In order to flourish, humans need to be both subjectified and objectified-- that is, they they need to feel like they are in control of their life and that their wellbeing is taken as an end in itself by others (subjectified) but they also need to feel useful and wanted by others (objectified).
Of course they ideal balance between these two paradigms probably varies greatly between individuals and between groups. But I think it is plausible that our culture, in general, over-objectifies women and under-objectifies men. I don't think this is actually that controversial, most narrative protagonists are men, most people who make money from their physical attractiveness are women. Bosses tend to be men, secretaries tend to be women. Traditionally men headed families, went to work and made the important decisions. Traditionally a woman's role was to support her husband, cook for him, raise his children and look nice.
Now, if we assume that, whatever the ideal ratio of objectification to subjectification is for women, our culture over objectifies it becomes clear why feminists would oppose female objectification (one would also suspect that outspoken feminists would be among the most over-...
Agreed. It's probably more multi-dimensional than that actually- people's preferences regarding objecthood and subjecthood vary over different domains as well. There are people who want to be totally independent financially but dominated in bed and there are people happy to be dependent on another for income so long as they get to be on top. Further, people's preferences change over time.
As usual, treating people as generalizations of their subgroup is dangerous.
There's an associated Catch-22 actually. Finding out the degree of objectification someone desires is really difficult unless you ask them (and give them the freedom to learn and explore the relevant options). But of course, this subjectifies them (to a rather extreme level relative to the tremendous restrictions on autonomy our ancestors faced). This paradox plays out constantly as far as I can tell. For example, some people are turned off when others are overly concerned with getting prior permission to engage in romantic and sexual behavior. Person A may want person B to "just grab me and lay one on". Person B may want to do the kissing but doesn't know if A wants to be objectified in this way. B can ask A, bu...
lukeprog said:
I'm a tall white American male, so sometimes it takes a bit of work for me to understand what it's like to be a member of a suppressed group.
It's a high-status truism in polite, liberal middle-class society that white males are not oppressed (except perhaps on the dimensions of class and sexual orientation). That's exactly the sort of belief that should be interrogated on LW.
I propose that you have more insight into the oppression of other groups than you think, because you actually are a member of an oppressed group (males). You just haven't been trained to conceptualize your experiences as oppression, like women have been trained by feminism.
For many readers, the notion that men are "oppressed" may be controversial. This view of oppression is denied by mainstream academic feminists. Nevertheless, some feminists do believe that men are oppressed (though not "as much" as women).
Rather than argue that men are oppressed myself, I will refer to feminist sociologist Caroline New's amazing paper Oppressed and Oppressors? The Systematic Mistreatment of Men, which I discussed a while ago on my blog:
...I shall argue that both women and men are oppress
Could you please taboo "oppression" and its synonyms? You seem to be using it as a sort of discrimination/cognitive bias affair which doesn't seem to fit colloquial use of oppression.
Oppression in common usage appears to signify systematic stereotyping with a net negative effect for the population group in question, or specific behaviors associated with oppression of a group, in which case neither males nor white males are oppressed, even though there are indubitably cases where discrimination and cognitive biases turn out negatively for specific subgroups (such as male nurses, cuckolds, divorcees, etc.)
"Objectification" is another such concept. We know that it's yet another piece of jargon for a bad thing that men do to women. But we don't really know what it and why it's wrong, nor it is demarcated from ethical forms of imagery.
Objectification is a well-defined and experimentally verified to exist phenomenon by which women in western society at least judge themselves by the impression others have of their physical bodies, which correlates, amongst other things, to eating disorders.
While the connection between sexual imagery and objectification is less easi...
I recommend the movie "Filming Desire" for what I found to be a very interesting and nuanced feminist analysis of objectification, and what happens when women try to represent sex for ourselves rather than buying into how the dominant culture represents sex (i.e., how men with stereotypical desires represent sex).
Here is an edited version of a comment I recently wrote on my own post "Ethical Pick-Up Artistry" [ http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2011/03/23/ethical-pick-up-artistry/ ], which I think is tangentially relevant:
I don’t really like the idea that men’s sexuality is generally more focused on stereotypically “hot” women, and that it’s some kind of inherent difference -- beyond cultural influences -- that it's more unusual/more difficult for men to be attracted to non-conventionally attractive women than to conventionally attractive ones, as opposed to the way attraction works for most het women. But it could be true, and if it is then I don’t feel comfortable shaming men for that. (It seems like gay men frequently exhibit similar attraction patterns to straight men, in terms of being considerably more attracted to younger partners and more, shall we say, scul...
I think that objectification of people is kind of like defecation or masturbation. I do it sometimes, I'm pretty sure everyone else does it too, I don't think it is particularly unhealthy, but for some reason people object when you do it publicly.
So I don't.
I actually think it's the public thing that specifically makes it bad. The private thing is an issue, but only because saying things in private makes you more likely to say/do related things in public.
This ties in with my issue with the Hanson and Katja Grace articles. Grace and Hanson seem to be approaching the issue from a single metric - guys treating specific women like sex objects and interacting with them with that mindset. When I think a bigger problem (in a torture vs dust specks sense) is all the little comments guys will make that belittle women in their daily life.
I work in an animation studio. For a while I was in a room with 4 guys and 1 girl. The guys had a raunchy sense of humor and with some frequency, joked about things like rape. I never got to actually talk to the girl about it but my sense was that she was uncomfortable, but pretended not to be. (She'd laugh at the jokes, but occasionally I saw her grimace in a way that didn't look too amused)
She left the company eventually. Now I'm in a room with just a few guys. The sexist comments have gone up dramatically. I know the guys are joking, but I also suspect that they've internalized some of the things they say. (For example, in discussing his romantic partner, one guy says on occasion "seriously, I think girls are just crazy." I think he's only half joking, and that his perception of the girls he's been involved with are warped by the portrayal of girls, both in media and in the way he and his friends talk about them).
Interesting exercise: going through your list of '''10 ways to treat a person as a thing''' and see how many of them the 'LW consensus' satisfies.
1) Instrumentality. The objectifier treats the object as a tool of his or her purposes.
Well, we're mostly consequentialists.
2) Denial of autonomy. The objectifier treats the object as lacking in autonomy and self-determination.
Are you claiming to have free will or something?
3) Inertness. The objectifier treats the object as lacking in agency, and perhaps also in activity.
See 2.
4) Fungibility. The objectifier treats the object as interchangeable (a) with other objects of the same type and/or (b) with objects of other types.
5) Violability. The objectifier treats the object as lacking in boundary integrity, as something that it is permissible to break up, smash, break into.
6) Ownership. The objectifier treats the object as something that is owned by another, can be bought or sold, etc.
Ok, we don't do these two.
7) Denial of subjectivity. The objectifier treats the object as something whose experience and feelings (if any) need not be taken into account.
Fortunately this isn't that common but there is an occasional tendency...
Really, I think the list overcomplicates matters.
Status is a valuable commodity, so behaving in a way that lowers someone else's status is therefore acting against their interests; non-person objects generally have lower status than people, so treating people as though they were non-person objects is therefore acting against their interests.
"I'm a tall white American male, so sometimes it takes a bit of work for me to understand what it's like to be a member of a suppressed group."
Females are suppressed, and so are males. Gender roles suppress both genders. They also offer advantages to both genders.
List of male privileges: http://www.amptoons.com/blog/the-male-privilege-checklist/
List of female privileges: http://masculistadvice.blogspot.com/2008/06/female-privilege-list.html
It is true that popular discourse paints females as the suppressed group and males as the non-suppressed group.
"So I've always thought of myself as a feminist."
Feminism goes beyond technical gender equality of having the same rights and privileges. I'm a feminist too, because I think politics should solve problems facing women. And I'm also a masculist (or a men's rights activist), since men's problems should be solved too.
"Of course, some activists (the word has positive connotations to me, BTW) pushed too far, as is the case in all large movements."
The main problem with feminism today is that all the political gender equality resources are directed to feminism. It should be evenly distributed between masculism and feminism.
Mutilating female genitals draws the appropriate outrage, while mutilating male genitals is ignored or even condoned.
The mutilation of male genitals in question is ridiculous in itself but hardly equivalent to the kind of mutilation done to female genitals.
The mutilation of male genitals in question is ridiculous in itself but hardly equivalent to the kind of mutilation done to female genitals.
Granted. Female mutilation is often far more severe.
But I think it's interesting that when the American Academy of Pediatrics proposed allowing female circumcision that really just was circumcision, i.e. cutting of the clitoral hood, people were still outraged. And so we see that even when the situation is made symmetrical, there persists what we can only call female privilege in this circumstance.
An actress is not a machine, but they treat you like a machine. A money machine.
That's the trouble, a sex symbol becomes a thing... I just hate to be a thing.
The truth is I've never fooled anyone. I've let people fool themselves. They didn't bother to find out who and what I was. Instead they would invent a character for me. I wouldn't argue with them. They were obviously loving somebody I wasn't. When they found this out, they would blame me for disillusioning them and fooling them.
People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror instead of a person. They didn't see me, they saw their own lewd thoughts, then they white-masked themselves by calling me the lewd one.
I am not a typical feminist.
But my take (somewhat reinforced by feminist blogs and earlier feminist writers like Germaine Greer and Joanna Russ) is that a person can be portrayed as either observed or as an observer. And there are far more media representations of women as observed than as observers. The problem with this is that it promotes a habit of thinking of women as NPC's. For example: thinking of the man as the desirer and the woman as the desired, even though women also have desires. Or thinking of the man as the artist and the woman as the muse. The man as the narrator and the woman as his obsession, inspiration, or enemy.
So: the issue, in my view, is not any single act of "objectification," but a predominance of representations of women that only portray them in relation to a male observer. It promotes the idea that women don't have their own point of view or creative capacity.
Reading this post and comments was almost physically painful to me. Offense is a solved problem. Why are we still discussing it? Are we going to have a free will debate next week? Though I understand that people may get offended at the thought that their feelings of offense are how a status-seeking algorithm feels from inside, and all the "deeper" reasons coming to mind are just post hoc rationalizations. It must feel like trivializing the rainbow...
In my opinion, one reason why many people tend to dislike status-based explanations is that these explanations have unpleasant implications because of the fixed-sum nature of status. Status may not be precisely a fixed-sum good, but that does seem to be a very good approximation. Therefore, if the status of a certain individual or group is raised, that usually means that someone else's status has been lowered as result, and the change that produced this rise in status must have come at someone else's expense.
It follows that the advocates of some status-altering social change cannot accurately present it as an unalloyed good and a win-win situation for everyone; it is always analogous to redistribution of wealth, rather than everyone becoming richer. Of course, the former is a tougher sell, and makes for a much less convincing case.
Well, the status hypothesis easily explains why the Playboy photo will displease many women in a way the mud photo won't. Do you have any other puzzling questions?
(Sorry for deleting my previous reply, it missed the mark.)
I wasn't trying to answer the question "why is objectification wrong", but rather "why do many people think objectification is wrong?" I think offense is a big part of the answer to the latter. See Righting a Wrong Question. This trick seems to be be especially useful with moral questions, e.g. "why is it wrong to kill" leads to making up stuff like unalienable rights, while "why do people think it's wrong to kill" leads to evolutionary psychology and other issues that at least have the potential of becoming scientific.
Agreed with this as far as it goes, but I think it can go further.
A real understanding of the status issues involved does more than answer "will people be offended by objectification?" It also answers "does objectification harm people?"
This isn't a moral question. That is, whether it's wrong to harm people or not, and in what ways and under what circumstances it's wrong, is a different question.
The problem isn't objectification of women, it's a lack of non-objectified female characters.
Men are objectified a lot in media. As a simple example, the overwhelming majority of mooks are male, and these characters exist solely to be mowed down so the audience can see how awesome the hero(ine) is (or sometimes how dangerous the villain is). They are hapless, often unthinking and with basically no backstory to speak of. Most of the time they aren't even given names. So why doesn't this common male objectification bring outrage?
I think the reason is that there are also plenty of male characters who aren't objectified. Male characters with clear agency abound in fiction, far more so than female characters. And this way, male viewers can identify with the agency-bearing male characters, and the objectified mooks become far less problematic.
The issue isn't with there merely being a bunch of objectified female characters. The issue is that until very recently, objectified characters were pretty much all that women got. If we get a healthy number of non-objectified female characters with clear agency, who obtain value in a myriad of ways (and not just by being sexy), then the objectified ones won't be nearly as problematic.
Disclaimer: I'm hetero-male. I strongly consider myself a feminist. It'd be nice if we didn't need a word for moral equity of the sexes. But we have far enough to go that it's still an issue. I work in media production, and media production is heavily steeped in sexism. I have to make a conscious effort to make sure my work doesn't contribute to the problem. I read a few feminist blogs to keep myself thinking about issues I would likely forget about otherwise, or at least not consider as strongly.
I don't consider objectification an inherent bad thing, but in many contexts it produces similar, repetitive detrimental effects on society. You will probably be able to argue about individual cases and find that some aren't that bad or whathaveyou. But the problem is big, and real, and complex enough, that for purposes of encouraging widespread action, it's a lot easier to tell people "objectifying women is bad" than telling them to "carefully analyze how individual artworks are likely to impact society, measure their utility, and censure the ones that cause the most harm."
The people-in-mud photo is objectifying people in general. But what makes objectification bad is ...
Here's a stab at the question about the images:
The female tennis player image has (just like words can have) certain connotations that are attached to it and they're mostly the of the type of the 10 things you've listed. The muddy people image, on the other hand, doesn't have those same connotations associated with it. So you can't just analyze the image itself, you have to take a look at it in the context of what's in people's heads related to the image. Just like what you'd do to figure out what people mean by some word.
"thousands of much-needed feminist advances" seems to link to the "sex differences in humans" article.
I agree with you about it being silly to have a word for advocating the moral equality of the sexes (although I use this as a reason not to label myself "a feminist", in much the same way that I would consider it vaguely silly to identify with a word labeling the advocacy of the moral equality of left- and right-handed people).
I don't really like being summoned to do this consciousness-raising job on the basis of "Sayeth ...
If you are willing to do your consciousness-raising by reading stuff, you could read some blogs and follow links like crazy (feminist bloggers are pretty good about linkage) and keep going until everything you run into looks familiar. This is the sort of topic you need to simmer in more than study like there will be a test later.
This sounds like saying that you should keep reading authors who share a given ideological standpoint until you're successfully propagandized by them. I don't see how this approach could lead to an unbiased understanding of any subject. [Edit: I mean any subject that is an issue of strong ideological controversy, as this one clearly is.]
This sounds like saying that you should keep reading authors who share a given ideological standpoint until you're successfully propagandized by them. I don't see how this approach could lead to an unbiased understanding of any subject.
You don't limit bias by restricting what you read, but by exactly the opposite--by reading more, and from more varied, ideological perspectives. Alicorn didn't say to reading nothing except feminist ideology; and you completely missed her conditional, "If you are willing to do your consciousness-raising by reading stuff".
She is obviously speaking to the people who desire to understand the concepts involved. If you want to evaluate feminism, you need to understand the concepts, and to do that you need read things written by actual feminists. I think Cyan is right, you're arguing in a way that you wouldn't if this was about about something that wasn't feminism.
Yup, that was what I was getting at: contrary to your original statement, your true objection isn't to the approach per se but to the content.
I'm not advocating reading them until one agrees with them on every particular, or even any particular. Familiarity is a different goal entirely. It's a little like learning another language: which, sure, learning a new language has its effects on your thought process, but it's not so sinister as you imply. Notably, you could combine simmering in feminism with simmering in men's right's advocacy, or even whackaloon level misogyny, without seriously harming the ability to learn the feminist blogosphere's culture and language.
For feminist blogs that aren't horribly ideological echo chambers, I recommend Clarisse Thorn and Ethecofem.
I'm a big fan of Finally Feminism 101. It shows how badly certain feminist arguments fall down when actually articulated. For instance, good luck parsing the argument for why male privilege exists, but female privilege doesn't:
No, what is commonly called “female privilege” is better described as benevolent sexism.
If I understand this correctly, FF101 would look at "women and children first" situations like the Titanic, HMS Birkenhead, and Srebrenica Massacre and say that women disproportionately being protected is not "female privilege," but rather "benevolent sexism." And keep in mind that by "benevolent sexism," FF101 means sexism towards women, not towards men. Even though it's the men who end up dead.
Because it's so much more sexist to be patronized with a spot on a lifeboat, rather than being left to die. For some reason, men getting disproportionately assigned to death doesn't count as sexism (towards men) or as a lack of privilege in the eyes of FF101. Something is very wrong with their moral philosophy.
So, why do women lack ...
I don't want to make this an issue, at least until I'm more familiar with it. But I recall at least one comment in another thread questioning the concept of "privilege." Can someone link to a good, rational article that argues against the concept of privilege?
If you are unfamiliar with the concept, I recommend this article
(Please don't debate the issue here yet. I think it's relevant but I want to gather information before I decide if it's worth bringing up in more detail. If you do want to talk about it PM me).
I'm far from being the right guy to answer this, but my $0.02: if I were one of the people in that photo, I'd probably feel a bit uncomfortable by the fact that the photo had been taken without my consent and republished here.
It wouldn't be a huge thing, but it would be unpleasant.
If I felt like you were treating me like one of the people in that photo when I was, say, going on a job interview or going out to dinner, I would feel extremely uncomfortable and pretty angry about it.
That suggests to me that treating people in my life the way you describe tr...
I suspect that the main problem with objectification is when it's the only way that certain people interact with certain other people. It doesn't seem to be entirely avoidable, in any case, but recognizing that a person has agency and all that when it's important makes it okay to focus on other things at other times. It's also an issue when people are, or feel like they are, only treated in objectifying ways - socially-normal neurotypicals seem to have an innate need for validation of themselves-as-people that being treated in objectified ways interferes w...
The framing allows everyone to turn their mind killers off, and the mission statement of entertainment means that concepts have to be presented so clearly that understanding them takes almost no effort at all, while there simply is no incentive to try to make anything sound profound.
Presumably, in "I don't understand why objectification is wrong" you have a plain English meaning of "wrong" in mind, and not something technical. Still, I wonder if you can explain what kinds of answers you would be looking for to a simpler or more abstract version of your question. Objectification is tendentious and controversial. Is there something more unanimously agreed on to be wrong whose wrongfulness can be explained in rational terms?
Take cruelty. If someone posted here "I have never understood why cruelty is wrong" and asked for help and arguments, what would people come up with?
Perhaps I have been studying AI to much, but I do not really think of myself or anyone else as an observer at all. Sure I have an unusual capacity to react to my environment, but the entire process can be reduced down to a large number of electrical signals interacting in predictable ways. What I find strange is NOT thinking of people as objects. Does this have any effect on how I treat women? I don't think so... except perhaps an unusual ability to ignore people of both genders completely.
I voted this down, as it seems to me that bringing the topic up again will do far more harm than good.
We didn't particularly successfully tackle the issue in the last few hundred commenter-hours devoted to it. I'm worried that there's a comparatively small number of people who just really like talking about these topics, and they tend to dominate the voting because they're a concentrated interest opposing the diffuse interest of site quality.
Alan Soble questions the widely held Kantian view according to which human dignity is something that people have. He argues that objectification is not inappropriate. Everyone is already only an object and being only an object is not necessarily a bad thing. In one sense, then, no one can be objectified because no one has the higher ontological status that is required to be reduce-able by objectification. In another sense, everyone is vulnerable to objectification, and everyone can and may be objectified, because to do so is to take them to their correct ontological level.
Seeing the list, the objection to objectification is in Stirner's terms an objection to not taking the the object as sacred, but instead viewing it as an object to be consumed and enjoyed.
I think this is a problem about talking about two different things with the same word. When most people talk about objectification, they are talking about utilitarian principles, yes. Objectification is not actually the issue. But they are calling the issue objectification because is sounds right.
Objectification is not actually the issue. What non-rationalists call objectification is.
I've read through the comments thus far, but relatively quickly, so please point out and forgive if any of this is exact rehash.
First, and directly concerning text in the post: one of the listed Ways to Objectify is denial of autonomy, and that is discussed briefly after the list. In later examples, lukeprog describes how we...
"...all use each other as means to an end, or as objects of one kind or another, all the time. And we can do so while respecting their autonomy."
The post implicitly casts denial of autonomy as the defining Bad Thing a...
The Playboy picture likely counts as objectification but seems like a terrible example. I'd illustrate it using someone keeping women around as status symbols. And note that it matters little for our purpose if one makes the women wear skimpy clothing like Hugh Hefner does -- giving them curfews and rules against dating so as not to embarrass the old man -- or puts them all in burqas. By contrast, finding a women attractive in part because she wants to have sex seems very far from objectification. (Technically I believe making a women sincerely beg for se...
Warning: potentially triggering.
Well, okay, first let's review some statistics. At least one in six women will be raped over the course of their lives; actually the numbers I see are usually significantly higher than this (rape statistics suffer due to extreme under-reporting). Moreover, about half the time it will happen (the first time) before they turn eighteen. Lastly, about two thirds of rapes are committed by friends and acquaintances of the victims.
So, if you take an adult woman at random from your community, there is a significant chance (agai...
I am infuriated by the suggestion that offense is precisely and only a form of status-seeking behaviour. Some white, heterosexual males might perhaps display their progressive values for the sake of signaling social status; but for visible minorities, there is quite a lot more at stake.
I suspect you underestimate the effects of status.
I have watched my status in the U.S., as a queer man, increase significantly over the last twenty years; this has translated directly into increases to my safety, my liberty, pretty much every aspect of my life. There is quite a lot more at stake in seeking and protecting status than you seem to be respecting.
All of that said, I apologize for infuriating you.
you'd think we'd start teaching men not to rape, but no, it's apparently up to women to stop this from happening to them
FWIW, I and many of the men I know were in fact taught not to rape. So we do seem to be starting to teach that, in at least some places and times.
At least one in six women will be raped over the course of their lives; actually the numbers I see are usually significantly higher than this (rape statistics suffer due to extreme under-reporting).
That only holds if the fact that rapes are under-reported was not used in calculating the estimate that one in six women will be raped. The site you linked to gives no reason to think that's the case, it's pretty likely that less than one in six women reports a rape, and then estimates of reporting rate were used to get an estimate of one in six.
(Edit to add) That is, if the "1 in 6" is an actual estimate of rapes; the Eric Raymond piece Eugine Nier linked seems to indicate that there never was such an estimate, the 1 in 6 number originally also included attempted rape, and then turned into a number of actual rapes by a game of Chinese whispers.
Defense against status attacks is in no way illegitimate, status is one of the most valuable commodities humans have, and often considered literally worth dying for, as proven by countless suicides in defense of status ( seppuku, Romans falling onto their sword etc). Just because current society brands recognized status moves as illegitimate doesn't mean denying the status component of social problems makes it go away, or that they can still be usefully analysed without.
Yes, describing a legitimate behavior in status terms factually constitutes a very serious attack on people who depend on the viability of that behavior if it is accompanied with the usual delegitimazation. And discussion here so far possibly hasn't taken that into account sufficiently and so inadvertently damaged many legitimate causes that depend on the power of offense. But that doesn't change any facts.
Rape looks in large parts like a status problem to me (I in no way mean to make light of rape, as said status is extremely important, even worth dying for). One of the things that make rape so horrible is that it's pretty much the largest status degradation possible (and since status can be worth dying for the s...
For under-reporting, look here. Even amongst high-school students, the incidence rate was as high as one in five women, and half of these had never told anyone about the incident.
The point here is that feminists tend to use a definition of "rape" that is vastly more general then what the word commonly refers (it tends to boil down to "any sex you regret in the morning") to in order to inflate the statistics.
I'm sorry, but this is absolute nonsense. In fact this is precisely the kind of nonsense that gets used to systematically belittle and trivialize rape victims, and which leads to the under-reporting I mentioned.
The typical popular model of sexuality goes something like this. The woman has, i.e. possesses, sex; the man wants to get it from her. She, on the other hand, wants to hold onto it for the best mate she can find (in order to get married, etc.). Therefore his job is to put on the moves, and her job is to put on the brakes. However, if she resists, then she's a bitch, because he deserves it after all, therefore she better not resist. If she does resist she might just be playing hard to get, because after all she really wants it, so as long as ...
Though obviously the consequences aren't as severe, it works the other way too: it can be the woman who has the model that she must play hard to get even when interested (thereby diminishing the information value of even the sincere rejections), and the man who views this mentality as batshit insane. (Consider the effects on the incentive profile and the kind of man this selects for.)
The best thing the subset of women who reward men who act aggressively towards women can do is stop rewarding. Those who already don't reward it don't have "stop rewarding it" as an option.
The point here is that feminists tend to use a definition of "rape" that is vastly more general then what the word commonly refers (it tends to boil down to "any sex you regret in the morning") to in order to inflate the statistics.
I haven't spent a whole bunch of time on this topic, but I've never actually run into a definition of rape that could be described that way. Citation?
Considering that some feminists have argued that all heterosexual sex is rape, he's not exaggerating that much. The ones who make the studies he was referencing do things like making questionnaires that ask questions like "Have you ever pushed a girl into bed to make her have sex with you?" and counting that as rape to inflate the statistics, because more rapes = more money for the rape services they work for.
Personally, I like objectifying women. I get erotic pleasure from it, along with a lot of other things that involve women being degraded and humiliated; put simply, my fetish is for the lowering of women's status.
Obviously, I would need to compartmentalise this to function in day to day society, as well as avoid violations of ethics; rape is, after all, very wrong, even if it is a quite sexy idea. So, would any of the other Less Wrongers be willing to help me more efficiently box it off, so I can open it up without needing to do what amounts to mentally ch...
I hope this is being downvoted for the second paragraph and not the first paragraph. There are women out there whose fetish is their status being lowered, and they need boyfriends too.
Even if it were being downvoted for the first paragraph, this would not necessarily constitute disapproval of the existence of the fetish. It is an altogether too personal announcement, as opposed to something more appropriate like "Complicating the issue is the fact that objectification, like many other things, can be sexually fetishized; there is not an obvious solution for dealing with "leaks" from the fetish-oriented mindset into the rest of an individual's behavior."
(I downvoted the grandparent, mostly because I felt the comment was staggeringly inappropriate in its entirety, and it also put me in a position where I did not dare reply. Not out of any fear for my safety - I had none resulting from the comment - but because it prompted me to consider any reply I might make to be some kind of sexually-charged interaction however innocuous the content might be. After all, nick012000 does not claim to have achieved adequate compartmentalization. I feel like I'm entitled to not knowingly participate in someone else's sex life if I don't want to - that is, whatever they get off on thinking about later is fine, but as soon as they tell me that some ordinary thing I'm doing may be sexually charged for them, my choice is to end the interaction or to voluntarily have a sexual interaction. So effectively, informing me of such a thing is driving me away from a place I was otherwise interested in being.)
I think the problem is that you don't understand how you made a mistake. Therefore, you're unable to apologize.
The problem isn't that your intentions are wrong. Intentions aren't obvious things, and people are not authorities on their own intentions, especially when it comes to sex. A man will pursue a woman without realizing it; or they realize it "in the moment" but afterwords confabulate an alternative explanation.
But none of us are entirely in control of our desires, and nor should it be expected that, given certain desires, that we wouldn't try to satisfy them. But sexuality is full of ulterior motives, and this is what makes relations between the sexes so difficult. I upvoted Eliezer's post because the substance of what he said is correct, and if you said only the first paragraph I wouldn't have so much of a problem with it. Maybe it could have been said better, but it's only a blog comment.
But in the context of "making women more comfortable in online communities" I think we have to deal with the scenario where women have to adopt the heuristic of "guilty until proven innocent" whenever discussion seems to be the least bit sexually charged...
unless you start cybering with me or something
This suggests - yes, very indirectly - that that's a thing that could plausibly happen. Also, the wink suggests 'there is subtext here'. Taken together, they imply things that I assume you weren't intending to imply - along the lines of 'I am talking with you about sex in part because we have a relationship where that kind of discussion happens, rather than purely for instrumental reasons'.
Not that one fetish in particular, no. But speaking much more generally, part of the concept behind the rationalist mate is that we're supposed to do a bit of consequentialist reasoning before going "Ew!", and try to set things up so that people are happy instead of making them do the ideologically correct thing.
The main way "objectifying women as sexual fetish" is a problem ("problem": something that prevents people from being happy) is if (1) the person doesn't understand the difference between having a sexual fetish and stating an ethical value or (2) if there's a large difference between the number of men who have that fetish and the number of women, so that they can't pair up.
I get the frustration of being into something that's not perfectly nice and sanitary and "appropriate." And I understand the impulse to rebel and rant when you see a post that tells you that your preferences are Bad. But I do encourage you to stick around and keep a cooler head; in the long run, it is rewarding to participate in some forums and activities that are non-sexual and don't involve smutty language.
I'm seeking some feminist consciousness-raising, and I'm hoping some LWers (Alicorn?) can help.
Specifically, I've never understood why "objectification" is wrong.
I'm a tall white American male, so sometimes it takes a bit of work for me to understand what it's like to be a member of a suppressed group. I still need regular training in avoiding sexist language, etc.
First: my background. When I was 10ish I encountered the word "feminism" for the first time. I asked my mom what the word meant.
She said, "It's the idea that women should have the same rights and privileges as men do."
And I thought, "They have a word for that?" It seemed too obvious to deserve its own word. It felt like having a special word for the idea that left-handers and right-handers should have the same rights and privileges.
So I've always thought of myself as a feminist.
Of course, some activists (the word has positive connotations to me, BTW) pushed too far, as is the case in all large movements. At some times and places (1980s academia, I think), it was common to assert that there are almost no (average) significant differences between men and women that aren't caused by enculturation, except for genitalia. That is of course false. Hormones matter, especially during development.
Such overreaches made it psychologically easier for some non-feminists to dismiss legitimate feminist demands and resist thousands of much-needed feminist advances (which are still ongoing).
Now, on this matter of objectification. I've never understood it. I've tried to get people to explain it to me before, but they were (apparently) not well-trained in rationality. I'm hoping a rationalist can explain it to me.
Here's my confusion about objectification. Depending on what you mean by "objectification," it seems to be either something that (1) is very often perfectly acceptable, or that (2) means something very narrow and is usually not being exemplified when there is an accusation of it being exemplified.
Let me explain.
Earlier, when I tried to figure out what "objectification" was and why it was wrong, the leading article on the topic seemed to be one by philosopher Martha Nussbaum. She lays out the goal of her paper like this:
Using examples, she then outlines seven ways to treat a person as a thing. Rae Langton added three more in 2009, bringing the total count to 10 ways to treat a person as a thing:
Consider a classic example of objectification from Playboy magazine: a photo of a female tennis player bending over, revealing her butt, above the caption "Why We Love Tennis."
The Playboy image exhibits at least eight features of objectification: instrumentalization, denial of autonomy, fungibility, denial of subjectivity, reduction to body, reduction to appearance, and silencing!
But, let's consider another example of objectification, what I'll call the Muddy People photo:
To us, these people are nothing but objects of our entertainment and pleasure. We have instrumentalized them. Moreover, they are fungible. It does not matter to us which people are covered in mud and looking silly. And just as with the Playboy example, this photo involves a denial of autonomy. Indeed, it is doubtful the permission to publish their photos was obtained. Moreover, we are not much interested in the feelings of these people but only their role in entertaining us as we gaze upon their mud-caked bodies – a denial of subjectivity. Often, nothing of these mud-covered people can be seen or known except their bodies – in many cases, only body parts, sticking every which way. This is the reduction to body. There is also clearly a reduction to appearance. Their mud-covered appearance is their only interest to us. In many cases, the emotions they might be having are totally obscured by the mud covering their faces. They are also, of course, silent to us.
So all the features of objectification found in the Playboy example, which we might feel is wrong somehow, are also shared by the Muddy People photo, which we probably feel is acceptable. Perhaps this suggests that our feelings are poor guides to moral truth. Or maybe what is wrong with the Playboy photo is something other than objectification.
Of course, there are disanalogies to be found. The Playboy example (especially with the caption) involved sexuality, and the Muddy People photo does not particularly do so. But if this is the line of thought that leads us to condemn Playboy but not the Muddy People photo, then we are bringing in another concept besides objectification.
For example, perhaps we want to say that Playboy‘s objectifications harm women by contributing to a culture of sexual prejudice, but the Muddy People objectifications do not cause any such harm. But then we are not appealing to this Kantian notion of "objectification." Rather, we are appealing to utilitarian principles. (Feminist philosopher Lina Papadaki makes similar objections to the notion of objectification.)
We all use each other as means to an end, or as objects of one kind or another, all the time. And we can do so while respecting their autonomy. I enjoy looking at the shapes and textures in the Muddy People photo while also respecting that the people whose bodies make up those shapes and textures are autonomous individuals of great value. But their value as individuals is not the point of the photo. The point of the photo, in this case, is that it's an interesting picture to look at. And that's okay, I think.
Good romantic partners use each other as a means to their own gratification while also respecting each others' autonomy. We use each other as sex objects, as emotion objects, as conversation objects, as knowledge objects, as carpool objects, and as other objects, all the time - while also respecting each others' autonomy and value. It's not clear to me what's wrong with that.
So if something like Nussbaum's analysis of "objectification" is what is meant by the term, then I don't see what's wrong with it. But if it means something much more narrow (what? I don't know), then I doubt it is exemplified nearly as often as people are accused of exemplifying it.
I reject Kant's epistemology, logic, and metaphysics - as I think any scientifically-informed person should. But even if you do accept all three, I still don't see what's intrinsically wrong with objectification as Nussbaum defines it.
Maybe I'm being dense. That has happened before. I'm not posting this with much confidence that objectification is a mostly useless concept. I'm posting this in pursuit of some consciousness-raising.
Understanding the problem is the first step toward fixing it. And right now I don't understand the problem. So if you have the time, please teach me.
Thanks.
Update: below, I'll keep an updated list of the most useful articles I've found so far.