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Open any paper or listen to the news this week and you’ll find accounts of women talking about the way they’ve been treated by men. There have been claims about cases of touching and groping, some of it historic, some recent. Yet despite the reports of these allegations, what particularly distressed me was a picture of a chair. I suppose this shows the power an image has to shock but like many others I was taken aback by a photo of a chair modelled on a woman’s body, lying on the floor, bent over so that her buttocks and thighs made the chair’s seat and with her legs in the air. Even though the image showed another woman, rather than a man, sitting on it, the whole thing cried out subjugation. It was exacerbated too by the fact that the chair was a model of a black woman, reinterpreted from a previous artist’s white version. The Norwegian artist who made the latest chair says it’s an artwork specifically as a commentary on gender and racial politics. It certainly shocked and disturbed me and says something about our society: that women, despite 50 plus years of feminism, are often still sexualised and objectified. It also indicates the extent to which people still see the human body as separate from the rest of the person and as something to be used. While this dualism is reflected today in a consumerist approach to people it has ancient roots in Greek philosophy which saw the body and the soul as distinct. The body was of no importance compared to the immortal soul. It affected early Christian thinking too until Thomas Aquinas argued that the human soul and body are united. Evidence from abuse victims and those affected by war proves Aquinas right about the unity of the human form. Traumatic bodily experiences linger to affect your mind, your character, your very soul. The scarring isn’t just physical – it goes right to the heart of you. Years ago at my convent school the nuns would try and inculcate the idea that the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. At the time we teenagers thought it a ridiculously pious notion. But think of other people’s bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit and you start to understand that they are not yours to consume or take for granted. They are integral to that person, as much as any other part of them, and something to be cherished. As Wittgenstein said, the human body is the best picture of the human soul.