A Rationalist's Account of Objectification?

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-objectified relative to their ideal). The person doing the objectifying is contributing to patterns and trends that, on balance, make life worse for women. Conversely, men might be under-objectified and that is why they don't understand why women object to certain instances of objectification. For example, most men probably want to be stared and desired just for their bodies more often than they are right now.

I don't mean to suggest that the situation is symmetrical for men and women, exactly. It seems likely being over objectified is worse than being under objectified (a free person who isn't needed or wanted by anyone is probably still better off than most slaves). Men and women may also, on average, prefer different levels of objectification.

In general, if we want a culture that provides something close to the ideal amount of objectification and subjectification for everyone we probably want a system that doesn't objectify whole groups-- better for people to get the objectification they need on an individual basis which should be better calibrated.

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 oppressed, but not symmetrically. While men are positioned to act as systematic agents of the oppression of women, women are not in such a relation to men. Yet unsurprisingly, given the inescapably relational character of gender, the two oppressions are complementary in their functioning—the practices of each contribute to the reproduction of the other. In particular, the very practices which construct men’s capacity to oppress women and interest in doing so, work by systematically harming men.

Why do you think you aren't a member of a suppressed/oppressed group? What thought process led you to accept that premise?

I don't know about you, but I accepted that view in the past because I was encultured with it. Since you are someone who was socialized with another set of beliefs that you now question (religion), are alarm bells going off in your head yet? Even if it's most reasonable to conclude that white males are not oppressed, I hypothesize that most people who hold that belief do so for the wrong reasons, and can't actually show why it's true.

"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.

Back to you:

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.

Social constructionism is alive and well in Women's Studies programs today. For instance, I encountered claims that both sexual orientation and sex (i.e. male/female) are socially constructed.

Of course, social constructionism isn't the only objection to feminism. See this post for some other books that critique feminism. Keep in mind that not all feminists make these sorts of errors, but particular groups of feminists do, and don't get sufficiently called on it.

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, sculpted partners. I seem to recall reading somewhere that lesbians have written critiques of ageism in gay men’s attraction patterns.)

There’s evidence for sexual fluidity but there’s no evidence for being able to consciously change sexuality. Maybe changing culture can change sexuality. There’s no evidence for this and I’m extremely reluctant to police art, porn, whatever based on a weak hypothesis, especially if the goal is to police sexuality even more than it is already policed. All the anecdotes (and sexuality scholars) I’ve encountered have said that sexual fluidity appears to happen in a way we can’t control and don’t understand. The ex-gay movement shows us that even people who are very motivated to abandon homosexuality simply cannot meet with success, and will become disillusioned witnesses against the programs that tried. What good is shame for influencing such a force?

But is it such a problem that attraction patterns are like this? Well, it sucks for conventionally unattractive women in particular. I have a lot of sympathy for this (as my frequently-noted fears of aging show). On the other hand, a lot of things about sexual attraction just aren’t fair, and if we start insisting that people are obligated to have sex with people they’re not attracted to, that’s not right either.

I think the real, and important, problem comes in when people (especially women) who are attractive are given more social power in other areas: more likely to be promoted, more likely to be seen as competent, etc (studies show that blonde hair is most universally attractive to men and that blondes make more money on average than other women). Some famous misogynist, I can’t remember which one, is on record as saying that feminism is about giving unattractive women more power in society (even leaving aside its massive misread on feminism, this statement assumes that unattractive women don’t deserve any power in society, which is obviously fucked up).

People aren’t very good at watching their biases in general, and so when I say that men generally suck at watching out for how biased they get about attractive women, I’m not trying to say something specific about men. It may be that women are less biased by conventionally attractive men because our hormones just work differently. It may also be that attractive men would be able to get ahead through their attractiveness more if women had the same amount of overall power in society as men. Regardless, it seems like the focus should be on de-biasing people to think that attractive people are better at things that have nothing to do with attraction, rather than on attempting to change men's attraction patterns.

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.

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.

Shut up and multiply!

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 by some prominent commenters to dismiss personal experience as anecdotes.

8) Reduction to body: treatment of a person as identified with their body, or body parts.

What, are you claiming you have a soul or something?

9) Reduction to appearance: treatment of a person primarily in terms of how they look.

Ok we generally avoid this.

10) Silencing: the treatment of a person as if they lack the capacity to speak.

There's a tendency to consider some people so hopelessly biased that one should disregard anything they say.

Taking Bayseanism and consequentialism seriously tends to reduce humans to the status of tools and victory points.

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.

- Marilyn Monroe

"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.

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...

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.

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.

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 that it makes some people into objects and others into people who use objects. The people-in-mud photo is fine because it doesn't make any kind of statement (conscious or otherwise) about specific groups of people. It's just a bunch of folks in the mud. They could be anyone. Because they're covered in mud, it's not even clear what race they are.

The playboy picture is explicitly objectifying women, and setting men up to be the ones who do the objectifying. It's creating an imbalance of power, which is the kind of objectification that's actually wrong.

This Katja Grace post is related.

"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 The Girl". For one thing, I wrote that long enough ago that I now find it (like virtually everything else I wrote long enough ago) embarrassingly badly crafted, and I leave it up only as part of a policy that I shouldn't delete stuff I publish just because it's gotten embarrassing. For another, I have never wanted the job of Feminism Police on Less Wrong, and have largely stepped back as more people have been willing to do the needed work.

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.

If for some reason you think talking to me in particular would be helpful (and you're reasonably caught up on what I've already written onsite on the subject so I don't need to repeat myself) I'm up for it but would prefer to do so offsite, via IM (or e-mail if IM is impractical).

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 treating the people in that photo isn't actually acceptable.

It more weakly suggests to me that treating people in that photo the way you describe treating the people in that photo isn't actually acceptable.

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 with.

As to the two pictures, the framing of the first, both in the sense of how it's composed and in terms of the caption, seems to me to make it more problematic than it would be on its own, and more problematic than the second picture. There are many fewer contextual and body language cues, and we're specifically prompted to see the subject as a body to be judged and (in a fantasy sense) used. The second picture has no such prompting, and it's entirely possible to read it as a group of individual people, wonder about what they're doing, try to guess at what they're thinking, and so on. (What are those people at the top of the picture looking at? That guy on the bottom near the right, is he helping that person up, or about to headbutt them? The woman in the upper right with her hair in a bun looks like she's having fun, and maybe just made a friend, and I hope that person next to her doesn't fall!)

You may want to see if you can find a good explanation of the term "male gaze". Unfortunately I don't have one - in fact if you do find a good one I'd appreciate it if you shared - but it seems highly relevant from what I've gathered.

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.

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 about objectification. On the surface, I'd agree that that is one of, if not the most inherently negative aspect of objectification, but I need to think about it some more.

Ultimately, I do not think objectification (action with one or more of the listed traits) is necessarily a Bad Thing; if I did it would place me in the anti-pornography, anti consensual sadomasochism camp of feminism, which of course involves a desire to restrict the autonomy of adults... and while that circle isn't usually trotted out as an argument for why objectification isn't inherently bad, the symmetry is worth noting, at the least. It also lends some sense to the idea that denial of autonomy is, in fact, the major problematic factor out of those listed.

On the broad scale, I'm inclined to agree that the feminist argument against objectification is primarily utilitarian rather than categorical (and utilitarian for all the reasons that various people have already explained). The feminist utilitarian arguments (of which the rape culture argument is one) also usually depend on the unequal circumstances of women in current society. The takeaway message should then be to be aware of and understand how and to what extent you're interacting with, and yes - objectifying - people you meet. If you're a photographer who hires a model for a photoshoot, the resultant photos are going to involve several aspects of objectification, but (presumably) no harm or attack on the model. If you're treating a woman who works with you in some manner that is not dependent on her appearance with any of the listed behaviors beyond instrumentality, you're committing harm.

Having said that, it should also be fairly obvious that I don't consider instrumentality a problem.

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 sex can never count, though it might fall under a different offense.)

I mention this because I saw commenters saying that men want to feel more objectification, and this seems false almost by definition. Men want more sexual attention that respects their wishes. Maybe someone with more time or smarts to spare can link this with the status discussion in an interesting way.

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 (again, the numbers on the site I linked to are abnormally low, but they give some idea) that she has already been raped or sexually assaulted by someone she knew, and is therefore very aware of this danger; even if she hasn't been raped, she has most likely been taught at a young age to fear rape and to take appropriate precautions (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).

So what does this have to do with objectification? Well, look at what happens on the relatively rare occasions that rapes lead to criminal trials: the woman is interrogated about what she was wearing when it happened, whether or not she fought back (because if she was too scared to move, it must have been consenting), why she was out drinking/walking/dancing, whether they acted in a friendly manner toward the attacker. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the victim is emotionally brutalized for the duration of the trial, and then the rapist never spends a day in jail. Through it all, the implicit message is clear: the only reason women might demonstrate comfort in their own bodies is if they're looking to attract men, and indeed this is their sole purpose, and if they happened to actually "get" a man during that time, they should feel grateful and not niggle over little details like consent.

So, confronted by people who take this objectifying attitude toward women, your average female - who might have already been raped at some point in her life, and is certainly aware of the possibility - is likely to get a little upset, and rightly so. If she feels like you're basically a decent group of men who might just be a little misguided, she might give you the benefit of the doubt and speak out, hoping you will listen. More likely, though - if she's not yet comfortable with the group, or if her voice has been repeatedly ignored - she will remain silent, and take leave of the group at the earliest available opportunity. The risk is not just to her social status but to her body, her sexuality and her dignity.

(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.)

This is not the only reason to avoid objectification, but it is certainly sufficient and compelling enough on its own, I think.

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 chanting "SLUT SLUT SLUT GONNA RAPE YOU AND FILL YOU WITH CUM" whenever I want to masturbate to pornography, and to minimize leak-through so I'll stop doing things like licking my lips when I see a sexy woman.

There are two kinds of discussions, those that lead to progress and enlightenment, and those that lead to irritation where the longer the discussion continues the more the irritation. The latter case pertains when the prevailing approach is "Yes I know you explained before and this seems like a solved problem, but I just don't get it and will not get it. I want to prolong the discussion so that it becomes painfully clear to you paragraph after paragraph, day after day, that I derive pleasure from the debate itself in which I do not plan to ever yield ground and see your side of the argument in any substantive way."

When you read the 21,000 words above and below ask yourself 1) whether anything has been settled, any progress made, do you expect future generations to benefit from the points made here, 2) whether most of the discussion would not be irritating and distressing to someone who already felt painfully objectified, and 3) whether anyone on earth could equate the two photographs or seriously object to being in the second one where no one is identifiable and nothing exploitative is being suggested?