Legs crossed over a couch. Row of rumps in cut-offs. Two torsos tanning on pool chaises. Lips lacquered like a cherry red pick-up truck. Torso flanked by a spandex bra and shorts. Feeling overwhelmed, I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth.
As I imagined that Dexter himself had created that page, I caught myself in front of the medicine cabinet, unwittingly lifting my sweatshirt to check out — you guessed it — my torso. D, a psychology professor at Colorado College, tells Bustle. Dismemberment is a gruesome brand of objectification, and it preserves the idea that women are just the sum of their body parts.
Of course, this isn't a new thing — women have been objectified on canvas for centuries. But these days, "Do it better" life hacks tend to still be stealthily served up with images of hacked-up ladies. It turns out that isolating my stomach when I look at myself in the mirror isn't all that uncommon. In fact, provocative research published in European Journal of Social Psychology in found that this problem is so engrained that our brains tend to process women as a collection of parts.
When I am in the grip of sexual desire, I also allow another person to reduce me to my body, to use me as a tool. Kant saw this process of self-objectification as an equally, if not more, serious moral problem than objectification directed outwards.
I have duties to others to promote their happiness, but I also have a duty to morally perfect myself. Allowing myself to be objectified opposes this precept, according to Kant. Yes, we objectify each other in sex and let ourselves be objectified. Worse things have happened and will happen.
At least with sex there is pleasure if all goes well and lots of it if all goes really well. The capacity to reason is what makes people ends in themselves, worthy of moral respect, according to Kant.
Its power is such that it makes our reason its servant: our rationality becomes the means to satisfy its goals. I love atonal music! In my pursuit to fulfil it, I cheat, I deceive, I pretend to be not who I am — and not just to the other person, but to myself, too. That is not my concern; his or her body is. Is it possible to have sex without objectification? Of course. Prostitutes do it all the time. So do many long-term couples. They have sex with people whom they do not desire.
It distinguishes them from animals and inanimate objects. It is crucial, for Kant, that each person respects humanity in others, as well as humanity in their own person. Humanity must never be treated merely as a means, but always at the same time as an end Kant , Kant is worried that when people exercise their sexuality outside the context of monogamous marriage, they treat humanity merely as a means for their sexual purposes.
The loved person loses what is special to her as a human being, her humanity, and is reduced to a thing, a mere sexual instrument. The idea that within sexual relationships people are reduced to objects, that they lose their rational nature, is an extreme one. Halwani rightly points out that this reduction to the status of an object rarely happens in sexual objectification.
Therefore, even though the view that humanity is completely destroyed when people exercise their sexuality is an unappealing one, it is not unreasonable to think that, in some cases, sexual desire and exercise of sexuality can undermine our rationality.
Kant thought that in theory both men and women can be objectified, but he was well aware that in practice women are the most common victims of objectification. A person, Kant holds, cannot allow others to use her body sexually in exchange for money without losing her humanity and becoming an object.
He is not entitled to sell a limb, not even one of his teeth. Kant blames the prostitute for her objectification. The other relationship in which objectification is, for Kant, clearly present is concubinage. According to Kant, concubinage is the non-commodified sexual relationship between a man and more than one woman the concubines.
Kant takes concubinage to be a purely sexual relationship in which all parties aim at the satisfaction of their sexual desires Kant Lectures on Ethics , The inequality that is involved in this relationship makes it problematic. Since body and self are for Kant inseparable and together they constitute the person, in surrendering her body her sex exclusively to her male partner, the woman surrenders her whole person to the man, allowing him to possess it.
The man, by contrast, who has more than one sexual partner, does not exclusively surrender himself to the woman, and so he does not allow her to possess his person. The only relationship in which two people can exercise their sexuality without the fear of reducing themselves to objects is monogamous marriage. The spouses exclusively surrender their persons to one another, so neither of them is in danger of losing his or her person and becoming an object.
Like Kant, anti-pornography feminists Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin take inequality to be tightly linked to objectification. In the eyes of both these feminists and Kant, there is the powerful objectifier on the one hand, and on the other hand there exists his powerless victim.
Due to their unequal power, the former objectifies the latter. Kant is concerned with inequality taking place within polygamous relationships. MacKinnon and Dworkin, on the other hand, believe that inequality is a much more widespread and pervasive phenomenon.
It covers all aspects of our society. MacKinnon and Dworkin emphasise that we live in a world of gender inequality. Gender, being a man or a woman, is socially constructed, whereas sex, being male or female, is biologically defined. Within our patriarchal societies, men and women have clearly defined roles: women all women, women as a group are objectified, whereas men all men, men as a group are their objectifiers MacKinnon , 6, 32—45, 50; MacKinnon a, —4, , —40; Haslanger , 98— For more on sex and gender, see also the entries feminist perspectives on sex and gender and feminist perspectives on power.
Even though MacKinnon does acknowledge that a female sex individual can be an objectifier and a male sex individual can be objectified, she takes it that the former is a man and the latter is a woman, since in her view a man gender is by definition the objectifier and a woman gender is by definition the objectified.
For both of them, as for Kant, objectification involves treating a person, someone with humanity, as an object of merely instrumental worth, and consequently reducing this person to the status of an object for use. When objectification occurs, a person is depersonalised, so that no individuality or integrity is available socially or in what is an extremely circumscribed privacy. In this way, her humanity is harmed by being diminished.
MacKinnon too describes objectification in similar terms. Insofar as an individual has only instrumental value, she is clearly not regarded as an end in herself. For instance, these feminists claim that women in the pornographic industry consent to be used as objects simply out of lack of options available to them within our patriarchal society.
This does not only hold for women in pornography. They hold that women are not truly blameworthy for their reduction to things of merely instrumental value.
It is men who want, and also, Dworkin claims, need to use women as objects, and demand them to be object-like Dworkin , —3. Kant compares the objectified individual to a lemon, used and discarded afterwards, and elsewhere to a steak consumed by people for the satisfaction of their hunger Kant Lectures on Ethics , and In a similar manner, MacKinnon blames pornography for teaching its consumers that women exist to be used by men.
A woman, according to MacKinnon, becomes comparable to a cup a thing , and as such she is valued only for how she looks and how she can be used MacKinnon , Kant took exercise of sexuality to be inherently problematic.
For Dworkin and MacKinnon, on the other hand, what is problematic is not sexuality per se, but rather sexuality as constructed through pornography. MacKinnon fears that use can easily be followed by violence and abuse. Since women are things as opposed to human beings , it seems to men that there is nothing problematic with abusing them. The object status of women, then, is the cause of men seeing nothing problematic with violent behaviour towards women. Men … create scenes in which women desperately want to be bound, battered, tortured, humiliated, and killed.
Or merely taken and used. Pornography, then, teaches its consumers that, not only is it permissible to treat women in these ways, but also that women themselves enjoy being used, violated and abused by men. The idea that pornography causes men to treat women as objects to be used and abused has been defended by a number of feminists.
Alison Assiter argues that what is wrong with pornography is that it reinforces desires on the part of men to treat women as objects as mere means to achieve their purposes Assiter , This is admittedly a puzzling claim, but one which I will not delve into further here. Detailed defenses of the claim have been offered by Melinda Vadas Vadas and Rae Langton Langton , and a criticism has been put forward by Jennifer Saul Saul Kant thought that the solution to sexual objectification is marriage.
And while the air we breathe is no longer thick with smoke thanks to government regulation , unfortunately objectified representations of women continue to permeate our culture. Overall, our study confirms previous research showing that sexual objectification is a relatively common daily occurrence. More importantly, we have shown for the first time that these everyday objectifying experiences are not as innocuous as they may seem.
Though subtle, the indirect emotional effects of objectifying treatment may accumulate over time into more serious psychological harm for women. A version of this story appears in The Conversation.
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