I’m going to preface this by saying that so far, every time I’ve opened my mouth on feminism, I’ve ended up changing my position after someone else explained it to me. It was mostly a matter of me not understanding the issue. So please don’t take this the wrong way - I’m learning.
I don’t get the subject-object dichotomy. It’s not that it makes no sense to me per se - the basics described here make sense to me. What I don’t get is how this is turned into a huge issue. For starters, objectification is not some female-specific thing - it’s sort of how we view the world, outside of a small subset of people we know. Crackedhas a very approachable take on it.
More specifically, though, feminists very often use this as an argument against things like pornography, sex work, etc. But it seems to me that it could easily be turned on its head, as is done in this video (relevant example in the linked timestamp). It seems almost woefully bound to perspective - whether someone in a relationship is an object or a subject seems almost entirely based on how you look at it, with few notable (and usually quite criminal) exceptions. Especially in video games, the whole concept doesn’t make sense, because quite literally every non-player character is an object - nothing in there other than the player actually has any agency whatsoever. But even just in general, I just don’t get how this has become a major pop-culture criticism from the feminist point of view. Can anyone help me understand this?