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Alicorn comments on Absolute denial for atheists - Less Wrong
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You make a very good point. I'm tempted to draw a distinction between referring to a hypothetical member of a profession as opposed to a hypothetical member of a gender, but until I've given this more thought all I will say is that it'd probably be better to say "a garden" than "a gardener".
Alicorn, I am curious what is your answer to Emile's question if we replace "gardener" with "butler"?
Please do not take my question as a dismissal of your concern. In fact, I think it is probable that you have a valid concern. I ask my question not in the spirit of a debate but rather in the spirit of a cooperative quest to understand. I am planning more top-level posts about sex, and I do not want my ignorance of your concerns and similar concerns to cause me to alienate female Less Wrongers.
I think what I'm going to wind up saying to both the gardener and butler examples is that those individuals are explicitly selling their work, so it's okay to refer to the profession as a stand-in for a semi-objectified human representation of that work. I've said elsewhere that when people want to have sex with women, it's "at least honest" to purchase it outright from prostitutes who are selling it; I imagine it's no less honest to purchase the work of a gardener or a butler. It's when random "attractive women"/"girls"/whatever are said to be taking action other than the actual, literal sale of some sort of work as a result of hypothetical millionaire-ness that it stops being acceptable.
I think the problem is that you need to think though what it is you're protesting. Objectification, to me, doesn't mean wanting to get, acquire or obtain a girl. Buying a girl, raping a girl - that's objectification, because the rapist ignores the fact that the girl has free will. It's still true that she is ALSO an object, though. And a chordate animal. And an ultra-feminist.
Buying women, kidnapping women, shotgun wedding, buying off the cops to cover up your rape - these are no-nos. But what's wrong with attracting girls by being more awesome?
(Also, it is immoral to abuse bugs in people's decision-making algorithms.)
Nothing, unless by "more awesome" you mean "more deceitful, depersonalizing, and piggish".
Some people (of both sexes) have a sexual preference for depersonalization or being depersonalized. Are you saying that they are wrong to have that preference, or that it is wrong for anyone to participate with their enactment of it?
I assume here that by "wrong" you intend to ascribe some higher form of wrongness than merely your own disgust. But even if it's just your personal disgust, I find it hard to see how that disgust is any different from say, homophobia.
If you're talking about the ilk of BDSM, I do not think those desires or their enactments are wrong, but there is a difference between (for instance) person A calling person B depersonalizing names in situation X, where this is a scene and B has a safeword and they're going to go have scrambled eggs at a café together later or something, and in situation Y, where this is an abusive relationship and A is really and continually thought of as an object rather than a partner - even if in situation Y as well as X, B happens to be turned on by the depersonalizing names. By a similar token, battery is wrong even if you just so happen to perpetrate it on a masochist; murder is wrong even if you just so happen to perpetrate it on someone who was about to commit suicide; etc. Information, not luck.
The next logical thing to bring up is 24/7 BDSM relationships, but responsibly conducted those at least begin with a personal and consensual ceding of control.
The question was, is it then "wrong" (as you suggested it was) for person B to think person A is "more awesome" in situation Y?
In situation Y, person A is an abuser, and no one should think abusers at all awesome, at least not at being ethical people (I suppose they could be awesome at something else, like curling or origami). To think an abuser is awesome at being an ethical person is to be mistaken and, probably, to be mistaken about facts of morality.
The comment of yours I'm referring to is the one where you said:
And it was in reply to a comment asking what was wrong with attracting people via awesomeness, so switching it to "being ethical people" now is a complete red herring.
You still haven't said what it is that's "wrong" here with someone having a different definition of awesomeness than you.
So when you say:
My question to you is, what are you saying about person B thinking person A is awesome, in the sense of being attractive? (as was the context of this thread) You implied that it is "wrong". How so?
Please explain to me how being rich is any of these things. Don't make me invoke Godwinski's Law.
It seems to me that you're saying that merely wanting sex is dehumanizing.
It's not.
What?
No.
"Please explain to me how being rich is any of these things.
It's not."
Then what DO you mean? Minutae of phrasing?
When I said "more awesome", I meant "richer". That is also what Roko said - that money gets you girls. He didn't say that money gets you girls on the black market. Money gets you all sorts of girls - from sex slaves to true love. Not being a jerk is a separate problem.
The first Google result for this is the parent comment. I have no idea what you mean. From what I gather, it's supposed to be invoked when someone calls one's opponent a Communist. Did that happen?
It's a term that was proposed on TV Tropes, but I forgot that, apparently, it wasn't launched.
Is thomblake's definition correct, then?
Yep.
It is perhaps a salient distinction that people choose their profession, but not their gender.
However, I disagree; both are objectifying to some degree, but it is considered socially acceptable to objectify people in the context of employment, presumably because both parties are getting some explicit value out of the transaction.
It's certainly something that mid-20th-century radicals would object to. The language of 'objectification' that we've inherited primarily from radical feminists grew out of the intellectual framework of the Marxists, who were explicitly objecting to that sort of treatment of employees; cf Marx (or better yet Hagel)'s notion of alienation.
That said, I don't think we have any radicals here in that sense, and I agree with Alicorn's characterization that it would have probably been fine for OP to say (roughly speaking) "get lots of prostitutes".
Marx's equivalent to objectification is actually called "commodity fetishism" (seriously - no pun intended). It corresponds to replacing social relations between human beings with mere exchange of commodities. In Marxian analysis, this obscures the social and exchange relations between producers and consumers, since e.g. a worker becomes utterly unaware of the people who will consume his products, except to the extent that his "labor-power" is valued as a commodity.
Of course, as Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek observed, commodity fetishism (or the "commercial production process") is what makes modern-day specialization and complex supply chains possible: even something as humble as a cotton shirt might incorporate designs sketched out in Italy, cotton grown in Africa and plastic buttons made in China. Requiring human contact or conscious agreements between so many agents would clearly be infeasible.
The benefits of sexual objectification are far less clear, except to the extent that (as some empirical evidence bears out) some people are positive towards being objectified in a sexual context.
Well, it is somewhat tacky to blatantly objectify employees--it tends to make one sound like a pompous, entitled jerk. But that's a much shallower sort of objection than what Alicorn is raising. At a general social level, objectifying in the context of employement is on the "acceptable" side, whereas objectifying in the context of personal relationships, especially sexual relationships, straddles the line and is probably drifting toward "unacceptable".
As for me, since I figure it's heading that way, I'm getting in on the ground floor on avoiding such language, so that when I'm 70 years old I don't embarrass younger family members with quaint objectifying language.