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Eugine_Nier comments on Sayeth the Girl - Less Wrong
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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'm not always sure which instances of “sexbot” in your comment are supposed to be literal and which are supposed to be metaphorical. Anyway...
That would require your partner to be sentient, wouldn't it?
Or to have been sentient.
The squick has been doubled!
Haha, not quite. I think you'd want it to be sentient just enough to provide a challenge but turn off its sentience whenever it becomes unpleasant or inconvenient.
Whichever works (which in some cases means both).
Yes, quite right. My mental cache evidently used too much compression and the reconstruction thereof failed to include the necessary explanation. The ego related possible answer that I originally intended was of course that factors of pride and validation of sexual appeal may be absent in both cases and so "just pay a prostitute" would not help them.
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?
Yeah, I was the annoyingly sentient one. The conversation went something like
In that context, if you solve for the taboo meaning of the word "girlfriend", it basically comes out to nonsentient sexbot. But he wasn't trying to be evil, he was just quite innocently incredulous and couldn't figure out what was wrong with the world.
Would he agree with that description? Maybe he would, or perhaps there are other things that he said or did that make your attribution of meaning valid. However in themselves the words quoted are just as compatible with the taboo meaning being "someone who executes a set of behaviors that happen to include X, Y and also [thing]". That is a matter of someone having incompatible romantic preferences and who has made incorrect assumptions about your conformance to a particular social contract.
Again, I'm not saying the description is incompatible with him wishing you were a non-sentient sexbot. Rather, that this particular story doesn't come anywhere near making that interpretation the most plausible.
Well no, it specifically comes out to "someone who executes a set of behaviors that happens to include [thing] even when those behaviors go against their personality". So it's someone that puts aside their personality and does things that feels weird and uncomfortable that they wouldn't do otherwise because their "boyfriend" wants them to.
I think it's closer to "someone who likes me enough that she's willing to do things that (possibly mildly) go against their personality for me". I don't no what [thing] was so I don't know how reasonable or unreasonable the request was.
It might also help if you tabooed "go against one's personality".
(Now I'm reminded of someone in the Italian edition of Loveline asking a question starting with “I've been with my girlfriend for a year, but we haven't had sex yet” and being answered with something starting more-or-less with “first of all, if you aren't having sex with her, then by definition she's not your girlfriend; she's just a friend”.)
What'd you think when you heard it?
As far as I can remember, something like “well, I can kind-of sort-of see her point, but on the other hand I don't (say) kiss my friends on the mouth in public on a routine basis or implicitly promise each other to not hook up with anyone else, so assuming the caller does, I wouldn't say that she's not his girlfriend but just a friend”. But now that I think about that, that definition is broken, too (e.g. it doesn't encircle open/poly relationships).
Were you a mono couple? Members of mono couples sometimes have ideas about an obligation to fulfill all the other person's sexual and romantic needs since the partner can't go anywhere else. Perhaps he had asymmetrical ideas about this and would not have obliged if you'd made a similar request, but if the notions were symmetrical then it's not a sexbot thing. One reason I'm careful not to date women who aren't dating any other men is that my life is full of other and overriding demands, and I don't want to be someone's only boyfriendly recourse.
Yeah, I agree that there are circumstances in which this works out. But we were mono and he was very asymmetrical and he had no idea that he was asymmetrical. (There was stuff to which I told him to find another girl, but he'd get mad if I was talking to another guy.) Like the thought that he was asking me for way more stuff than he would be willing to do (and that there's anything wrong with that) just never crossed his mind. So he was innocently confused and frustrated about why things weren't going his way.
This also gets into the issue of manipulating language to sneak in blind spots into the meanings of words. "A girlfriend is someone who should make me happy, and not doing [thing] makes me unhappy, so it's your fault I'm unhappy." But again, the scariest part was that he wasn't trying to be evil! He just did all of his reasoning in that kind of spotty language that was skewed in his favor. And then constantly couldn't figure out why the territory ... wasn't.
We can't quite yet conclude he was evil until you further inform us that he thought he was allowed to talk to other girls without asking you (I naturally presume that no asymmetry of this sort was ever explicitly negotiated). If he carefully refrained from talking to other girls, then we have a big mismatch in expectations about how a relationship should work and a probable breakup recommendation, but not an asymmetric non-negotiated demand.
Sorry for being pedantic in my definitions, but while this sort of thing may not in fact be relevant to your case, the general rule may prove important to others.
That doesn't constitute asymmetry of the kind I think Eliezer was talking about. It would be asymmetric if he took you up on your invitation to look for other girls while expecting you not to do the same.
Sounds pretty narcissistic of him. And narcissism is basically incurable, so hopefully you moved on.
Are there still people like that? o.O
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:
'And' would be unambiguously incorrect. 'Or' is correct, obviously doesn't exclude the possibility that the gain could be of the kind your mentioned and also allows for the other possibilities.
Why do you read gain like it's a bad thing? I have no objection to gain. I'm not judging the expression of concern one way or another, merely commenting on which situations concern is expressed. It is worth making such a comment because the quoted prediction was misleadingly simple.
Okay, but if you're saying gain isn't a bad thing, then you're not really saying anything. Maybe it would help if you name these other things that can be gained by expressing concern?
But you're not, because you didn't name any situations.
I can't quite explain why it feels trivial to read gain as a good thing, but I have an example. Positive version:
It's kind of confusing, right? It's like "Err, yes. That's what I said." Compared to:
That's why I read it as the second one.
Not quite. The denotation of “A or B” is normally “A or B”, though it often has the connotation “but not both”. “A and/or B” has the same denotation but lacks that connotation. See the first sentence of the fifth paragraph of this.
The term connotation is usually used for what distinguishes the meanings of "dog" and "cur". The exclusivity of "or" seems to be a rather different thing and is commonly regarded as a conversational implicature (which explains why it disappears under negation, for instance). Whether that's really correct is somewhat debatable, especially because nobody really knows what the denotation of "or" actually is; but calling it connotation strikes me as misleading.
Yes, "conversational implicature" is the more precise term for that, but I used "connotation" instead because I thought it was close enough and it is more widely known among LW readers. (I thought that the main difference was that the latter is usually applied to words and the former to sentences; is there another important one?)
There's at least one that cannot be considered a consequence of implicatures attaching to sentences (or maybe phrases): You can cancel implicatures ("you can do this or that - in fact, you can do both"), but not connotations.
It's instructive to ask the reverse question: Is there any important commonality between implicatures and connotations other than that neither is part of the literal meaning? I think the answer is no.
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.