Actually... there is a problem with that definition. I bolded the particular word I have a problem with. Instead try replacing the word
viewing with the word
treating in that sentence:
Sexual objectification, as defined by many feminists, is the treating of people solely as depersonalized objects of desire instead of as individuals with complex personalities and desires/plans of their own.
It may seem a trivial change to some but I think it is an important distinction to be made between how you
see a person and how you
behave towards that person. The former is internal to your own mind and the latter is external.
Have you ever heard of "the male gaze" in second-wave feminist theory? But okay, I'll go with you alteration. That doesn't really change the problem as I've presented it.
Woah... "any interaction" ? I have never heard of such a concept. You jumped from a rather vague definition to an absolute application of that definition to every situation. Looks a bit like a straw man to me.
Okay, for those of you with severe Asperger's I meant any
lascivious interaction. To take two recent examples, the women who went viral for uploading video of catcalling included guys saying "good morning beautiful" with guys stalking her for a full 5 minutes beside her.
Or how about a bowling shirt with scantily clad women?
If someone looks at a female and appreciates her visually, one is failing to take into account all of the above qualities.
Doing one thing does not automatically exclude doing the others.
I would agree, but you're telling that to the wrong person. Tell
them.
I think you need to back up your argument with some real evidence that it is what "these feminists" actually want. I don't think you can.
Okay.
From Stanford.edu:
Pornography defines women by how we look according to how we can be sexually used.
Pornography
participates in its audience's eroticism through creating an accessible sexual object, the possession and consumption of which
is male sexuality, as socially constructed; to be consumed and possessed as which,
is female sexuality, as socially constructed (MacKinnon 1987, 173).
A sex object is defined on the basis of its looks, in terms of its usability for sexual pleasure, such that both the lookingthe quality of gaze, including its points of viewand the definition according to use become eroticised as part of the sex itself. This is what the feminist concept of sex object means (MacKinnon 1987, 173).
From Wikipedia:
In 1987, Dworkin published
Intercourse, in which she extended her analysis from pornography to sexual intercourse itself, and argued that the sort of sexual subordination depicted in pornography was central to men's and women's experiences of heterosexual intercourse in a male supremacist society. In the book, she argues that all heterosexual sex in our patriarchal society is coercive and degrading to women, and sexual penetration may by its very nature doom women to inferiority and submission, and "may be immune to reform".
--Andrea Dworkin
"The Pragmatist and the Feminist" :
If the social regime permits buying and selling of sexual and reproductive activities, thereby treating them as fungible market commodities given the current capitalistic understandings of monetary exchange, there is a threat to the personhood of women, who are the "owners" of these "commodities." The threat to personhood from commodification arises because essential attributes are treated as severable fungible objects, and this denies the integrity and uniqueness of the self.
--Professor Margaret Jane Radin
