I see a lot of people get confused about the topic of “fetishization.” They’re all “people complain about fetishizing trans people/fat chicks/bi women/women of color, that means it’s anti-feminist to be attracted to trans people/fat chicks/bi women/women of color!” And then half of them are like “therefore FEMINISTS HATE YOUR BONERS!” and the other half are like “therefore I must self-flagellate about my evil evil boner.”
No. Feminists do not hate your boner, and you should not self-flagellate about your evil evil boner. It is not anti-feminist to be attracted to trans people/fat chicks/bi women/women of color. It is not even anti-feminist to be attracted to a trans bi fat woman of color!
Fetishization is not about attraction, it’s about using your attraction as an excuse to objectify people. The misdefinition of objectification is one of the very few things I get legitimately angry about (my sources of anger are few and geeky), so let’s review what it means with the help of Granny Weatherwax:
“And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”
“It’s a lot more complicated than that–”
“No it ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes-”
“But they starts with thinking about people as things…”
Basically, “don’t fetishize me” means “don’t treat me like a thing because you’re attracted to me.”
One of the really common ways that fetishization plays out is the assumption that people you’re attracted to exist for your boner. For instance, dominant women in the kink scene regularly report submissive males assuming that because she’s dominant and female that she wants to dom them in exactly the way they want to be dommed. I mean! She’s dominant! In public! Clearly that means you don’t even have to ask before you lick her boots and call her Mistress.
Similarly, fat women who post pictures of themselves on Tumblr often get reblogged onto porn blogs, because clearly the only reason someone would post a picture of themselves on the Internet is so you can talk about how much you want to stick your dick in their fat jiggling ass. Fat women also often face problems with chubby chasers whose apparent thought process is something along the lines of “we have so much in common: you’re fat, and I like fat women.” For fat women and other women culturally considered unattractive, there’s also this really nasty “look, people who are attracted to you are so rare that you should be willing to fuck literally anyone who’s attracted to you” angle.
(PSA: you should not be willing to fuck literally anyone who’s attracted to you. Sex is amazingly much better if you’re attracted to the person you’re with and they care about you enjoying yourself too.)
Furthermore, a lot of the reasons that people give for being attracted to certain kinds of women are… really really gross. For instance, you should not believe “bi chicks are hot because two girls fucking is hot!” As a bi, poly, and female-presenting person, I have met approximately ten million people who believe this. I am sad to disappoint all of them by pointing out that when I fuck a lady, it’s because I want to fuck that lady, not because I want to give some other random dude a boner. It’s almost as if my sexual orientation is not entirely related to giving dudes boners. (I also hate threesomes and have no interest in being the third in your marriage. Sorry to crush all your Hot Bi Babe dreams.)
“I like Japanese girls because I love sushi and anime and I want a girl I can–” NOPE. You know there are Japanese women who grew up in Iowa and like McDonalds and Glee, right? You can’t assume that every person of a particular ethnicity shares all the traits you associate with that ethnicity. (Not to mention “I want a Japanese girl because Japanese girls are submissive and moe and I have never actually met a Japanese person” guy. Do not be that guy. If you become that guy I will fly to your house and light all your hentai on fire.)
“I like trans women because they’re the best of both worlds! A combination of male and female!” No, trans women are women, stop invalidating people’s genders. Furthermore, ‘best of both worlds’ implies all trans women have penises, which is just… not true.
“Ozy, you’re saying I can’t be attracted to anyone!” No, I’m not. It is perfectly fine to be interested in women who want to have threesomes with you, or women who like sushi and anime, or people who combine male and female– just don’t call those groups “bi women,” “Japanese women,” and “trans women,” because that isn’t true. Similarly, it’s perfectly fine to be attracted to women with penises or people with typically East Asian features or fat women, as long as you’re not an asshole about it.
A related issue is whether it’s possible to fetishize conventionally attractive, privileged women. My intuition would be “yes,” but for some reason the feminist movement has decided to go with “fetishization” for fetishization of marginalized groups and “sexual objectification” for fetishization of conventionally attractive and privileged women. I don’t get it.
Thing of Things 
Yeah it’s like that distinction in nomenclature is in itself othering of people who fit into the fetishisation categories – it’s all sexual objectification.
It’s also kinda kink-shamey – I don’t think kink is worse about sexual politics than mainstream so it seems silly to use a word associated with kinky people for ‘sexual objectification of people other than white-thin-able-bodied-straight-cis-chicks’.
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Ok, I know you say you don’t hate our boners, but it kind of looks like you hate our boners.
You start by saying that you aren’t against people being attracted to whatever, but you are against “objectification.” And you summarize that as “don’t treat me like a thing because you’re attracted to me.”
At this point, I can get behind this. Its ok to be attracted to, lets say, women with big boobs. But its not ok to treat them like objects because they have them. Got it.
And your next two paragraphs (the one about the kink community, and the one about fat women) are fine.
But then you go through a list of things you want people not to do, and most of them aren’t ways of treating people. They’re states of being attracted to people for reasons you don’t like.
I guess you could try to argue that you’re not critiquing their state of being attracted to something, you’re critiquing the way they’re verbalizing it. But…
1. If that’s a problem, then unless they approached you and volunteered this information, maybe you are entering into a conversation where you don’t belong,
2. Bodies are objects and our attractions to them are in part because of their status as objects rather than holistic attitudes towards the whole person, so to a certain extent some objectifying language is inevitable, and
3. To the extent that their statements aren’t “true,” you’re hitting on a larger problem than you realize. See your post from 12/27/14, which had as it’s implication the fact that there is literally no politically acceptable word for “the class of persons towards whom my sexual orientation as a cisgendered male is directed.”
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>But then you go through a list of things you want people not to do, and most of them aren’t ways of treating people. They’re states of being attracted to people for reasons you don’t like.
That’s an interesting point, actually – what’s Ozy’s opinion on the idea that some sexual desires and kinks are morally wrong? I feel like they’d be against it, because kink, but …
(I think you’re assuming that people can find whatever they like hot and it’s perfectly Ok morally, but this isn’t universally accepted at all.)
>there is literally no politically acceptable word for “the class of persons towards whom my sexual orientation as a cisgendered male is directed.”
Should there be a “heterosexual” in that sentence somewhere?
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I think my position about sexual desires is similar to my position about emotions. No emotion is morally wrong; no sexual desire is morally wrong. You can do immoral things because of your emotions or sexual desires (for instance, killing someone or raping someone); you can have emotions or sexual desires that are the result of inaccurate beliefs about the world (for instance, feeling guilty because you think something’s immoral when it isn’t, or being attracted to bisexual women because you believe bisexual women love threesomes), and having inaccurate beliefs is often immoral. But the emotion or desire itself isn’t.
To be clear, I think it’s totally fine to like threesomes. But in that case you should say that you are sexually attracted to women who like threesomes, not to bisexual women, as the expectation that they ought to like threesomes is deeply annoying to non-threesome-interested bisexual women (which is a lot of them).
Also, like, there are *lots* of heterosexual, cisgendered men who are attracted to trans women. Lots and lots. Who the fuck do you think trans porn is aimed at?
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“…having inaccurate beliefs is often immoral.”
Instrumentally or terminally? If it’s the former then the example of being attracted to bisexual women because you think they love threesomes seems like it harms you more than anyone else. I guess technically you would call that “immoral” in utilitarianism, but it feels like an odd word to use. If it’s the latter, then I’m curious as to what leads you to believe that.
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“Should there be a “heterosexual” in that sentence somewhere?”
Probably. I literally do not know the currently proper terminology to identify myself, or the people to whom I am attracted. I am not joking about that.
Imagine that you’re talking to someone who doesn’t know what “social justice” even means, and they say, “I am a straight man, and I am attracted to women.” I don’t know how I am supposed to verbalize the idea that person intends that sentence to mean.
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@wireheadwannabe
I would think it would be obvious why having inaccurate beliefs is terminally immoral. Almost all people value knowing the truth as an end in itself. It is a terminal value for them. People frequently choose to learn painful truths, rather than believe comforting lies, because knowing the truth is usually more important than avoiding pain (within limits of course, if I had a choice between being tortured for 10 years or thinking that Timbuktu was in South Africa instead of Mali, I’d pick the false belief).
Utilitarians desire that people achieve their goals in life. So if one of a person’s life-goals is to know the truth, a utilitarian should help them do that. If you don’t stop people from having false beliefs you’re not being a very good utilitarian.
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@Ghatanathoah:
I don’t know if you were being sarcastic or what, but I personally don’t know anyone in meatspace who values truth as an end in itself. In fact, even most Internet people do not value truth as an end in itself; or, in fact, at all. For most people, truth is an instrumental goal at best. Things like politics, mental biases, advertisement, and to some extent fiction, exist precisely because “people would rather believe comforting lies than choose to learn painful truths”.
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@Bugmaster
A ton of people I know value the truth as an end in itself. It might not be their most important value, but it’s there.
I’m not just talking about personal truths. Don’t you know anyone who likes trivia or likes reading popular science? Those count as the “truth” as well. If you know someone who gets excited about some new discovery in science, you know someone who places at least some value on the truth (and I’m not talking about highly politicized fields of science, I’m talking about things like how many fundamental particles there are, or how dinosaurs hunted).
Biases are generally egodystonic. Most people succumb to biases due to akrasia or to bad time horizons, not because they actually want to be biased. People who would rather believe comforting lies than painful truths are usually behaving irrationally. They are usually assigning too much value to the immediate pain of discovering a lie and too little value to the long-term value of knowing the truth.
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@Ghatanathoah
“A ton of people I know value the truth as an end in itself. It might not be their most important value, but it’s there.”
That seems somewhat different from asserting that it’s terminally immoral to have inaccurate beliefs. If the worst problem with objectification is that it doesn’t line up with the preferences of truth-seekers, then this doesn’t explain what makes it any worse than, say, being wrong about the capitol of Madagascar. Again, I get how objectifying beliefs can be instrumentally bad, but anti-objectificationists seem to have some terminal moral objection that I’m just not seeing.
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If you believe inaccurate things about the preferences of bisexual women, and you interact with bisexual women, this may lead you to behave in ways annoying to bisexual women. For instance, you may attempt to talk a bisexual woman of your acquaintance into a threesome, misinterpreting her reluctance as shyness when she actually just dislikes threesomes. Or you may say “all bisexual women like threesomes!” in public, making a bisexual woman feel sad and inferior because she doesn’t like them.
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@ozymandias:
>Also, like, there are *lots* of heterosexual, cisgendered men who are attracted to trans women. Lots and lots. Who the fuck do you think trans porn is aimed at?
… what’s this line directed at?
>If you believe inaccurate things about the preferences of bisexual women, and you interact with bisexual women, this may lead you to behave in ways annoying to bisexual women.
Objectification is a bias! This is an Important Distinction.
Seriously, you would not *believe* how long it took me to figure that out. I was working on the premise that it was either terminally Bad or some sort of vague cultural thing, like stereotypes, for the longest time.
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Patrick, not you.
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Ah, I see.
But see, this is really confusing! You say there are lots of heterosexual cis dudes interested in “trans women”; but of course, this porn is not about “trans women”, is it? That term isn’t cutting reality at it’s joints when it comes to this phenomenon.
It’s about “shemales“, if I recall my internet awfulness correctly; you probably know the rough definition, which is good b/c I’m not going to invent a proper definition.
This isn’t some guys being attracted to “women” no matter their bodies; it’s this subset of guys being attracted to, and fetishizing in the conventional and possibly “see the above post” sense, “females” who have dicks.
Which … is really damn fiddly to discuss, you can see how tortured my abuse of terminology is here.
What’s going on here? What kinds of stereotypes, pavlovian human sex drives, and really interesting bits of psychology underlying “gender” and “orientation” are at work here? No-one knows, we can barely describe it let alone analyse it. V. annoying.
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“You start by saying that you aren’t against people being attracted to whatever, but you are against “objectification.” And you summarize that as “don’t treat me like a thing because you’re attracted to me.”…But then you go through a list of things you want people not to do, and most of them aren’t ways of treating people.”
It’s called motte-and-bailey. And people can do it without realizing it, at times.
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Could you, perhaps, describe the ways in which this is a problem? I just realized, upon reading your comment, that there is no single word to describe the set of people I may be attracted to — politically acceptable or otherwise. Is this bad? Am I missing out on something?
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To the extent that it’s a problem, it isn’t an earth shattering one. But it does have as it’s implication the fact that people will make technically untrue statements when they talk about sexuality, just about all the time. So a degree of charity on that score might be best.
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Oh! I know one!
I saw a really heated Tumblr flamewar the other day that consisted entirely of people equivocating between different definitions of “male” and “female”, all firmly convinced that monosexual people are attracted to exactly one of these two clear-cut categories that exist in the real world …
… and anyone who uses the wrong definition is, of course, Evil (that is, a misogynistic, transphobic homophobe.)
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The entire concept of sexual orientation seems confusing to me.
A few days ago I came across a heated discussion on whether someone whose current long-term partner is male is allowed to call herself a lesbian. Originally, I used to think that straight and gay people are, somehow, utterly non-attracted to any members of their non-preferred gender, ever. But, apparently not? Or, at least in some people’s opinions it’s more of a relative thing? Or an “identity” thing (whatever that means)?
And, obviously, no-one is attracted to every woman or every man.
So, is it feasible to accurately describe sexual orientation at all? It seems like fetishists (the literal “can’t have a good time without this” fetishists) are the rare solvable case, and everyone else is fucking complicated.
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It can often help to think about it from the point of view of the Kinsey Scale: instead of thinking of heterosexuals, homosexuals, and bisexuals as discrete groups, think of it as a spectrum. A Kinsey 5 woman might have had fleeting attractions to men (perhaps a crush on a favorite teacher or an attractive actor); a Kinsey 4 might be attracted to quite a few men, but ultimately prefer women. A Kinsey 5 might, quite reasonably, argue that she’s a lesbian: if she’s attracted to 1/10 women and 1/1000 men, then men are less than one percent of the people she’s attracted to, and at that point it is very reasonable to round. And even if she falls in love with a man, (she might argue) the logic still applies.
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Yeah, I’m familiar with that scale. But doesn’t it depend on some notions of what “women” and “men” are generally like? In terms of first impressions, how are Judith Butler and Janet Mock even in the same category? And what’s the Kinsey number of someone whose ideal partner is Buck Angel (warning: NSFW pictures likely)?
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The Kinsey scale doesn’t solve the problem. The set of “people a Kinsey 5’s sexuality is directed towards” is not coterminous with “women” unless your understanding of “women” is at least partially trans exclusive.
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Are you suggesting that lesbians-in-general are not attracted to trans women? — cuz that is not quite true. Which, it’s complicated, but I know plenty of cis lesbians who are totally fine with trans lesbians, to the point of *going home with trans lesbians and having sex with them*. And this is not only trans-women-who-totally-pass-and-you-can’t-tell. This is kinda average-middle-of-the-road trans women, clearly women but also clearly trans. In fact, most of these women have penises (although they may not like that word).
Trans dykes often have all kinds of trouble in queer spaces, for all kinds of reasons, and we have valid gripes much the same way fat women have valid gripes, but to say we are *literally* never attractive to “Kinsey scale 5” lesbians is false.
Turns out that right now I’m dating a trans woman, who is very obviously AMAB. Like, she passes kinda worse than I do. She doesn’t really even try to pass. But we’re both dykes and we’re both on HRT and *that shit makes a difference*. Like, I cannot explain it, but she is female.
I think pheromones are a big part of it. As is (for lack of a better term) our way of being intimate, how our bodies work, how we respond to touch.
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No, I’m saying that the Kinsey scale doesn’t provide you with a method of describing the sexuality of someone who is into women, but not women who are trans, unless your understanding of the “women” pole of the Kinsey scale is at least partially trans exclusive.
I don’t think there’s anything crazy about that.
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@Patrick
How would such a hypothetical attraction work? How would this person’s sexuality identify someone as trans with 100% accuracy?
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Right. The Kinsey scale also lacks a distinct category for “prefers blonds,” yet somehow we struggle on.
Which look, the Kinsey scale is a nice simple tool. Don’t ask it to be what it is not.
I’m probably a 5. Except, I just took this, and I *swear to God* that it gave me not a number, but an “F”:
I’M SO WEIRD THE KINSEY SCALE CANNOT CONTAIN ME!
(This is the proudest day of my life.)
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@Nita- You’ve got that backwards. 100% accuracy in identifying trans persons is irrelevant. The problem I’m identifying exists so long as a hypothetical Kinsey 5’s attraction identifies and excludes trans persons more than 0% of the time.
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@Patrick
But wouldn’t such a person also be unattracted to cis women with similar traits? Lots and lots of women, trans or otherwise, don’t match the standards of femininity / beauty / daintiness of many heterosexual men, lesbians, bisexuals etc.
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If you want to respond by deconstructing the entire concept behind the Kinsey scale, be my guest, you’re kinda making my point.
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You’re arguing with a straw man. No one thinks the Kinsey scale is perfect. It’s just a quick way to talk about relative levels of str8/bi/gay.
Of course, I’m DOUBLE GAY, so I guess I don’t fit on the scale at all.
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Has Ozy written anything else on this?
Because I still feel like I don’t understand what the heck this thing is, unless it’s one of those “let’s shove a bunch of unrelated Bad Things in the same category with a bunch of unrelated Good Things and label them all with the same word” things?
Also, heh:
… interesting in light of current events.
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I think that fetishization is actually “being oppressive to someone while being sexually attracted to them and they’re a member of a marginalized group other than women.” It’s… not a great category, but sometimes useful (for instance, a lot of times the same people do different sex-related bad things, and the effects on the person being oppressed are often similar). It is sometimes also “objectifying someone while being sexually attracted to them and they’re a member of a marginalized group other than women”, but objectification is *another* concept that combines a bunch of different things that aren’t necessarily related. (Nussbaum’s work on objectification is excellent, btw; I hadn’t read it when I wrote this essay.)
I remain firm that in spite of the behavior of Amanda Marcotte feminism should not require anyone to flagellate about their evil evil boners.
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Most of the “fetishization” examples Ozy lists as problematic boil down to being attracted to a member of a (subaltern?) group because you’re attracted to certain features that are stereotypically associated with members of that group. Something like “fetishization is objectification based on prejudice.”
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The problem seems to amount to confusing your fantasy of someone with characteristic X with the actual people who possess characteristic X…
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I would like to hear a clear account of what exactly ‘objectification’ is. Generally when people talk about it I can see that most of their examples are people being inconsiderate, selfish, prejudiced, etc, but I can’t see a unifying state of mind or attitude that warrants a term like ‘objectification’.
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This is a good overview. I am planning on writing a plain-language explanation at some point.
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I see in that article a characterization involving 7-10 criteria (and no, ‘seeing and/or treating a person… as an object’ is not by itself the definition, unless you want belief in materialism to be an example of objectification). Why then do you quote approvingly how Granny Weatherwax disregards ‘it’s a lot more complicated than that’ when the precise definition of objectification genuinely is complicated?
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Defining what “people as things” means is hard. But Oates isn’t, in context, saying “what does that mean?” He’s saying “but what if there are some cases where people-as-things is justified? How do you know it’s true? Maybe we need a bunch of big complicated books of rules.” Granny Weatherwax is saying “stop doing ethical philosophy and start doing ethics.”
(My opinion on the relative merits of ethical philosophy and ethics are complicated and off-topic.)
Also I wrote this post before I knew who Nussbaum was, and also before I knew that objectification is a word you should never ever ever use because no one will understand what you mean. So that bit is unendorsed. 😛
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“But Oates isn’t, in context, saying “what does that mean?” He’s saying “but what if there are some cases where people-as-things is justified?”
It’s just a matter of semantics whether he says “I don’t understand what your definition means” or “your definition doesn’t seem to make sense” (because it seems to label justified things as bad). They’re basically the same thing.
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“never using the word ‘objectification'” seems like a perfectly sensible policy to me 🙂
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I’d be very interested in that overview. I’ve seen the list before, and it seems far too complex to fit the sense in which people use objectification. Lukeprog wrote a good article on the topic, and the issue was never adequately resolved as far as I remember.
I’m worried that objectification as above is a mott, and the bailey is ‘any sexualisation I dislike is inherently wrong and harmful’.
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The best explanation I’ve ever seen was given by Protagoras on a comment to a previous post on this blog (A Bunch of Incoherent Thoughts About Queer Fetishization…. from 12/17/14)
Basically, he argued that many people have internalized a strong intuitive belief in what is commonly called the “Madonna-Whore Dichotomy.” These people have a strong intuition that it is not possible to respect and sexualize people at the same time. When they see someone being sexualized they often assume that person is not being respected.
To someone who has not internalized the Madonna-Whore Dichotomy, the entire concept of Objectification seems bizarre. It seems to make a completely unjustified intuitive leap from “sexualize” to disrespect.
When I read this I immediately understood why the concept of “Objectification” frustrated me. I am really, really, really good at internalizing moral and political beliefs. When I was told “Respect people” and “Casual sex is not immoral” I immediately internalized those beliefs. I had fairly liberal parents, so I internalized these beliefs at a very young age and the Madonna-Whore Dichotomy never got a chance to get its filthy hands on me. It didn’t matter if I was exposed to subtext conveying that belief in the wider culture, because when it comes to controlling my brain, subtext is no match for text-text (I understand other people are the opposite in this regard).
I agree that Objectification and Festishization are not coherent or logical concepts in their native form. But you could probably construct a steel-man that goes something like this:
“Many people believe in, or have partly internalized, a Madonna-Whore Dichotomy. Therefore, if we sexualize people, the people with MWD will lose respect for them. We should avoid sexualizing people until the MWD is purged from our culture.”
I don’t think I buy this steel-man either though. Increased sexual liberalization in our culture seems to be killing MWD off quite nicely, so I don’t think enough people have it anymore to justify not sexualizing people. And sexuality is so awesome that I’d be loath to restrict it even if 100% of the population had MWD.
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Ozy seems to me to be using “objectification” in a way that exclusively refers to the people you say have internalized MWD. However that is a pretty good summary of the problem with a lot of feminist discourse around objectification though, if not this specific example.
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I’m not sure if MWD is *all* of this, but I think it is a big part of what I deal with in the day to day. So, yeah, +1.
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I think that this is definitely a part of the issue, in the sense that a culture where sexuality isn’t seen as inherently degrading wouldn’t think it’s acceptable to treat sexualized/sexual people as objects and/or ignore their preferences.
But I think there’s a little bit more to it than that, that I can maybe draw out by talking about what I understand sexualization to mean.
To sexualize someone (or something) means, as far as I understand, to treat them or their actions as sexual independently of any intention on their part to actually be sexual.
This is where I have an issue with the last part of your comment (“sexuality is so awesome that I’d be loath to restrict it even if 100% of the population had MWD.”). Because while I agree, personally, that sex is great and sexuality is awesome, not everyone actually experiences sex this way. Even I don’t experience sexuality as awesome 100% of the time. And I think that “I don’t want to interact with you sexually” is a legitimate preference in the same way that “I don’t want to have sex with you” is.
So while it’s probably fine to sexualize people who have agreed to it/are into it, I’m really uncomfortable with the argument that if everyone were more sex positive, sexualization would be a-okay 100% of the time and no one would ever be uncomfortable with it. I think that even in a no-MWD utopia, at least some people would probably still be uncomfortable with interacting sexually with people who they aren’t sexually interested in. Being sexualized when you don’t want to be is particularly bad when the people doing the sexualizing have also internalized the idea that “sexy people aren’t really people, so it’s fine to treat them badly,” but I also think that people should get to choose the contexts in which they actually want to be sexual.
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@bem:
> but I also think that people should get to choose the contexts in which they actually want to be sexual.
What does “being sexual” mean, though ? If it means something like “flirting”, then yeah, that totally makes sense. But if it means something like “allowing other people to find me attractive”, then, in meatspace, your only solution is pretty much some sort of burqa, and that has its own issues…
I was going to add something like, “it would be nice if you could emit some sort of a psionic pulse that automatically prevents people from finding you attractive unless you want them to, though we don’t yet have the tech for that”; but on reflection, giving people direct write access to the minds of others seems like a recipe for all kinds of disasters.
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Bugmaster–I don’t mean that no one should find anyone attractive without their consent, and I was careful not to phrase my response that way (although apparently not careful enough!). I meant that one shouldn’t, for example, flirt with people who are clearly uncomfortable with the flirting, stare at people you’re attracted to to the point of rudeness, make explicit sexual comments to strangers, etc.
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[cw: sexually explicit]
There is no thought crime. Your attractions are your own and they are okay.
Your actions — *those* I will judge you on.
Is it okay to hold some cute woman in your “spank bank”?
I mean, could anyone stop you? Should they? Do not your fantasies belong to you?
Your fantasies are okay. Anyone who says otherwise is being unrealistic.
Okay, but *the content of your fantasies* may be problematic. Mine are. I have some messed up fantasies. But the thing is, I know they are problematic. These fantasies do not make me bad. They make me *kinky*.
BDSM has good tools to deal with this stuff. My kink is okay. So is yours.
(Provided you understand how your kink fits into the broad culture and you are willing to explore it in a consensual way. If you are such a person, get into BDSM.)
Okay, so what if you are not kinky? Say you’re just a man who likes women and gets horny. Fine. Say you see a picture of a woman on Tumblr and you’re like, “Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck I WANT TO BE KISSING HER NOW!”
Trust me, lesbian feminists get the same feelings, and if they jump on your shit for it they are wrong.
On the other hand, some people are *very much* uncomfortable being the targets of sexual attraction. Such people usually have their reasons. Respect this. Sex is complex. It has psychological force that outweighs many other things.
There are people out there who are hostile to sex-in-genreal, to men-in-general, to women-in-general, etc., etc., etc. These people have issues.
On the other hand (if you’ll let me reverse the motte-bailey thing), even if their bailey sucks, they may be talking about an important motte that you need to listen to.
For example, your fantasies are okay. But how do you process them? In private? That’s fine. In public? Well, how exactly?
Posting your fantasies on erotica forums is fine, provided you sufficiently anonymize any real people who might not consent. It is fine to share them with trusted friends. Saying to a friend, “God I fucking love Becky’s ass. Just, OMG!” is fine. Maybe they also like Becky’s ass. They’ll nod and say, ”Fuck yeah her skirt is killing me.”
(This is a fairly typical conversation among my fiends and me.)
On the other hand, among casual friends, sexualized comments are then maybe less okay. The reality is that some people get sexualized much more than others, and this often happens in a way that messes with their lives. For example, many professional women have to negotiate a minefield of sexuality that is quite different from what professional men typically negotiate. A young woman sitting at a table among men, say at a gaming event, is getting a taste of this. She is being taught that her value is according to how men find her attractive. (While men train each other that their value is according to what women they can conquer.)
Which is hella fucked up. Maybe you want *not* to be a part of that.
But still, it’s totally okay to steal a few glances at Becky’s hot ass. You can smile at her. Maybe she smiles back. Maybe she flirts a bit. Maybe she’s totally into anal torture porn, and once you start talking in private she’ll admit this to you.
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“A related issue is whether it’s possible to fetishize conventionally attractive, privileged women.”
This strikes me as being like asking whether you can have a fetish for vanilla sex. It’s a tautology.
I’m also curious as to what you mean by treating people as things, and specifically why you think it’s bad. I mean people ARE things, just things with qualia whose well-being is therefore morally relevant. I agree that ignoring people’s agency and consent is bad, but I’m not sure if that’s what you’re talking about. Saying that fetishization or objectification are wrong because they reduce people to things seems like a failure to properly taboo words. I don’t feel any less confused after I read those kinds of statements.
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Some people do seem to confuse scientific materialism/reductionism with… not caring about people? I don’t really understand it.
I’m like 99.9% certain that’s not what is meant by “treating people like things” here though. Pratchett and Ozy are both way to smart for that.
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“Pratchett and Ozy are both way to smart for that.”
Keep in mind that this is past Ozy, who admits elsewhere in the comments that zie hadn’t yet read Nussbaum at the time.
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wirehead: This post has an unusual number of comments by Ozy, and it sounds from those like Ozy does still endorse the sentiments in the original post.
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>“A related issue is whether it’s possible to fetishize conventionally attractive, privileged women.”
>This strikes me as being like asking whether you can have a fetish for vanilla sex. It’s a tautology.
These seem to make assumptions about a “default” state. I would argue “vanilla” sex isn’t the default state, and that there is no default state. It seems strange to assume what is most popular in our culture to be some sort of default.
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>For instance, you should not believe “bi chicks are hot because two girls fucking is hot!”
Why not?
>I am sad to disappoint all of them by pointing out that when I fuck a lady, it’s because I want to fuck that lady, not because I want to give some other random dude a boner
Why would your intent matter to his boner? It may well be the case that his boner depends upon you wanting to fuck ladies.
All the other examples make sense to me (at least as far as arguments against objectification can), but “I am attracted to bisexual women because of an intrinsic characteristic of bisexual women” stretches it a bit far. It doesn’t seem very different for being attracted to musicians because you find musical talent attractive – I’m sure nobody has learned to play the piano with somebody else’s boner in mind but I don’t see why that matters.
It confirms my suspicion that a lot of stuff about objectification is just getting upset because people don’t care deeply enough about the particulars of your inner life. It’s a certain kind of privilege to be able to expect people to care about you for who you are in your innermost self, rather than what you can do for them, and it seems a bit much to demand that every potential hookup rises to those standards.
Personally, I kind of expect people to value me only in terms of what I can do for them. Why would anybody else’s world revolve around me?
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Ozy’s point is that “want a threesome” is not an intrinsic characteristic of bi women.
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>For instance, you should not believe “bi chicks are hot because two girls fucking is hot!”
The only assumption I see there is that bisexual women have sex with other women. It is an assumption, but not a particularly outrageous one.
Is “bi chicks are hot because girls being turned on by other girls is hot” impermissible objectification?
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Yeah, it’s confusing to me too – I appreciate people’s patience in educating me.
I was in a discussion a while back where a couple people were talking about how sexy it was when someone casually picked up a Rubik’s Cube and solved it. If one of them had told this person “Man, that was hot”, would that be objectifying the person? I mean, we don’t know whether this Rubik’s Cube solver did it for the purpose of giving other people boners.
I guess you could break down objectification to mean “You did something offensive to another person because you assumed it would not be offensive and didn’t bother to investigate first,” so if you walked into someone’s house wearing your shoes because you didn’t think to ask if the shoes near the door means that this is a no-shoe house, you have objectified your host as a person comfortable with shoes in the house, but it’s probably more accurate to say that you assumed the person’s reactions would be similar to yours, rather than to say that you reduced the host to an object in your mind.
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Jiro-I think I would personally say that the comment is objectifying if you had a reasonable cause to believe that it would make the other person uncomfortable, and you ignored their preferences. Whether this is the case depends on context.
For instance, if the Rubik’s Cube comment was made in, say, a work environment or a classroom, to someone you didn’t previously have a flirtatious relationship with, it probably qualifies as objectification: you had a reasonable chance of knowing that your comment would make the other person uncomfortable because those are environments where it’s not usually acceptable to talk about sex. (This is kind of how I feel about sexual comments from complete strangers.)
If the Rubik’s Cube comment was made to a person who has been acting flirtatious back, it’s perfectly harmless. If it was made to a person who you’ve previously flirted with who acted uncomfortable with the flirtation, or who acts uncomfortable with sexuality in general, it’s pretty definitely ignoring their preferences on the subject.
But what if you just met the other person and you simply don’t have enough information to guess what their preferences are? My instinct is to err on the side of less sexual–maybe, “That’s awesome!” instead of, “That’s hot.” But let’s say you said, “That’s hot,” and the other person reacted with discomfort. I think the answer to “Is this objectification?” depends on how you react next.
If you respond to the other person’s obvious discomfort by being like, “Oops, didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable,” or even just by dropping the subject, that seems like an honest mistake. You thought the comment would be welcome, it wasn’t, now you know the other person’s preference.
If you respond to their discomfort by repeating the comment, or saying something else sexual, or asking, “Why are you being so unreasonable when it was clearly a compliment?” then, well, the person demonstrated their preferences pretty clearly, and you are now ignoring them.
Similarly, not taking your shoes off in someone else’s house because you assumed they wouldn’t mind is an honest mistake. But if you refuse to take your shoes off after they’ve asked you to, or if you forget to take your shoes off every time you visit them, you’re now being deliberately rude.
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It definitely is possible to fetishise conventional standards of beauty. I recently spent a year and a half overseas and had the unusual experience of being repeatedly called beautiful by a guy who had literally never seen even a photo of me but started as soon as I responded to his requests to describe myself with “I am tall with pale skin, brown hair and hazel eyes.” It was particularly creepy because he had no reason to think that I wanted to interact with him socially at all — he had my number only because I’d posted it advertising a language exchange, which I thought I’d pretty clearly explained was a group of people who met at a scheduled time in a public place, not an invitation to be my new best friend for whom I’ll drop everything I’m doing in order to answer a bunch of questions about myself and my interests and what living in the US was like. Of course it wasn’t just him, lots of other men gave me the feeling that they were so interested in my whiteness that nothing else mattered, he was just the most blatant. I’m not bringing this up to cry reverse racism or claim that I was horribly oppressed by the experience, just that I don’t think the word “objectification” really does as good a job as “whiteness fetish” would at conveying the attitude of “Women from the US/Canada are just so exotically beautiful!” where even my butch haircut (nearly unheard of in the area), face full of acne, and tendency to dress all in men’s clothing wasn’t enough to knock me off of the pedestal they had constructed for me.
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> Similarly, fat women who post pictures of themselves on Tumblr often get reblogged onto porn blogs, because clearly the only reason someone would post a picture of themselves on the Internet is so you can talk about how much you want to stick your dick in their fat jiggling ass.
What’s wrong with that though? If the photos were publicly shared by the author, I could see the argument that if you happen to masturbate to and fantasize about them, don’t annoy the author by telling them that you did, unless you have some good evidence that they will find this notion pleasant. Also, the notion of slander may apply: don’t spread false information about a person that a reasonable reader could mistake for genuine. Other than that, is any of author’s rights being violated in this scenario?
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‘don’t annoy the author by telling them that you did’ seems like an attitude of ‘what you don’t know can’t hurt you, which seems in someway distasteful.
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Telling someone you were fantasizing about them is not really ok in general. This general advice has nothing to do with “objectification.” Maybe in some ideal society it should be, I don’t know. But in most social environments telling someone you were masturbating to them in mind is likely to upset them. The rule seems to hold across a wide range of social interactions. You shouldn’t tell your boss, friend, employee, etc.
I have been in situations where it is pretty ok and common for friends to comment on how hot to their friend how hot they think ze is. Even if the “hot friend” has is not interested in actually becoming intimate. Some relationships do allow saying “I masturbated to you last night” but most don’t.
Also it is naive at best to have policy that the “truth can’t hurt you.” And only doing things you would tell a person is a reflection of the “truth can’t hurt you” not “what you don’t know can’t hurt you.” The later maxim implies that an entire range of behaviors are ok. This is not what most people are arguing. They are arguing that specifically masturbating to people you wouldn’t alert that you are masturbating to them is fine. Few people think cheating is ok if your partner doesn’t find out. (though some find this ok).
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The serious issues are “re-blogging onto a porn blog” and potentially “messaging someone you were jerking off to them.”
Even masturbating exclusive to women of above average weight seems 100% fine to me. As does only wanting to date women of above average weight.
So I agree with you.
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If tumblr interface didn’t combine two actions into one – copying a picture into a porn blog, and notifying the author about it – would also think that collecting publicly available pictures that weren’t taken as erotic ones is OK too?
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Is the person whose picture you collected likely to learn they have been added to a porn blog?
If the odds are sufficiently low then I am 100% fine with it. Though, given there is no shortage of sexually explicit pics that were not meant for a personal tumblr, I think the odds have to be pretty low.
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Is it okay to post pictures of fat nerdy men in fedoras with “m’lady” captions, so you and your friends can get a good chuckle, provided the nerd-in-question never finds out about it?
I think it is *not* okay to do that. The reason is this: regardless of whether the man finds out, this is an affront to his dignity. His dignity should matter, insofar as a general respect for dignity matters. A group of people willing to trample on his dignity this way are coming from a hostile place, and they are further reinforcing and deepening their hostility. Furthermore, even if the man-in-question never sees the image, other nerds might. They will see they are a joke, a target of laughter. This hurts them.
Porn forums can be sleazy places. I do not mind this. I like porn. I like sleaze (in managed doses). However, to post images of people who *do not consent* to being the targets of sleaze is undignified. I care about their dignity because I care about dignity in general.
This is true even if the women-in-question never sees. I am a woman who sees. Many of us do. This tells us our true value to men. It tells us what little control we have over our dignity, our “proper place.”
If you a person who is pro-creep-shots, I don’t wanna know you. There are better people in the world.
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@veronica
Idk what you mean by “pro creep shots” I am surely not in the practice of posting people’s pictures to a porn blog without their consent. Or looking at pictures I know are posted without consent. I am just not going to condemn people for actions unless I feel I have a good reason.
You do bring up a good point. It is definitely bad to post pictures where it is clear they put up without consent. Even if the original woman/man never finds the picture other people will feel less safe. As other people will fear (rightly) that their pictures may be on some porn blog.
Posting “fat nerdy men’s” pictures has the same problem even if the particular men never see the picture. However it has an additional issue. I don’t even feel good about people mocking pictures of animated “fat nerdy men.” There seem to be “neckbeard cartoons” and those really bother me even though the subject is fictional.
I agree I was wrong to neglect the impact on women/nerds/etc of doing these things publicly. But idk, I really try to err on side of not condemning actions unless I can think of a strong reason.
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One thing that has been pointed out is this: there is absolutely no shortage of eroticized images of women freely available on the Internet. Whatever your fetish, you will find plenty to choose from. So *why* seek out images of unsuspecting girls? Why frequent “creepshots”? Why look at “upskirts”? What it is about the images that are so attractive, compared to any number of other images?
Well, one thing I noticed about the discourse surrounding “the fappening” was this: there was a marked sense of bringing these women down a peg. There were many people who unmistakably craved the status-lowering effects the images had. To these people, the humiliation was a plus.
Which is to say, Jennifer Lawrence is an attractive woman, but there are plenty of women comparably beautiful who freely share their nude images. So why *freak out* about getting to see Lawrence? And why be so public about it? Such a celebration?
There was a misogynistic undercurrent to the whole event — and that is precisely the correct word. Men who felt small could feel a bit larger if they could bring these women down. There was hostility.
Not all men. Not only men. But enough men. It was a *thing*.
Looking at a beautiful woman can be a perfectly lovely thing to do. I do it. In fact, I work hard *to be* beautiful — as much as I can as a middle aged trans woman. But I do encounter men who resent me, who want to lower me. These men are shitty people. And yes, I hate their boners.
But just *their* boners! Not necessarily *your* boner! These men are actual creeps.
(Please note, these men are seldom nerds. In fact, in my experience “actual creep” has very little overlap with “nerd.” There is some overlap. It happens. But mostly these are weird dudes on the subway who want to say shitty things to the tranny.)
In a world unlike ours, it might be fine to repost pictures of people to sexualized forums. We do not live in that world. In our world, sexualization has particular social functions. It is *fraught*. The people who seek out non-consensual images do so for not-nice reasons. Their targets should have a say in how their images are used.
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I really liked this article, though the last paragraph gave me pause, and I wish you would expand on it at a later time. I used to belong very much to the Dan Savage school of incredibly liberal sexual thought. At this time, I believed fetishization and attraction were one and the same thing, and that larger women who wanted partners who didn’t fetishize their size were as nonsensical as a brunette who only wanted to date men who preferred blondes.
I have since learned the incredibly important, though somewhat nuanced difference between fetishization and attraction, which, to me, is about how you prioritize your own attraction and another person’s complexities and identity. If you reduce the people to whom you are attracted to the traits you desire, and overlook, or pay less attention to the rest of their personality, then you are treating them primarily as the object of your desire, and only as a person secondarily. Often times people who do this do not bother to learn the ways in which their desired partner describes their own identity, in favor of identity terms that are easier for them, and conform to their own desires.
Obviously all people who experience attraction see attractive qualities in other people, but when we overlook the parts of a person that are less immediately attractive to us, we are not simply experiencing lust, we are denying aspects of their humanity. This thought action is not inherently bad until it informs physical actions. If your interactions with another person are informed by your reduction of their whole self into the attraction-category that you have constructed to fit your desires, then these interactions will effectively be held between you and your constructed object, rather than the person upon whom you project this objectification.
In writing this, I realize that I ultimately agree with your conclusion that sexual objectification and fetishization describe the same process, with the former being ascribed to conventionally attractive, thin, cis, people, and the latter being used for the same process as it affects anyone else. I believe (and I could be wrong here) that the term “sexual objectification” originated within feminism, and “fetishization” was originally used by the psych community, and was later discussed by feminists. This could be why the two are still used today.
The next task is to ask if anything is gained by separating the two terms. My instinct says that a single term should be used for these phenomena, and I would favor “sexual objectification” as “fetishization” was originally used as a way of othering such desires, and still carries strong connotations. However, it is possible that keeping the two terms could be beneficial in some way…
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Would the behavior of a typical (non-asshole) person with a service employee count as objectification? If I call a plumber to fix my sink, is it objectification? It seems those might fall under many definitions of “objectification”, but most people don’t find them morally problematic. And even if you set aside the question of morality, I find it really hard to determine whether a given behavior would qualify as “objectification”.
I don’t think the concept of “objectification” adds that much value to the analysis, many of the cases described would equally fall under “don’t be an asshole” or “don’t confuse people with their stereotype”, “when in a relationship or looking for one, take your partner’s preferences into account”, etc.
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To be clear, my objections/questions/concerns also work if we talk of “thinking of people as things” instead of “objectification”. Asking somebody for the time is “treating him as a thing”, but nobody thinks it’s the root of all evil.
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From other comments: ozy says objectification is not a useful concept for communicating with those who aren’t well-versed in feminist theory, and Ghatanatoah says it only makes sense to people who internalized the Madonna-Whore Dichotomy …
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Perhaps it is relevant that the plumber is knowingly and consentingly being a plumber. A corollary of this would be that the objectification of prostitutes is fine.
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To be honest, yes, I think a certain level of objectifying sex workers is fine. Which, what I mean is, it is their job to give good sexytimes. It is not their job to be your real-actual-friend, even if you are paying for the “girlfriend experience.” It is meant to be a commercial transaction.
I think customers of sex workers should *respect* them, in the same way the sex workers should respect the customers — provided everyone treats each other with basic dignity and respect.
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Thanks for an interesting post, with which I am now about to quibble.
I’m not sure that finding people arousing means either that (1) I assume they want to have sex with me or (2) that I am treating them like objects instead of people. In fact, I assume naive Bayesian updating has caused most people to learn that they cannot assume anyone will have sex with them, but have to test the waters first.
Suppose my hot friend shows up to our beach party in a new swimsuit, and I say “wow, you look even hotter than usual in that swimsuit.” Depending on our relationship, I may or may not offend him, and I may or may not be hopeful that if things fall the right way, at some point, we might have sex.
Regardless, it seems to me that whether my comment is (1) offensive and (2) carries the implication that I think sex is a possibility and am signalling interest depends entirely on the interpersonal context. I might just be trying to compliment him, or to be funny, or to acknowledge that he’s hot.
It’s not really fair to say that I’m objectifying my friend or that I’m assuming that my friend might be open to having sex with me unless you can see inside my head. It’s entirely possibile that I mean “Hey, in addition to being a person, and therefore having feelings, consiousness, etc., you are also very sexy, and I enjoy looking at you, even though I am fully aware that the chances of us ever having sex are indistinguishable from zero.”
Now, if my friend is sensitive about his sexiness, then I might have unintentionally caused some hurt feelings, which hopefully we can resolve by explaining outselves and me apologizing, but me acknowledging that I find him sexy doesn’t necessarily mean either that I don’t think he’s a person or that I assume he’ll have sex with me.
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Sorry, Ozy – I should have gone through the effort of reading all the comments, and gotten to the part where you say that you now think that the concept of objectification is complicated enough that it’s hard to use to communicate with people (like me) who don’t have the background.
I got so interested in the language, I missed the point, on objectification and fetishization.
I’d love to read more about your point that “Similarly, it’s perfectly fine to be attracted to women with penises or people with typically East Asian features or fat women, as long as you’re not an asshole about it.” I think “don’t be an a-hole” is a good generalizable rule that’s easier to sell, and we’d all appreciated advice in that direction.
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Okay, so let’s play a game. Imagine being an ethnically Japanese girl born in America.
(I’m not Japanese, so I’m *literally* imagining this. If you are Japanese and I get this totally wrong, say “Hey veronica I’m Japanese and you got this totally wrong.”)
Anyway, we shall imagine away.
Okay, so your name is “Jennifer,” cuz your parents wanted to raise you in American culture. (I guess this happens often enough.)
Okay, say you’re into math or something. Maybe this is kind of a stereotype of an Asian girl. But whatever. You like math. So you hang with the smart kids.
Say you also like dancing, Jazz music, and indoor rock climbing.
Okay, like, imagine how you feel after the 3490389430984th guy in your social group lets you know he wished you were named “Miki” or something and that you should totally know about all the manga he likes and darn you look like {character name}, but maybe you should dress more like her.
Do you want to join his LARP group as a robot maid?
You’re a fucking athlete! You like math but you don’t LARP. Nor are you particularly into miniskirts. Nor do you have plans to wear a girly sailor outfit, no matter how many times they ask.
Cuz you’re Jenny and you like indoor rock climbing and Jazz and math. You own no swords. You never once fought a robot army.
Can you kinda imagine how *annoying* this gets after the first 349049340984094 times? ’Specially when the dudes are kinda immature about it and kinda won’t drop it and kinda keep bringing it up and kinda seem obsessed about it.
#####
[cw: sexually explicit]
Okay, so I like Bailey Jay as much as the next girl. Actually, she’s hot as fuck.
[Don’t Google Bailey Jay at work!]
I mean, she’s got the business. She can use her business. Lotsa folks have all kinds of fantasies about how Bailey Jay uses her business on people, including on straight dudes looking for something new.
Which is all awesome and HAWT and if you too like Bailey Jay and her business, than you and I have a thing in common.
But guess what, I ain’t her. Nor can I do the things she does. First, I don’t want to. Her sexuality ain’t mine. Second, I actually kinda cannot. Hormones do different things to different people and my business cannot do what hers can.
Which, lucky her. But I’m happy with me.
(My g/f kinda wants me to do to her what Bailey Jay can do, but I can’t, so we’re working out compromises.)
Here’s the thing, lotsa folks *fetishize* what Bailey Jay can do. This is different from *liking* her stuff, or wanting to do her stuff. It is this: wanting someone only for that stuff and being kinda weird about it and treating them as if that is their only purpose and if they don’t do that then they might as well not exist.
Trans women get treated this way by some people. (Mostly men, but women also from time to time.) It’s depressing.
#####
Sexuality ain’t exactly like other things. The reason for this is simple: whatever ethical principles we come up with, they are implemented on human brains and human brains in fact assign a special role for sexuality.
We really seem to do this, probably for some evopsysch reason or whatever. But it is hard to observe human behavior and not see it. For example, check out *which threads* cause a shitstorm on SCC. This ain’t an accident. Call it “revealed preference” if you want. Point is, if your meta-ethical models ignore or gloss over this fact then they fail map-territory correspondence.
So when you try to compare sexual objectification to (for example) working as a fry cook, you’re really missing something important. It logically possible to equate a fast food job to being sexualized, but they differ psychologically. They differ a lot. Much. Singularly. If you don’t get this you will have a very difficult time relating to people.
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My issue is that “Fetishization” as a concept seems to lead to a misunderstanding of why certain actions are bad. In addition it sometimes seems to harm the marginalized groups it is intended to help.
All the bad things in Ozy’s post are explained by general principles that have nothing to do with race, sex, cis/trans, etc. Here are some cases and reasons:
1)
Case: Don’t reblog pictures of above average weight women from their tumblr onto porn blogs. Unless invited don’t send them sexually explicit pms.
Reasons: Don’t do things that will upset people unless needed. Having pictures on a porn blog or being sent those pms are likely to upset people. An additional principle is that you shouldn’t impose unwanted intimacy. Which is what sending sexual pms is likely to do.
2)
Case: Sub men blindly assuming dominant women want to play with them. Often in specific ways. *
Reason: The main one is that imposing unwanted intimacy is not really ok.
3)
Case: Trans/Jappanesse girls because of stereotypes about them
Reason: Try not to hold stereotypical ideas. And definitely try not to act on them. Especially be wary that being treated poorly because of the group you belong to is often extra painful. As you cannot really change the group you belong to a person will feel that the mistreatment they just received is impossible to avoid. Even if something seems unimportant to you it might hit them very hard. Edge very, very far on the side of caution here.
====
In the cases where fetisization points to a real problem I don’t see how race/sex/gender/etc are crucial. Of course some groups (trans, Asian, etc) are more likely to be treated poorly sexually. But the same dynamic can easily happen to straight cishet men. And if it happens to straight cishet men its equally bad. Even if straight cishet men are less likely to be affected some of them will be very affected. And some of them will even have a long life history of being affected.
Finally having significant contact with the trans community I think the concept of “fetishizaion” has done alot of damage. At least some trans individuals and “allies” seem to have a deep distrust and animus towards partners of trans individuals. Who does this help? Not the trans people who love their partners. Not the partners. And not trans people who are looking to date, as the majority of the dating scene is cis.
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You last comment on the damage from the concept of “fetishization” reminds me of the damage to people like Scott Aaronson from too much noise about “harassment”.
Maybe the general pattern is that some people benefit from condemning fuzzy concepts if they can place themselves as judges over what that concept covers; in effect, it’s a roundabout way of making oneself arbiter of Right and Wrong in a specific domain, and one that’s hard to criticize without sounding like someone looking for excuses for bad behavior. And a lot of the backlash against SJW types is that people reject their authority on the subject of morality.
But this isn’t just about SJW – “heretic”, “statist” and “un-American” and “unscientific” have been used the same way.
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I think you are probably right. Scott Aaronson is a deeply interesting person. And while I can’t tell this from writing he seems quite kind. I am sure lots of women would have loved interacting with him romantically. Scott says in retrospect lots of people were interested. The women who wanted to date Scott are also victims of the dialogue around harassment (As well as gender roles of woemn not asking men out).
When you go around demonizing a group of men the women who care about such men suffer too. So the “war on nerds” affects women too. It goes without saying ti hurts “nerds.” I am not really sure who it helps, outside of the media and the bloggers.
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Now that I’ve read all the comments, I come back to Ozy’s near concluding line that “it’s perfectly fine to be attracted to women with penises or people with typically East Asian features or fat women, as long as you’re not an asshole about it.”
I think that’s a generalizable point that’s pretty easy to sell without reaching consensus on “fetishization.”
As I understand Ozy’s ultimate point, if you tend to be turned on by features associated with disadvantage or oppression, that’s fine, but you should be more careful than if you’re really turned on by rich white guys or cis-male lacrosse players of privilege, because there’s a greater chance there’s an emotional minefield there.
Now if anybody has generalizable suggestions about how to work through the minefield, I’m sure they’d be welcome.
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I 100% agree with the claim:
“As I understand Ozy’s ultimate point, if you tend to be turned on by features associated with disadvantage or oppression, that’s fine, but you should be more careful than if you’re really turned on by rich white guys or cis-male lacrosse players of privilege, because there’s a greater chance there’s an emotional minefield there.”
However I do not think this is what “fetishization” usually is used to mean. This meaning isn’t even clear from Ozy’s article imo. If this is her current view can you point me to where she clearly expresses it.
Many people agree the “Core” idea of fetishization/objectification is treaitng people like objects or means to sexual ends. I am not sure what this core concept has to do with the “ultimate point” you described.
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Oh I do want to add that your post is really well written and makes a point in this discussion super clear.
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Thanks! I keep planning to register with wordpress so I can start liking your posts!
Ozy, I apologize in advance if guessing what you mean is buggy – your posts are very thought-provoking, so I’m going to do some guessing what you mean. It’s fine when it’s Camus, because I don’t do it where he can read it, so I hope you take it in the same spirit!
SGP, here’s where I’m coming from.
Recent Ozy wrote above that “objectification” isn’t very helpful in conversations with people who don’t already get it, which I totally agree with.
Recent Ozy also wrote that to Ozy, fetishization is “being oppressive to someone while being sexually attracted to them and they’re a member of a marginalized group other than women”, which leaves people wishing to avoid it to figure out what being oppressive means. (I’ll skip the link because that’s enough for you to find the comment).
My personal feeling is that fetishization isn’t that helpful an idea in this context – someone could cause Ozy offense by saying that all bisexuals are into threesomes even if that person isn’t themself into bisexuals or threesomes – they might just be offensive.*
Given that original Ozy also wrote that Ozy thought it was ok to be turned on by disadvantaged characteristics as long as one isn’t an asshole, I think that’s probably a good starting point to find some common ground.
* I’m not even bi, but it offends me as a person of logic when people assume that bisexuals can’t be monogamous, but I’ve seen a lot of people assume that, including people who didn’t seem to be into threesomes. (Or logic.)
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In my mind, whenever I read a “fetishization is evil” or “objectification is evil” I add the word “reductive” and it helps.
That is, one could argue that any sort of sexual attraction/activities in any version of a healthy sexual relationship (of any length) between persons will, at some point, necessitate that some part of one or more persons be fetishized or sexually objectified in some fashion. This is not the problem.
The problem is when fetishization or objectification becomes the only/driving factor in how you see someone. They aren’t a person, all they really are is life support for boobs, a butt, legs, arms, boots, large body, small body, penis, vagina, feet, a thing for humiliation, a thing for worship etc.
What’s worse is that such a mindset is often rarely explicit. In my experience, it usually shows up not as someone overtly arguing that another is less than human, but as someone failing to even consider or mitigating another person’s humanity/desires/agency or the variation among individuals. Not all straight people want the same sort of sex, nor do all bi, gay, people with large boobs, people with feet, wearing boots, with large bodies, with small bodies, with penises, with vaginas, up for humiliation, up for worship etc.
In a more direct counter to an argument made in a comment above mine: It is not that one needs care about the “particulars of your inner life” it is that one needs to be careful not lose the humanity of another in a fantasy.
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Let’s say I really like red sportscoats. I mean, *really* like. In my pants. I’m at a party, and there is a man there in a red sportscoat. Boner time! There’s nothing wrong with that. Boners happen.
Do I still see the man? Do I want to get to that red sportscoat so badly that I’m willing to deceive, mislead, coerce, or force him to let me just touch it? Do I intend to do that? This, to me, is the main difference between fetishization/ objectification and desire.
If the man in the sportscoat doesn’t matter to me, if he’s just a warm ambulatory coathanger, he is an object to me – he is a vehicle for my desire, not an agent in his own right. If I communicate that to him clearly and he’s still like, “Sure man, feel free to get all up in my sportscoat,” I would argue that even though he’s still an object to me, there’s no moral foul here. The problem isn’t *thinking of* someone as an object – it’s *assuming they are one,* and treating them accordingly. It makes someone else responsible for your boner.
In summary:
– Red sportscoat fetish: OK!
– Aroused by presence of man in red sportscoat: OK!
– Having consensual sex with man in red sportscoat, during which I am extra turned-on due to presence of red sportscoat: OK!
– Ignoring man in red sportscoat’s agency/ humanity in effort to get close to red sportscoat: NOT OK!
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Do you think that that is what Ozy means by it, though?
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No, I was just offering my tangential view on the topic.
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The problem with this post is that Ozy is explaining the motte of fetishization. The bailey is, of course, that feminists hate your boners because claiming attraction to a particular group (especially a marginalized one) could maybe be taken as fetishization, so they’re going to hop on that assumption.
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I think we can cover most of the examples using a definition of fetishization like:
Objectification is when you have strong beliefs about someone based on their group membership AND won’t update those beliefs when faced with information about the person as an individual.
Take the Japanese example. It’s fine to expect that a typical Japanese person likes Sushi. That’s just a matter of polling.
The problem starts when Bob’s expectations are so fixed that he can’t (or won’t) notice when Kimiko tells him that she’s vegetarian.
At that point Bob is using real-Kimiko like a mannequin. The flesh-and-blood human is there just as a projection screen for his image of Typical Japanese Woman.
The offensiveness of the other examples seems directly proportional to the amount of effort/time that someone needs to spend to get people to change their priors.
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