns it inside out. You have been bought, yes. But not to be used and discarded, enjoyed and forgotten. You were bought to be loved. You were bought to be a home for God. You were bought to be made whole and raised to everlasting life.

Self-Objectification and Rapidly Depreciating Assets

Imagine a young Corinthian man, newly converted, in the gymnasium, wondering whether the way of Christ is worth it. Will he follow the way of a man who gave his body up for others, or the way of men who use their bodies to get ahead? He gazes up at the marble god that promises he, too, could be sculpted into perfection, that he, too, could be worshiped. However chiseled, however well endowed, this “god” is ultimately just a dead block of stone—no life in its eyes, no blood in its veins, no strength in its limbs, and no gift to offer the world.

He looks around at the older men eyeing him with thirst and envy. Their bodies once looked like those statues, but now they are breaking down. They’re still objects but no longer objects anyone would pay to see.

That is the tragedy of self-objectification in first-century Corinth or twenty-first-century America. Turning oneself into an object is never as glamorous as it seems. The human body, for all its glory, is a rapidly depreciating asset.

But Paul has the best possible news for this young man, and for every young man who is in Christ. Just as a living body is more real than any marble statue, he will one day be raised with a body more real than he is now, even at the peak of his strength. What is sown in weakness will be raised in power (1 Cor. 15:42–43). As C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity, “We are the statues, and there is a rumor going around that some of us are some day going to come to life” (159).

Created to Be a Gift

This is the difference between a commodity and a gift. A commodity is hoarded and sold to the highest bidder, but a gift is received. And a gift is freely given away. Christ did not redeem you to set your body on a shelf. Your body is you, and your body is a gift. When you are united to Christ and full of his love, your body becomes a gift you can offer freely, even sacrificially. Strength for the sake of others, not for pride. Beauty that reflects our Creator, not vanity. Embodied presence with a friend, not disincarnated pixels. Sexuality expressed in true self-donation to one’s wife, not a thirst for personal gratification.

If Christ had not come in real flesh, lived, died, and risen, none of this makes sense. Not in a Corinthian gymnasium, not on HBO, and not on a TikTok feed. If he did not rise, your male body really is headed back to the dust faster than you think, and then it’s all over. So, by all means, pursue self-objectification. “Rock it, bro.” Rock it while you can.

But Christ did rise. And if you are united to him, you will rise, too, with a body more alive and strong and beautiful than anything you could ever build, and you will not waste a single moment of eternity trying to objectify it. You will be too busy living, loving, serving, and adventuring in the new creation, in the presence of God.

Brother, you are not a bag of flesh and blood and meat and organs. You are a man. Whatever your size or shape, every part of you was made with love to tell the story of God’s love, not human thirst. No part of you, in flesh or in pixels, can ever be sold, because you have already been bought with a price by the One who loves you—the One who gave his body for you.

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^[1] Meghan de Maria, “Chris Pratt Welcomes Your Objectification,” Refinery 29, April 21, 2017. https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2017/04/151129/chris-pratt-objectification-men-women  

^[2] Natalie Stone, “Chris Pratt on Advocating for Equality: ‘Objectify Men Just as Often as We Objectify Women,’” The Hollywood Reporter, June 18, 2015. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/chris-pratt-advocating-equality-objectify-803637/

^[3] Elizabeth Gulino, “The World Did Not Need Chris Pratt’s White Lotus Take,” The Cut, February 25, 2025. https://www.thecut.com/article/chris-pratt-patrick-schwarzenegger-nude-scene-white-lotus.html

^[4] Stephen G. Adubato, “The Angst of the Male Thirst Trapper,” Tablet: Arts and Letters, May 14, 2023. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/angst-male-thirst-trapper