Objectification

Sex-based objectification has become a familiar concept. Once a relatively technical term
associated primarily with the work of MacKinnon and Dworkin, “objectification” has now
become a term of normative assessment in common parlance, used to criticize advertisements,
movies, and other cultural representations, but also to criticize the speech and behavior of
individuals. It is almost always pejorative, designating a way of speaking and acting that the
speaker finds objectionable, usually, though not always, in the realm of gender and sexuality.
Thus we hear of women “dehumanized as sexual objects, things, or commodities,” and this sort
of dehumanization is taken to be a salient social problem, both by feminist theorists and by
many women describing their daily lives. It’s a problem that is rightly seen to lie at the heart of
feminism.

MacKinnon insists on a further point: objectification is so ubiquitous that for the most part
women cannot help living surrounded, even suffused, by it. In a striking metaphor, she states
that “All women live in sexual objectification the way fish live in water”—meaning by this,
presumably, not only that objectification surrounds women, but also that they have become
such that they derive their very nourishment and sustenance from it. (Here she agrees with
Mill, and with Mary Wollstonecraft, who made the same point earlier.) But women are not fish,
and for MacKinnon objectification is bad because it cuts women off from full self-expression
and self-determination—from, in effect, their humanity. The connection of this normative
concept to the radicalism of Stanton is evident. But we still need more clarity: what is
objectification, and what lies at its heart?

To objectify is to treat as a thing. But to treat a desk or a pen as a thing would not be called
“objectification,” since desks and pens just are things. Objectification means converting into a
thing, treating as a thing what is really not a thing at all, but a human being. Objectification thus
involves a refusal to see the humanity that is there, or, even more often, active denial of that
full humanity. But we need to dig deeper, asking what is involved in the idea of treating
someone as a thing, since the concept has not always been analyzed with the requisite clarity
and complexity. For twenty-five years I have argued that we need to make a series of further
distinctions.

There are many ways in which full humanity may be denied, so objectification should be viewed
as a cluster concept, involving (at least) seven distinct ideas, seven ways to treat a person as a
thing:

Instrumentality: objectifiers treat their object as a (mere) tool of their purposes.

Denial of autonomy: objectifiers treat their object as lacking in autonomy and self-
determination.

Inertness: objectifiers treat their object as lacking in agency, and perhaps also in activity.
Fungibility: objectifiers treat their object as interchangeable with (a) other objects of the same
type, and/or (b) objects of other types.

Violability: objectifiers treat their object as lacking in boundary integrity, as something that it is
permissible to break up, smash, break into.

Ownership: objectifiers treat their object as something that is owned or ownable by someone,
that can be bought or sold, or otherwise treated as property.

Denial of subjectivity: objectifiers treat their object as something whose experience and
feelings (if any) need not be taken into account.

These different ways of objectifying a human being can be seen both in the context of sexual
relations and in other contexts (slavery, labor relations, and so on). The seven are distinct
notions, giving rise to different types of objectification, interrelated in a variety of complicated
ways. We should think of the concept as involving a family of interweaving conceptually
independent criteria, rather than as having a single set of necessary and sufficient conditions.
However, while conceptually independent, the notions are causally linked in many complicated
ways. For example, one may certainly deny women autonomy and subjectivity without treating
one woman as fungible with other women. They still differ in the way they look and move. But
once one denies a woman those core aspects of her full humanity, differences between her and
other women (similarly denied) become superficial, mere matters of outer appearance, so we
are on the way to the idea that one may be substituted for another. Again, one may deny
autonomy and subjectivity to a woman without thinking of her as ownable, a market
commodity. Once again, however, once those denials are made, reasons for not treating that
putative shell of a human being as able to be bought and sold seem weak.

Along with feminist Rae Langton, we may add to my 1995 list

Silencing: objectifiers treat their object as unable to speak.

Silencing is really an aspect of autonomy-denial, but it is so ubiquitous that it is useful to single

it out. And, again with Langton, we should insist that there is a distinction running through
several of the items on the list, especially items 2, 7, and 8. That is, one might fail to believe
that women are capable of autonomy; that they are capable of articulate thought and speech;
that they have thoughts and feelings worthy of notice. Or, as the list suggests, one may actively
deny or thwart a woman’s search for autonomy, for speech, and for recognition of her inner
life. One may even take pleasure in subjectivity-violation, invading and colonizing a woman’s
inner world.