[Commenting note: I will be deleting any comments that say that it’s hot or kinky or fun when women are treated as if they are only for sex. See section two here.]
I mostly don’t use the word “sexual objectification.” Some people interpret “sexual objectification” to mean “sexual attraction”, which makes the conversation frustrating. Other people aren’t sufficiently Kantian to buy the assumptions of the concept, and I don’t want to debate Kantianism vs. utilitarianism every time I talk about sexual ethics. So even if I’m thinking “objectification”, it’s easier to use a whole sentence to say the thing I mean.
But I think the history of the concept is really fascinating and reveals a lot about what we think about sex. So here is a brief, selective, opinionated history of what people mean when they say “objectification.”
Kant
The origin of the concept of “objectification” is Immanuel Kant.1 To Kant, people needed to always be treated as an end in themselves and never as a means. This is a very subtle concept, and I think the best definition is made by example:
END: Nuturing and supporting your child’s authentic interest in the piano (which might include getting them to practice when they don’t feel like it).
MEANS: Forcing your child to play piano even though they hate it, because you want to show off your musical prodigy to other parents so they think you’re a good parent with impressive children.
END: Politely saying “excuse me, I actually ordered a decaf coffee, could I get a replacement?” because you respect the barista as a person.
MEANS: Politely saying “excuse me, I actually ordered a decaf coffee, could I get a replacement?” because you think it’s the best way to get a replacement, and you’d curse them out if you thought that would work better.
END: Selling products that help people.
MEANS: Being deceptive about your product so people who wouldn’t benefit from it buy it.
END: Saying that overpopulation is a problem, so it’s good to give women access to contraceptives.
MEANS: Saying that overpopulation is a problem, so it’s bad to prevent small children from dying of malaria.
END: Spending time with someone you genuinely like.
MEANS: Pretending to like someone who annoys you so they’ll invite you to their parties so you can feel cool because you’re invited to selective parties.
END: Hiring someone to work at your company; giving them reasonable hours, a fair wage, and good working conditions; not going back on your word or misleading them about the job; communicating with them respectfully and compassionately.
MEANS: Kidnapping someone; threatening them with violence if they don’t pick cotton from your fields; giving them inadequate food and shelter to save money; forcibly separating them from their children so you can earn more.
Treating someone as a means is called “objectification” because you are literally treating them like an object. A knife is good if it cuts, and bad if it doesn’t cut; similarly, a child is good if she gives you status among other parents and bad if she doesn’t, a barista is good if she gives you the right coffee and bad if she doesn’t, an enslaved person is good if she picks cotton and bad if she doesn’t. You don’t care about the child’s or barista’s or enslaved person’s feelings or needs or goals, the same way you don’t think about the knife’s feelings or needs or goals.
Without going too deeply into matters of metaethics, nearly everyone agrees that there are some ways you shouldn’t treat other people: you shouldn’t kill people or commit fraud or pretend to be friends with people you actually don’t like or be rude to service workers. I claim that, much of the time, when Alice treats Bob in ways that a person shouldn’t be treated, it’s because she’s not really thinking of Bob as a person who deserves to be treated a certain way. She’s thinking of him the same way she’d think of a Lamborghini or a self-checkout kiosk or a cotton picking machine.
Kant was very suspicious of sexual desire. To Kant, the overwhelming pleasure of sexuality drives out all attention to the partner as a person with their own feelings and needs; we’re focused only on what we feel in our own bodies. Similarly, while having sex, people want sexual pleasure so badly that it’s basically impossible to treat one’s sexual partners as autonomous beings capable of self-determination. Not only that, but when orgasming people generally are a bit too distracted to be rational, autonomous beings with inherent dignity: by seeking sexual pleasure, you’re turning yourself into an animal, an object. Masturbation, thus, is harming yourself by making yourself an object for no good reason.
The only solution is to reserve all sexuality for monogamous marriage in which you want to have children. Hopefully, you will have to pay enough attention to your partner’s personhood the rest of the time that it minimizes the harm of sex. And the desire to conceive children is powerful enough that it justifies the inherently dangerous nature of sexual desire.
Second-Wave Radical Feminists
In this section I’ll mostly discuss Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin,2 famously “sex-negative” feminists who are significantly more pro-sex than Immanual Kant.
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