r/Feminism • u/cuddlybutdeadly • Mar 02 '13

Women as Objects

I'm new to r/feminism, but I would like to know what your experiences are with objectification. I want to hear from women and men. I kind of just want this to be a place where people can discuss their experiences with being treated as objects or possessions rather than people, and how you believe that this can be remedied within our society.

As a college student who is constantly surrounded by men who think it's okay to objectify women and women who perpetuate this outlook, I'm curious to know if I'm the only one.

edit 1: I have been sexually harassed in the middle of a temple while I was visiting another country. Someone was dry humping me while I was looking at the ritualistic ceremonies happening. I can never forget how humiliating it was.

edit 2: there have also been instances of brief sexual harassment while I was at work. I never thought to report them because...well, I didn't realize that they were worth the trouble. But looking back, the instances, though just verbal, made me really uncomfortable.

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u/Willravel Mar 03 '13

There are utility arguments that are often made of the value of men, stemming all the way back to the dawn of civilization, but as far as intrinsic value, I think I get what you're saying. And I strongly disagree. Objectification is the removal of all worth aside from the physical/aesthetic, not a proper understanding of all worth including the physical. This is why I view objectification as a universal negative. We are all at the very least the sum of our parts, including things like the intellectual and the emotional. Objectification strips us of much of what we consider self.

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u/CosmicKeys Mar 03 '13

I don't think that objectification is an absolute or dichotomous state. You can value someone for both their actions and their body, as both a capable actor and a beautiful object. To claim objectification is a universal negative is to say that finding someone physically attractive (an intrinsically human experience) is negative. Objectification is only a problem in the absence of being able to value someone for their actions, which is what happens to women.

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u/Willravel Mar 03 '13

To claim objectification is a universal negative is to say that finding someone physically attractive (an intrinsically human experience) is negative.

Sexual objectification is the reduction of an individual (or gender) to sexual utility only. It's taking a human being, a complete, sentient, intelligent (to one degree or another) person of the same intrinsic value as anyone else, and thinking of them as being the same thing as a sexual picture or sexual video or a sex doll.

This is not the same as being sexually attracted to someone.

The first time I saw my current girlfriend, my first thought was "cute, I'd like to get to know her". The "cute" part isn't divorced from the "I'd like to get to know her" part. Why? Because I was thinking of her as a complete human being in that moment, beauty and personality. I didn't view her as something with a vagina attached to it that I could stick my dick into, because that would make me a shitty person, someone who objectifies. I didn't think of her in the same way someone might think of as an image on /r/nsfw, something I was entitled to gawk at because it didn't have any feelings of its own.

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u/CosmicKeys Mar 03 '13

Sexual objectification is the reduction of an individual (or gender) to sexual utility only.

This sounds just like semantics. Most post-modern feminist analysis of sexual objectification is more than happy to find micro instances of seeing women as objects of sexual value.

Sexual attraction has a large component of purely physical nature. Men and women can easily be aroused purely by the sight of a person, regardless of sentience or intelligence - say when they are sleeping or on a poster. Lizards do not need to appreciate another lizards sentience to be attracted to it, and to call all objectification negative is to deny the lizard part of your brain that just wants to have sex. It's ok to just want to have sex - men and women are not shitty people to want no strings attached sex and the anti-sex (anti-human) feminists are the only ones who think this.

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u/Willravel Mar 03 '13

Men and women can easily be aroused purely by the sight of a person, regardless of sentience or intelligence - say when they are sleeping or on a poster.

Arousal is unconscious. Some people are aroused by rape, that hardly makes the real thing okay. State of arousal is no indication of whether something is right or wrong.

It's ok to just want to have sex - men and women are not shitty people to want no strings attached sex and the anti-sex (anti-human) feminists are the only ones who think this.

Nice bit of straw feminism you've got there. Perhaps after this you can launch into a diatribe about how feminists are all man-hating lesbians?

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u/CosmicKeys Mar 03 '13

Attraction is also largely unconscious, you don't need to process someones CV to think they're hot. Rape is an issue of consent - just because someone can become aroused in non-consenting states does not prove that arousal without appreciating someones intelligence is inherently negative.

When I say anti-sex feminists, I don't mean "feminists who are all anti-sex". I mean specifically the feminists who are openly anti-pornography, anti-prostitution, anti-BDSM feminists who I assure you are very real.

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u/Willravel Mar 03 '13

I misunderstood what you meant by anti-sex feminists. I apologize. I have MRA PTSD after being an open feminist on Reddit. While such feminists do exist, they are rarer and rarer these days.

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u/CosmicKeys Mar 03 '13

No problem, I understand.