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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   18100 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026

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Sexual Objectification

There is something that bothers me about watching progressive/feminist content on youtube, especially regarding the topic of objectification, and its particularly emphasized in this video, as follows:

So if something doesn't serve a purpose (nudity and sex scenes), it's clear the only purpose it serves is to scratch an itch of the artists. This is something called Chekhov's gun, which is a storytelling principle that says if a gun is shown on screen, it must be fired later in the story. And if it isn't, the filmmaker made a promise to the audience that they didn't keep.

It's absolutely the same with female nudity and violence on screen. If it serves no artistic purpose, then the sole purpose becomes the objectification of women and the normalization of violence.

You know, like that scene where Cassie (Refering to the show euphoria) turns into a giant. Absolutely unnecessary. And it's completely inconsistent with the show's genre, which has no magical elements up until that point. We already got the point that Cassie is defined by her breasts from the 15-minute montage leading up to that scene and the other 200 shots of her naked throughout the show. Like, we got it, right? We got that point.

We actually didn't need you to bend the genre of the show in order to show her boobs in a giant form. In general, the amount of unnecessary nudity and the way that the camera lingers on women's naked bodies, or bodies in general, is beyond what is needed to make the point that they're in a lurid, exploitative industry.

To rehash for someone not familiar, objectification is defined as: the act of treating a person as an object, a commodity, or a tool, rather than as a whole human being with their own agency, feelings, and rights. The most common form, (sexual) occurs when a person is reduced to a mere object of sexual desire. It often involves judging someone solely based on their physical attributes or breaking their body into separate, "consumable" parts (e.g., focusing only on legs or a torso).

The main issue here is that this idea, at least on the surface is that it seems to be fundamentally in conflict with the the sexual revolution and sex positivity of many previous & current progressive movements. Pornography, prostitution, and strip clubs all fit the objectification bill quite neatly, and the data seems to support the authors argument that "sexual objectification" leads to or plays some role in many of these harms:

Sex workers are a vulnerable group of individuals that experience sexual violence on the job, but it is difficult and limiting for workers to report their assault (Sex Workers Project, 2020). Sex workers are adults who receive money or goods in exchange for consensual sexual acts. According to research, globally, sex workers have a 45% to 75% chance of experiencing sexual violence on the job (Sex Workers Project, 2020).

I struggle to see how these individuals may square this perspective that sex work is valid, despite fitting the bill of objectification. Perhaps there is something I'm missing?

the act of treating a person as an object, a commodity, or a tool, rather than as a whole human being with their own agency, feelings, and rights. The most common form, (sexual) occurs when a person is reduced to a mere object of sexual desire.

obligatory PhD comics.

At the risk of sounding like a hippie commie, objectification is the default mode to relate to trade partners. The relationship of an Amazon shareholder and a worker in a fulfillment center or software programmer is one of 100% objectification. The shareholder does not know or care if the worker is putting in the hours to pay for college for his kid or to finance a substance habit. The only thing he cares about is that the fulfillment of the orders happens in a cost-effective way. Humans are only employed because robots and LLMs are not cost-effective ways to replace them (yet).

Nor do I think that this is bad, or would be different in some commie utopia. The ideal would be that humans use each other as tools in ways which incidentally also improves the situation of the used person. But this is merely a question of trade balance. I do not want my coffee to be produced by someone whom I can appreciate as a person with agency and feelings, perhaps deciding that today I will buy coffee beans from that farmer because I sympathize with his backstory or whatever. I only care about the general stuff in aggregate, that he is not enslaved and not overly exploited. Otherwise, my caring takes the form of pieces of paper with pictures of presidents on it, and I do not expect him to care about my specific situation, why I feel the need to caffeinate etc. As long as I care about his well-being in the abstract that I don't want him exploited, and he cares about mine enough that he does not want me to drink coffee with a lot of mercury in it, objectifying the other as a source of labor or funds seems perfectly fine.

Nor do I think that the objectification in sex work is one sided. If the guy sees the sex worker as a collection of tits and holes, it seems likewise reasonable to assume that the sex worker will see the john as a wallet with a cock attached to it.

When I walk through the city, I tend to model other people as bounding boxes for collision avoidance. Does this make me more or less evil than a guy who instead models the people around him as a collection of sex organs?

I do not have a bigger point to make (I am not into super-transactional sex, personally), but I find it dishonest to pretend that objectification is bad when it is the default way we relate to other people in any polity larger than Dunbar's number. "The cashier scanned my food" is as much as an objectification as "the big-chested blonde walked by my table".

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