[Part of the Response to the Prude's Progress series, particularly this section. Trigger warning for talking about abuse.]
I was challenged recently about my use of “objectification” as a concept, which made me realize that I wasn’t entirely certain about what it meant, which is very bad because I keep using it. So let’s talk about that.
I think “objectification” refers to a cluster-in-thingspace of behavior typically but not always directed against members of marginalized groups. “Treating people like things” is a way of describing that cluster, but kind of a vague way to describe it. I mean, if I’m driving and I treat a pedestrian walking across the street as an obstacle I ought to avoid without considering their agency and personhood, am I objectifying them?
Millbank describes ten things that make up objectification, based on the work of philosophers Martha Nussbaum and Rae Langton:
- Instrumentality: coercing or conditioning a woman to act as a tool for men’s purposes
- Denial of autonomy: taking away a woman’s autonomy and self-determination
- Inertness: restricting a woman’s agency and activity
- Fungibility: objectifying a woman (the rest of these activities) in such a way that they become interchangeable with other objectified women
- Violability: violating a woman’s boundary-integrity and enabling boundary violation
- Ownership: two completely separate issues here (though not quite treated as separate in Nussbaum’s paper); most importantly, human slavery is widespread in trafficking and other forms; also, and incomparably with human slavery, many women are treated as if men have authority over them
- Denial of subjectivity: not taking into account a person’s experiences and feelings, and treatment which suppresses, denies or makes them doubt their experiences and feelings
- Reduction to body: conditioning which restrains a person’s consciousness to their body or body parts
- Reduction to appearance: treating a person primarily in terms of how they look, or how they appear to the senses, as well as conditioning which makes people judgethemselves primarily on their appearance
- Silencing: removing or suppressing a person’s capacity to speak, creating a context such that their speech is systematically misinterpreted/misunderstood/non-valued or conditioning them to think their speech isn’t worthwhile
The reason I think objectification is a useful concept is that those ten things tend to show up together (although of course each one can act independently). In general, if you act as though you have authority over your partner’s body (ownership), you might decide you deserve sex even when your partner doesn’t want it (violability) or that your partner shouldn’t wear short skirts because it makes you feel jealous (denial of autonomy). Raping someone is both instrumentality (treating another person as a vehicle for your orgasm) and violability (violating another’s boundaries). If you think women are only of worth if they’re sexually attractive (reduction to appearance), then you can treat equally attractive women as interchangeable (fungibility). If you gaslight someone (denial of subjectivity), you reduce their ability to speak up about their experiences (silencing). Et cetera.
What do all those things have in common? Shit, I’m not sure. It definitely seems to be A Thing, though, and I don’t need the concept to be perfectly defined in order to use it as a tool to understand the world. Are those ten the only things that could play into objectification? Probably not; the list seems pretty complete to me, but there’s probably something I’m missing.
(“Oy, Ozy, you’re a utilitarian, what if objectifying someone increases the amount of utility in the world?” To which I say: fuck yeah rule utilitarian. In general, objectifying people is bad, so we can create the “no objectifying people” rule.)
It’s not an accident that describing the traits of objectification in a really obvious way ends up sounding like it describes an abusive relationship. I think one of the key insights of radical feminism was that abuse and rape are the far end of a continuum of behavior (this is the insight that usually gets mangled into “damn feminists, think everything is rape!”). Obviously, gaslighting in an interpersonal relationship is not the same thing as sending rape threats to female bloggers is not the same thing as ignoring an insight when it comes from a woman and applauding it when it comes from a man is not the same thing as a woman not speaking up because she assumes her ideas are less relevant than the men’s, but they are all in a sense silencing a woman.
It’s important, I think, to understand objectification as a thing done “by systems and to classes” (to quote Millbank). You don‘t have to say “have vaginal intercourse or I’ll leave you,” if your partner believes that vaginal intercourse is a necessary component of having a relationship, that a relationship isn’t “real” unless you have “real sex” which is of course vaginal intercourse, and that it is bad and unreasonable to ask not to have it. They might not even recognize that not having vaginal intercourse is an option. This is, of course, violability, denial of autonomy, and ownership (plus probably half the other things on the list depending on how exactly the person enacts “vaginal intercourse is mandatory”)– but you’re not denying your partner’s autonomy. You may, in fact, fully respect your partner’s right to say no to vaginal intercourse. Even if there is not a specific objectifier, they are being objectified.
(NOTE: Not having vaginal intercourse is totally an option. You never have to engage in any sex acts you don’t want to. Vaginal intercourse is fairly popular and refusing to have it may limit the number of people who want to have sex with you, but the tradeoff is always yours to make.)
Of course, it is in the vast majority of cases individually more harmful to be objectified by a person than to be objectified by a vast social system. But the social system is the bigger problem– it affects more people, and it is one of the causes of the individual coercion. (After all, if you believe vaginal intercourse is a mandatory part of a relationship and your partner refuses it, well, they’re being unreasonable, aren’t they?)
I have some concerns over item 7, “denial of subjectivity”. I can’t help but read that as implying that the “experiences and feelings” of individuals are paramount and should be insulated somehow. People’s “experiences and feelings” can be wrong; suppressing and denying them is not always a bad thing; and, in many cases, doubting one’s “experiences and feelings” is not only not-wrong but in fact necessary to learn and grow. I feel like it’s possible – or should be – to circumscribe the “gaslighting” category without using quite so broad terms.
Ozy,
Yes. But there’s a different thing that’s necessary in common interactions, which I’d call “functionalization”, reducing people not to objects but seeing them merely as systemic agents performing a specific function which I may or may not currently take advantage of. It’s similar to the person you’re trying not to hit, but I’m glad I don’t have to listen to every salesperson’s romantic history. I think there’s a layered notion of individuation that changes with the kind of interaction – I think that the term objectification only beomes relevant when the interaction should (structurally) take place not between functionl agents (salesperson/client) but between persons.
if defined that way, the whole thing becomes logically oxymoronic, because that notion is also objectifying the alleged objectifier. When everything is objectifying, nothing is.
It really doesn’t matter if anyone is unreasonble. If I believed that and my partner didn’t, and it would be a dealbreaker for me to be in a relationship without vaginal penetration, then it would be objectifying me to expect me to simply go along with that without talking about it – and possibly define my boundaries for the relationship: and why shouldn’t that be “no relationship without vaginal intercourse?”
Après Sam, I also think that it doesn’t matter why people think things like “vaginal intercourse is a necessary component of a relationship”, regardless of whether they are the ones demanding or acquiescing in a particular scenario. It is absolutely reasonable to say that, as a general rule, it is better (in your personal moral belief) for people to try to be aware of social pressures and not base their life decisions on them, but it does not follow from that that choices resulting from social pressures are invalid, nor is it right to assume that people who made choices that happen to align with social pressures did so because of those pressures. The argument, oft-heard, that it’s safe to assume as much because “everyone is affected by social pressures” is not good enough for me, because the person making it is, when pressed, inevitably never actually capable of reading minds.
To sum up: I think it’s douchey to second-guess people’s reasons for their choices, and extremely douchey to say anything that smacks of “that choice is wrong because you aren’t capable of making it correctly”, as long as that decision doesn’t infringe the rights of others. (When a decision DOES infringe on the rights of others, nobody is capable of making that decision, under any circumstances, without the consent of those others. And I could go on at length about what those rights should entail, but it should hopefully go without saying that neither “having the kind of sex you want when the person you want to have sex with doesn’t consent for any reason” nor “having relationships with people who don’t want to be in a relationship with you for any reason” [where "any reason" always includes "no reason at all"] do not qualify.)
Sethenal: Um. People are perfectly free to make whatever choice they like. I am not here to say “you shouldn’t make that choice,” I’m here to say “you don’t have to make that choice.” But you know what? I’ve HAD SEX when I didn’t want it because I believed it was necessary for a Real Relationship ™,* directly because of the social pressure on that point, and I will shout from the fucking rooftops that it is not necessary to have sex that you don’t want to have, because you know what? IT FUCKING SUCKS TO HAVE SEX YOU DON’T WANT TO HAVE. Pointing out the existence of social pressure is not the same thing as pressuring people.
Sam: …I am confused about what you are saying re: objectifying.
See, the point I was trying to make there is that “talking about what you both want from the relationship and possibly breaking up if those desires are incompatible” is a Good Thing, and that “but don’t you love me? If we’re really in love we have to have vaginal intercourse” is a Bad Thing, and social norms that true love equates to vaginal intercourse lend power to the latter thing.
*although it was receptive oral sex and not vaginal intercourse, because I like vaginal intercourse. And have it. Because I find it fun.
Being asexual, I certainly agree with that. I didn’t mean at any point to imply that anything you said was wrong or an example of the behaviour I complained about; I was just expanding on the last paragraph of Sam’s comment (which I do think was largely orthogonal to the post, but I don’t have any issues with going off-topic). I’m sorry to have given the impression that I thought you were saying something wrong; I don’t. Social pressure clearly exists and it is perfectly reasonable to point it out.
Ozy,
How so?
yes, but the pressure can also work in the other direction, which is what I felt you were subtly hinting at – “but don’t you love me? If we’re really in love you’d not expect me to have vaginal intercourse” – is equally as bad as the other thing.
You might want to leave a comment on Scott’s post saying you’ve responded/expanded/clarified/whatever. This is a response to Scott’s post, right?
And since there’s now two discussions of this going on in somewhat overlapping blogspace, I’m not sure if I should repeat what I said about non-sexual objectification and being rude to the waiter.
“If you really loved me, you’d …” is pretty fucking terrible, but it isn’t objectification.
I’m confused as to what the difference between these two cases is: in this post, you are treating the assumption of vaginal intercourse in a relationship as being Bad, but in the previous post you treated the assumption of monogamy as being Natural and Good. It seems to me like both of those are harmful memes, and if either of them is more natural and good, it’s the vaginal intercourse one, largely because I think that sex is good and so I am in favor of memes that promote it.
Fnord: Actually nope, I wrote it about a week before Scott’s post.
Thomas: …uh, no. I support there not being social pressure for people to be monogamous, which makes sense, because I’m poly myself. I just _also_ support people not breaking their promises to their romantic partners, even if those promises include promises of monogamy. I feel like this is internally consistent.
Thomas: “sex is good”? Not for everyone, not all the time. Foisting “memes that promote [sex]” on people who don’t want them doesn’t strike me as better than the alternative in any way. Both of those assumptions are, to me, equally bad, and it’s wrong to suggest that one of them is better because it is less immediately harmful to you, personally. (And, by the way? Practising monogamy, and talking about other people who practise monogamy, is not the same as contributing to social pressures enforcing monogamy. People DO have the right to choose it even though it is not right for everyone.)
Good post. However, I resist the emphasis placed on the idea that objectification is something necessarily and exclusively done by systems to classes of individuals, as this emphasis risks devaluing personal accountability in some situations, or erasing the possibility of multiple classes being objectified in different ways by the same system. I find that the gendered language in the Millbank definitions 1 through 5 is a symptom of precisely that: it seems to imply that only persons of a single gender can be instrumentalized by a social system. I do not think this is true.
Of course, it is possible that this language was context-dependent from where you excerpted it? Or perhaps I misunderstand?
:Checks dates:
Huh, apparently you did.
Amusingly enough, the whole long checklist most immediately reminds me of the treatment of low-ranking military, actually, particularly the conscripted military that have historically been and are presently (there’s plenty of countries with an active and gender-specific draft) primarily men.