A Brief History of "Sexual Objectification"

[Commenting note: I will be deleting any comments that say that it’s hot or kinky or fun when women are treated as if they are only for sex. See section two here.] I mostly don’t use the word “sexual objectification.” Some people interpret “sexual objectification” to mean “sexual attraction”, which makes the conversation frustrating. Other people aren’t sufficiently Kantian to buy the assumptions of the concept, and I don’t want to debate Kantianism vs. utilitarianism every time I talk about sexual ethics. So even if I’m thinking “objectification”, it’s easier to use a whole sentence to say the thing I mean. But I think the history of the concept is really fascinating and reveals a lot about what we think about sex. So here is a brief, selective, opinionated history of what people mean when they say “objectification.” The origin of the concept of “objectification” is Immanuel Kant.1 To Kant, people needed to always be treated as an end in themselves and never as a means. This is a very

[Commenting note: I will be deleting any comments that say that it’s hot or kinky or fun when women are treated as if they are only for sex. See section two here.] I mostly don’t use the word “sexual objectification.” Some people interpret “sexual objectification” to mean “sexual attraction”, which makes the conversation frustrating. Other people aren’t sufficiently Kantian to buy the assumptions of the concept, and I don’t want to debate Kantianism vs. utilitarianism every time I talk about sexual ethics. So even if I’m thinking “objectification”, it’s easier to use a whole sentence to say th