Can Anyone Help Me Understand the Subject-Object Dichotomy in Feminism?

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?

I may be totally off-base here, but I’ve considered it to be in the vein of Kant’s principle that human beings can never be used solely as a means, but must always be an end in themselves in moral contexts (commonly called the ‘humanity formula’). So, to objectify somebody is to just use them as a means in terms of, for example, achieving sexual gratification, which is essentially dehumanizing, because it does not recognise them as an end in themselves.

Regarding video games, of course strictly speaking everything besides the player is an object, but the issue is with the fact that women are often portrayed as objects; that is, they’re used solely as a means in-game.

So, just because a woman is, say, the object of my sexual desire, doesn’t mean I am objectifying her—as long as I do not, in whatever way, use her solely as a means of satisfying my sexual urges, but rather, consider her as a moral equal with her own desires and intentions.

But that’s just my own take; I can’t say I’m well versed in modern feminist philosophy.

Here’s what I don’t get. Maybe I’m the only one (although I seriously doubt it), but this is just sort of how I view people outside of my particular sphere. I like my bandmates and I see them as people and we all have goals and dreams. I like my friends. But the guy working at the post office? He’s a means for me to get my letters through. The guy working tech support at Telecom? He’s a means for me to get my internet fixed. Sure, at some level I’m aware he’s a human being like me, but not in the same way as people I know. Almost a perfect analogue not to how I would see a human being if I was examining the human condition, but rather to how I would see a porn actress playing a role.

See, this is what I don’t get. Because my take on this doesn’t merely extend to porn, or hookers, or whatever - it extends to my life. Take the above example of the postman. I don’t know this person. I realize that they are a person in some faint way, but they’re incredibly one-dimensional. I don’t think I’d particularly care if I didn’t see them again. I don’t know if this makes me a sociopath, or what…

Well, as I said, it’s completely OK to view the postman as a means to get your letters to where you want them to go, as long as you can be reasonably sure that the postman does what he does—which is to provide a service—because it is a means to achieve his own ends, i.e. rationally and out of his own free choice. It wouldn’t be OK if you knew that the postman was kept there against his will as a slave, or if you yourself would keep him a slave just to achieve your own end of getting your letters through. You can treat other people as a means, but not as a mere means—your end to get your letters through doesn’t trump the ends of the postman. So only if you were to use the postman as a means of letter-delivery in disregard of his own ends would you be in violation of the humanity formula (i.e. the categorical imperative).

But if the postman fell down while distributing your letters, would you help him? You most likely would, because in that moment he’d be a fellow human being in pain.

When a person is seen exclusively as an object, there is no reason to help them if they fall down. Or thank them, or respect their opinions. Objects don’t have opinions to respect.

Fine explanation if that’s the way men treated women in general, and women didn’t treat men the same way, but that’s not what I see in the world. I think this is just word play, the use of symbolism that avoids the direct issue. Women aren’t denied their rights, or underpaid, or denied opportunities because they are objects. Those things happen because many men are self-centered and insecure assholes (not to mention the women that support traditionalist concepts even to their own disadvantage). It’s wrong to treat women as a different class of people than men in regards to their rights and freedom whether or not they are seen as objects or subjects, and the same applies to any group of people you wish to label. People who treat anyone exclusively as objects are assholes, whether the subject or object is male or female doesn’t matter.

I don’t understand what it is that you don’t understand. The only example you give is the linked “Feminist Perspectives on Objectification” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and you say that it makes sense to you. So what specifically are you hoping that we’ll be able to explain to you?

The idea is that in grammar when using the active voice the subject is acting upon the object. Feminists tend to believe that in popular culture men are normally the protagonists while women are passive background decoration. Sometimes this is true, like in pretty much any romcom (whcih almost always focus on a man pursuing a woman), and sometimes it’s not, like in classic computer games Metron and Tomb Raider (which have female protagonists).

Why is this a feminist issue? Because feminists like dreaming up non-existent problems to complain about on the grounds that there are no longer any legitimate feminist issues, and haven’t been in decades.

No, because it doesn’t make sense. The only lens through which it can be understood is that of feminism as a hate movement, and the objectification business as a crude attempt to get people to confuse object in the grammatical sense with object in the physical, inanimate sense, and thereby to claim that women are treated as less than human by society, which is contrary to the truth but a necessary justification for feminism as a movement.

If your society spent a lot of time saying, “Oh, he’s just a dummy who wasn’t smart enough to get a real job; you know those postmen, more muscle than brains; they’re just like worker ants, you know,” and then you saw him fall down, you (or the average person) might be slightly less ready to go and help him.

Much of feminism is about subtle social biases and expectations. Many of us are old enough to remember when “women drivers” were seriously believed to be less competent than men. This led to inequalities in hiring opportunity for women couriers, truckers, delivery drivers, taxi drivers, etc.

A society that sexualizes women as much as ours does – watch TV for a while and tell me otherwise! – will produce citizens who are to some degree more prepared to view a real woman, in a real situation, as a sexual entity than as a moral agent.

The sexual aspect isn’t the worst part of American sexism, I will note. It’s the infantilization of women that does more harm, keeping them from their share of corporate and governmental power. More harm is done by “Don’t worry your little head” than by “Yowza, what knockers.”

Its one of those things that can get pretty ridiculous pretty fast though - you end up with Andrea Dworkin sorts of logic. At its base, its important to recognize that women can be - and are often - objectified. That doesn’t mean that all male female interactions are examples of objectification or that women are always passive victims of objectification. Its a theory that a modern feminist would likely temper a lot more than a 1970s feminist would.

Driving is a dangerous and arduous job, and as with all dangerous and arduous jobs, women are less likely to do it. Subtle social biases and expectations only come into it by pressuring men to do these jobs to provide for women.

Yes, men want to have sex with women because the TV tells them to, women never want to have sex at all and are oppressed by the male gaze and video games cause school shootings.

Bullshit.

I disagree. I’ve been reading and hearing a lot lately about street harassment and it seems a perfect example of this. The experiences that are typical for women are bizarrely threatening and demeaning and downright creepy, and in the dialog of these scenarios the women don’t get to be people, they are targets and targets only. What is probably most startling to me is that it is typical for any woman to have some experience of this. I’m a man and have never had anything like this happen to me, and it makes my head spin that this is actually typical.

There was a great photo series on Huffington Post a few weeks ago of women holding up signs that said things they had heard on the street. The things the signs say are scary and ugly. What struck me most was this didn’t come about because somebody at Huffpost interviewed a bunch of victims as victims – these were all their own editors, who happened to be women.

I’ll give you an example: battered women. Google it, and you will get all kinds of hits on the problem of battered women, what is being done to help battered women, studies od battered women, effects of the children of battered women.

What hardly ever gets mentioned is that for every battered woman, there is a man who beat her. Leaving aside that aspect of lesbians who batter (and it does happen; I’m not ignoring it-- but even as a percentage of relationships, it’s rarer, probably because partners tend to be better physical matches), the problem isn’t really “battered women,” it’s “men who beat,” so why do we focus on the women? because of a long-held belief, that is mostly gone, but lingers linguistically, that a husband had the right (and under the law he did, for a long time) to discipline his wife.

When “battered women” were first receiving media attention, there were still quite a lot of people who thought they were just women who got out of hand, and left their husbands at their wits’ end, and so if they (the women) ended up needing medical attention, it really was their own fault.

Mostly, society has given up the idea that it’s OK for a man to “discipline” his wife (you will probably find religious cult that disagree, but they are not part of the mainstream); however, we keep this linguistic baggage from another time.

My point is that “A man beat his wife” is the natural way to say that sentence, and not “A woman was beaten by her husband.” I realize that just looking at parts of speech, the woman is unnaturally sujectified, but the point that you put the sentence in the passive voice, or just shift subject and object, to change the focus is often what happens when women are objectified: not “I’m attracted to her,” but “She [who may not even be aware of the speaker] turns me on.” Suddenly, she is responsible for her effect of the speaker.

Another example comes up when you listen to women discuss women’s issues, whether it’s maternity leave or something completely unrelated to an actual difference between men and woman. Women, discussing women’s issues, will often say “they,” rather than “us,” and I don’t even mean when talking about the suffrage movement, I mean when talking about current events that affect them personally. That’s how distanced individual woman feel from woman as a class. That’s objectification right there.

Okay, that makes sense, but I don’t think I’ve ever thought of a person like that. Ever. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who would think of another person like that. And yet this dichotomy is applied in incredibly broad terms. That’s the confusion.

I think I understand the gist of what it is. What I don’t get is how it is at all applicable to the real world.

Absolutely. I think street harassment is the easiest place to see it, because it’s so blatant, once it’s pointed out or videotaped so that you can see what we see everyday. There are some men out there who very literally see women as objects. The catcalls are often exactly like the catcalls and “compliments” they deliver to an impressive car, or a delicious looking pizza. “Aw, yeah! Gotta get me some of that! That’s HOT!” And, in all fairness, there are rowdy women out there who do the same thing to men, but the numbers are definitely skewed in one direction.

It happens other places, too. My own idiot boss, love him to pieces, but he asks only the prettiest nurses to attend marketing events. It makes sense, from a marketing perspective, but he sees us as objects, literally, like a nice looking sign or a balloon that will grab people’s attention and make them ask us for a flyer. Harmless, you might say, unless you’re the 60 year old “unattractive” nurse who could have used that extra bump in her paycheck for an hour of very easy work, but won’t ever be asked. He sees her as an object, too - but an object that would impede his goal of getting new clients, not assist it.

:confused:

You’ve lost me again. I mean, I get that this used to be a thing, but the focus on battered women today seems to me to have little difference from any other crime where we focus on the victim - rape, abuse, theft… In certain cases the media focuses on the victim, and that’s mainly because that’s where, well, to be perfectly frank, the better story is. And that draws our eye. The story behind an abusive spouse is simply not interesting to us. We don’t want to sympathize with him. Right? It may have started differently, but there are good reasons for it to be that way today. Or can you tell me a way of saying “Shelter for battered women” that puts the emphasis on the perpetrator? This “linguistic baggage”, as you put it, does potentially place the woman as the “object” - she’s been acted upon. Well, duh. But it’s also a correct description of the event - the woman was acted upon. Just like I am acted upon in countless ways in my life - albeit considerably less traumatically.

I’m not convinced this is actually the case; in fact, I’m fairly certain I heard the latter more often and would use the latter. I also don’t get why, if this is a linguistic quirk, that it matters. Like, I get that linguistics can matter, but this one just seems… Well, okay, the woman is the object in the sentence. No kidding. Same deal with “John hugged Jane” or “John loved Jane”. There is literally no way to change those statements so that the woman is the subject and the man is the object. But why would you need to? That’s what’s happening - someone is doing something to someone else. Hell, in the case of battered women, I’d call that a good thing - that we recognize that what’s going on is that the woman is the object in that scenario helps us understand that it couldn’t be her fault!

That, on the other hand, I get.

This seems moderately surreal to me but I get the concept at least.

I take it you’re struggling with the difference between the way we see most people as a faceless mass (objects), and treating the women we encounter as objects, so I’ll try to address that with an example to see if it helps you understand a little.

I make films. They’re small, independent, low/no budget artsy films. We usually work with a tiny crew, and the films will sometimes be screened at little festivals or screening evenings.

I usually work with a very good friend, and we do pretty much everything together. Sometimes, with a bigger crew, the tasks are more defined, but if it’s a crew of 4 or 5 we just do everything together. He and I, you could say, are the producer/director duo.

After the screenings, there are drinks and you all say hello and shake hands. And people will always address him with questions and praise. Never me. Ever. He says himself how much of an eye-opener it is, he says he would never believe it if he didn’t see it happen every time.

So you could say this is an example of the type of “inertness” objectification (as mentioned in the linked Stanford entry): there is an assumption that he is active, that he does the filmmaking. I scarcely exist, I am just there, standing by his side looking pretty. Just to be clear: all these people are not evil. They don’t hate women. If you asked them “do you think women should be treated the same as men?” they would answer yes. But somehow, this is still the result.

In this example, the fact that my friend is also a faceless monkey statistic (borrowing from the Cracked article) doesn’t really matter. To some extent he is, to some extent he isn’t - the point is people are in that moment choosing to engage with [us/him]. But there is some sort of assumption of difference: that he is active, that he has agency and autonomy, that he is the filmmaker. And that I am not.

Perhaps this particular example is somewhat different that the usual idea of sexual objectification, but it is what came to mind because of your specific question.

In your OP, you say you don’t get “how this has become a major pop-culture criticism”. Do you want to talk about the real world or do you want to talk about pop culture criticism?

That’s a sincere question, not a “Gotcha!” I really don’t understand what you’re looking for with this thread.

I guess both. It’s sort of like in my last discussion about “rape culture”. I understood the concept, but I absolutely did not understand how it was applicable. Then someone posted this:

And then my girlfriend confirmed to me that yes, she’d seen similar things within her family. Along with a few other things, it sort of clicked for me. Here, I guess there are two things I don’t really get - how objectification is common enough or gender-specific in normal, day-to-day life for it to be a real feminist issue, and how objectification in the media ties into that. Part of the impetus of this was, of course, my examination of Anita Sarkeesian’s videos on the object-subject dichotomy in video games… Which I found woefully lacking on several levels, and which seem fairly bizarre. It might just be that she’s not presenting a very good view of the subject. I don’t know.

Huh. This seems like the kind of thing I just wouldn’t notice. That is a troubling blind spot. :frowning: Are you guys credited differently on the film? I mean, I can imagine someone wanting to talk to the director more than the producer… Like, this happens to a certain extent with me and my girlfriend, but this has a lot to do with how we present ourselves outwardly - she’s fairly demure, while I’m very outgoing and extroverted. You can often tell from our body language who’s more interested in leading a conversation. I don’t know, to be honest. I wouldn’t call that a gender thing, but I could be wrong. It does worry me that I’ve been barely noticing this all this time.

I’ve come to the sad conclusion that with men it’s always a dick-waving contest, with women it’s always a shit-test. ISTM that the root cause of objectification is self-objectification. Sure, you’re my little ego-feeding device and that’s your entire function. But that makes me no more than the totem you live to worship.

I think the philosopher Martin Burber addressed this pretty good with his I and Thou theory, at least to the satisfaction of my middlebrow tastes.