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buybuydandavis comments on Sayeth the Girl - Less Wrong
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Women reduce men to a fancy car and a big house all the time. I used to find it rather insulting. I'd rather be reduced to a sex object. The grass is always greener.
Both men and women get reduced to status symbols for their mates. That's the way it is. I don't get much heartburn over it anymore.
The whole point of this website is that we can do something about big problems. Like dying!
I feel like not treating each other like crap should be a much easier problem to tackle than dying. Your comment smacks of System Justification.
While it's worth noting that men can also be objectified, I don't see how it follows that this isn't a Bad Thing.
While the statement "unfortunately people from group A undergo experience X" doesn't logically entail anything about people outside group A, it often does pragmatically implicate that the speaker doesn't think that people outside group A experiencing X constitute a problem to be worried about at the moment (otherwise, the speaker would likely not have mentioned group A in the first place: when did you last hear anyone lamenting that so many right-handed people die in car accidents?); therefore, the fact that both people within and outside A experience X is a reason to ADBOC with such a statement.
An excellent point, if perhaps a little strong, (objectifying men could simply be less of an issue,) but dan is saying that "That's the way it is. I don't get much heartburn over it anymore."
It is absolutely worth pointing out that neither sex is immune to objectification. Objectification is still bad. Just because I've been forced to put up with something doesn't mean everyone should just suck it up.
Another interpretation of his point: “It's hypocritical for women to complain about being objectified by men, because they also objectify men themselves.” That's only a valid point if the women who resent being objectified are the same women who objectify men, which is probably not the case.
Other examples of this failure mode are “Jerusalemites hailed Jesus as a deity when he came back, but five days later they were shouting for Pontius Pilate to crucify him” (maybe he had both supporters and opposers, who weren't the same people?) and “people are always protesting about that politician, but he keeps on being re-elected” (maybe young people protest and old people vote for him, or something like that).
It's an inference drawn from a mixture of fallacies of composition and division and the availability heuristic.
"I notice Jerusalemites supporting Jesus, therefore Jerusalem supports Jesus. I notice Jerusalemites opposing Jesus, therefore Jerusalem opposing Jesus. Jerusalem both supports and opposes Jesus; therefore Jerusalem is fickle; therefore Jerusalemites are individually fickle ... and should feel bad about their fickleness."
Or awesome, depending on your preference in the specific instance.
For most meanings of "objectification", I figured this possibility is so unusual as to be irrelevant. Am I missing something?
What do we mean by "objectification"? I would argue that the Baysianism-utilitarianism epistemology cloud around here objectifies all people and all subsets of people by reducing them to the status of tools or victory points, and no one seems particularly concerned about this until the subset being objectified becomes that set of all females.
From Rachael's comment:
Or ... look it up. The top three or four results for "objectification of women" on your favorite search engine may be enlightening.
EY is opposed to not-caring-about-whether-your-sexual-partner-is-sentient (which is my understanding of the top Google hit for that phrase), FWIW.
It seems to be a bit more than that. Sometimes sexual objectification seems to include wishing a potential sexual partner were nonsentient — treating people as if they ought to be automata to serve your wishes, and that it's an outrage that they don't act like it.
It's one thing to say, "I wish I had a sexbot." It's another thing to say, "You shouldn't exist; instead there should exist a sexbot in your image, for me."
First thought was, “WTH? If all those people want is to masturbate using someone else's body, why don't they just pay for a prostitute?”, then I remembered that prostitution is illegal in plenty of places. (Now I'm curious whether stuff like date rape drug use is more prevalent in places where prostitution is illegal than where it isn't.)
Possible reasons:
I'd like to chime in and say that if this seems absurd and incredible and who does that ... Uhh. That's happened to me. It's not fun. Maybe a bit more tangled up, but almost exactly that.
Which one were you, the one who wished your partner were nonsentient or the one whom your partner wished were nonsentient?
There's no problem with seeing women as status tools or victory points if you explicitly state that what you're playing is a woman-collecting game, or a lay-collecting game, number-close game, etc. Some people might frown at your choice of game for moral reasons, but they'll admit that you're doing the strategically correct thing with respect to your game's objective.
The problem arises when you say that you're winning at "relationships" or you claim your game is what "everyone knows" to be how relationships work or that's how "the" game is played. That is when "everyone" gets pissed. We don't want to be lumped into that group.
That's not the claim. The claim is that everyone does this, but most people prefer to believe they're doing something else.
Oh, I think I agree in that case. Objectifying people is okay because people are really complicated and sometimes you only need to consider one property of a person in order to compute your goals if you're maximizing utility along some one axis. Sure!
Objectifying people is bad when it hurts them.
When people are concerned about it, it's probably because it hurts them.
Or because they expect to gain from indicating concern.
Few things:
It seems to have multiple meanings and connotations all blurring into each other. Possible meaning include:
Most people mean many or all of these when they say "objectifying" due to connotations and sloppy terminology. A few also include "Treating someone as governed by instinct rather than as a sentient being", especially when discussing PUA.
Does that answer your question?
Prior discussion about that
I made the same point there as well.
Ah, that part I had glanced over. Well, that's a case of Generalizing from One Example: ‘[I don't mind {noise, clutter, being objectified}, therefore it's not a big deal and] if you complain about it you're oversensitive.’
Do you suggest that people should select their mates randomly?
Him:
Me:
So no, no I don't.
I thought that you implied that it was a Bad Thing, while you were just objecting the logic of the argument. Thanks for the clarification.
The multiple negation might be confusing, but basically:
"It's not just A that has horrible things happen to them, A^C also do!" does not imply "It is good/okay that A and A^C have horrible things happen to them".