Beyond Arguments From Objectification

Lindsay offers what I think is one of the most pleasant surprises inherent to reading; addressing an argument I’ve long been wrestling with and articulating what I was grasping for far better than I was capable of. I’ve long thought of arguments about “objectification” the way I’ve thought about arguments about “gentrification“; some potentially useful arguments are subsumed by a rubric that renders them essentially useless. I think this is the key paragraph:

Objectification is not the same as degradation or exploitation. Objectification occurs whenever we relate to someone as the executor of a social role, rather than as an individual. We effortlessly objectify each other all the time as clients, colleagues, employees, etc. Impersonal interactions are not necessarily disrespectful or dehumanizing…

I think this is right; I would also add that “objectification” would seem to apply to all works of art as well (a representation of an individual, no matter how complex and detailed, is not in fact a human being.) Indeed, I’m not sure I wouldn’t go further. I’m not sure that any human relationship, no matter how caring or intimate, is entirely free of “objectification.” Distance is endemic to human relationships; no two people ever know each other fully, and people always occupy a number of social roles. There’s a continuum, of course, but just as one will hopefully treat a business client with dignity even if the relationship exists for an instrumental purpose, we always see even the closest friends within a framework of social roles and personal needs and desires. I’m not sure “objectification” is really a useful way of making even these distinctions. I can see what is meant by it–Kant’s argument that people should be seen as ends rather than means, maybe. But ultimately I think it’s more useful to think about things in more precise terms, some of which Lindsay uses: in particular, dehumanization and degradation.

Once one is more precise, are their feminist reasons to be concerned about porn? Of course. Porn (like other forms of sex work) certainly can be dehumanizing to women, and this is work thinking about and analyzing. But in this, of course, pornography is hardly unique. Perhaps, in general, porn is more likely to have these qualities than non-pornographic films or books (although anyone familiar with the works of, say, Oliver Stone or Martin Amis or [insert one of countless of potential names here] may have reason to doubt this.) But even if this is so, “objectification” has nothing to do with it; what makes one thing worse, as Lindsay says, cannot be properties it shares with other things. Certainly, all representations of human life that spring from the human mind are “objectifying” in some sense. I don’t really see how thinking about things in terms of “objectification” helps us see anything.