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A lot of 'objectification' discourse is just a political weapon -- as you say, ideologues uncomfortable with sexual desire who turn to any argument against it -- or the Dworkin-style criticism of industries that doesn't meaningfully discuss or respond to specific acts or creations.
Unfortunately, the Dworkin/MacKinnon-style one is what's present here, and in a lot of youtube content dating back to Sarkeesian, so that doesn't help. Because it's supposed to be a criticism of broad structures rather than specific acts, it's largely not interested in specific acts... and coincidentally is largely unfalsifiable, up to and including handwaves when confronted with increasingly broad spectrums of pornography that either don't fit its model definition (femdom, gay porn) or do fit its model definition but don't actually objectify (women's erotica, woman-to-consumer sales, the growth of parasocial porn). The waiter counterexample just gets a 'mu' here: it's just not a relevant question to their framework.
But there is a meaningful steelman (and not some recent or made-up one) that's worth keeping in mind if you every write smut or romance (or even 'normal' stories that feature romance).
There is a difference between treating people like tools or toys, and sexualizing them or making them targets of sexual desire. It's the line between a character that's sexy, and a fleshlight with a smil. You can treat a tool well, or a person poorly, just as being a target of desire can be humanizing or not depending on framework, norms, and reciprocity of interest.
For an extreme (and het) example, look at het free-use style BDSM.You can play into the same kink by literally stuffing a woman into a hole in a wall and treating her like a sex toy for a parade of men to use, or you can tie her down to a breeding stand and then make a game out of getting an orgasm (or too many orgasms) out of her or tease her so long that she's begging for more stimulation. Hell, a lot of straight guys find the latter option hotter (or the former a little gay). There's no difference in agency between these two implementations: they can and often do have near-identical framing stories, and it's even easier to make the 'I'm a sex toy' version more clear about its consent. But the former is about the men's pleasure and the women's appearance, while the latter centers the woman's feelings and desire.
In writing, erotica or pornography with more of a story, that can be more varied. A lot of less experienced writers will try to make sex scenes so low-friction that the sub does nothing but sit there, look sexy, and maybe squeeze a little. But there's a lot of mileage in highlighting the sort of pinch points that show up in real sex. Overstimulation and 'forced' orgasms are kinks of their own for a reason. A sub finding a position uncomfortable and wanting to swap, or needing a different tempo or some time to adjust to the big dick in them, or wanting more foreplay before penetration, can be a great pacing tool. Someone using a safe word because they can't physically bend that way is a perfect tool to make clear that they are comfortable with or at least enjoying everything else, or act as a scene break. These inevitably inject questions about who can make what call and how those desires are negotiated, even if the writer ultimately wants to just to treat them as one-liners.
Now, I'll make the separate argument that objectification isn't always bad. The counterargument to objectifying a waiter ultimately ends up asking a lot of emotional labor from someone who, in reality, just wants you to leave a tip and get out of here so the table's clear. In sex, a significant portion of women (... and some men) like smut that objectifies the character they're projecting themselves into, because of that objectification. It gives them a vehicle to see their desires instantiated, without having to replace an existing character's conflicting desires and feelings, or require that projection to vocalize and admit their own desires. That's a particularly big deal for people who've been raised to stigmatize or hide overt expressions of their sexuality: denying the interior experience of 'their' character may be the only way they can really come to grips with it.
The steelman of the feminist argument is that objectification can be dangerous, even for the people who get the most out of it. Some men like the woman-as-sex-toy framework because it does make it easier to think about sex as solely about 'their' own pleasure, up to and including at the expense of what their partners want or what their partners are comfortable doing. Some women who need objectification as a way to bypass their shame do so to their own detriment, either ignoring or refusing to use environments where they could admit to their desires safely, or by internalizing the self-abnegate to destructive ends.
I don't buy that as a common concern, but I don't think it's a non-existent failure mode, either. The academic research is bad, since it's mostly revolving around priming effects with little pre-registered study and even fewer direct replication, and a lot of signal only shows up if you divide 'violent' (mainstream) porn from general porn, which doesn't encourage about direction-of-causation or salami-slicing-reasons. Still, unless it's entirely fraudulent, there's some level of signal, and if so the pro-sex side's larger population-scale data is partly recognizing other variables.
Your own example of leaked nudes is a central version: you weren't restricting her rights or opinions, but you weren't recognizing them as matters to care about either. That's why the objectification theory uses that word, not just to smuggle emotional loading from the Dworkin version: you don't deny the rights or opinions of tissue paper, after all, but you still treat it as an object. I'd guess that she didn't want her nudes to be present everywhere on the internet, and legally she might have had a cause of action against the leakers and redistributors.
((caveat: I don't follow celebrities, so if she's separately a well-known exhibitionist, objection withdrawn.))
You've said alot of interesting things that I largely agree with, so I just want to hone in on one element I take issue with :
I disagree - in this specific scenario, my teenage self fantasising about having sex with a famous actress is not imagining fucking a lifeless ragdoll that just happens to look identical to Jennifer Lawrence. The fantasy obviously involves her being enthusiastic, willing, and desiring me during the encounter, which pretty explicitly means that her "opinions" or "rights" are comfortably sublimated in an affirmative manner into the fantasy itself. Furthermore, if I mention Jennifer Lawrence and not one of the million random porn stars or e-whores you can see naked on the internet, it's because wanting to fuck Jennifer Lawrence is bound to her personality, status, etc. making her more desirable than other women, which means that her physical attributes are only a minor part of the overall attraction.
This is true but it's a detail relative to the specific example I chose - I could just as easily have mentioned Keira Knightley in Pirates of the Caribbean, in which case the non-consent angle vanishes.
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Mostly unrelated but the recent Twitter discourse on CNC orgies has been funny. Especially Aella indicating that it's hard to ensure less attractive women attract sufficient rapists
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