You can paraphrase their complaints by inserting words like “non-human” or “subhuman”, or you can just accept that they’re using “objects” in a more restrictive sense. But if you treat them as saying only that humans are objects in the sense in which everything that exists is an object, you are making the same mistake as you would be by saying “But Jews are animals, just like everyone else”.
Paraphrasing or recategorising aren’t the only valid options. That is just one strategy people who use to resolve dissonance between the tone someone may use when saying:
pornography treats women “as objects”,
that attributes negative affect to the treatment, and the innocuous formulation of syntax when that tone is disregarded and the truth value evaluated independently.
I reckon the issue with objectification is more about human tendency to self-pity, seek validation and such. Historically women where happier than men until steady declines from the 1970′s till today. This coincides with the birth of second wave feminism, which seems to have taken an important human rights movement and turned it into a circlejerk of bitching about trivial things like objectification, while neglecting the important mission of first wave feminism in the less well off parts of society and the world.
I reckon many people, particularly socially incompetent people feel the need to pander to social movements and their world views, and particularly gravitating around women, in order to compensate for their confusion. We don’t see posts about ″colonialism‴ or race to the same extent as gender on LessWrong for instance, because we have sex drives and not ″impress exotic people drives″. An example of pandering to social movements controlling for the gender effect is Wahabist Islam, which ignorant regular folk will strongly defend (aggregated under the banner of things like “”islam is peaceful″ or ″most muslims aren’t like that″, when the real issue is a subset of them from a specific set are consitently like that, regardless of region (from Thailand to China to Africa), regardless of the character of the leader or whatever.
Paraphrasing or recategorising aren’t the only valid options.
Do feel free to present others. (I confess that I’m not quite sure what you mean: aren’t the only valid options for doing what? I say you should paraphrase or recategorize because if you keep the words and keep their meaning then you end up representing people who complain of “objectification” as saying something absolutely 100% ridiculous, which it is not reasonable to suppose they are doing. Are you saying there are other options for interpreting their words that don’t require them to be total morons? Or are you saying that you’re quite happy treating them as total morons, and that’s what your other options are for?)
The remainder of your comment appears to me to have nothing to do with the point at issue, being more a general complaint that feminists are unreasonable and socially incompetent people pander to social movements. Whatever truth there may be in that, it has very little to do with what people mean when they talk about treating people “as objects”.
Wahabist Islam, which ignorant regular folk will strongly defend
I do not believe you.
(Of course there are some people ignorant of what “Wahhabi” means, but it is not honest to take whatever they may say about Islam generally and pretend that they are saying it specifically about Wahhabism. If you give an accurate description of Wahhabi Islam to those regular folk they will mostly not defend it. If they happen to be regular folk who know what Wahhabism is, they will mostly not defend it.)
Yes I misunderstand your key point
Paraphrasing or recategorising aren’t the only valid options. That is just one strategy people who use to resolve dissonance between the tone someone may use when saying:
that attributes negative affect to the treatment, and the innocuous formulation of syntax when that tone is disregarded and the truth value evaluated independently.
I reckon the issue with objectification is more about human tendency to self-pity, seek validation and such. Historically women where happier than men until steady declines from the 1970′s till today. This coincides with the birth of second wave feminism, which seems to have taken an important human rights movement and turned it into a circlejerk of bitching about trivial things like objectification, while neglecting the important mission of first wave feminism in the less well off parts of society and the world.
I reckon many people, particularly socially incompetent people feel the need to pander to social movements and their world views, and particularly gravitating around women, in order to compensate for their confusion. We don’t see posts about ″colonialism‴ or race to the same extent as gender on LessWrong for instance, because we have sex drives and not ″impress exotic people drives″. An example of pandering to social movements controlling for the gender effect is Wahabist Islam, which ignorant regular folk will strongly defend (aggregated under the banner of things like “”islam is peaceful″ or ″most muslims aren’t like that″, when the real issue is a subset of them from a specific set are consitently like that, regardless of region (from Thailand to China to Africa), regardless of the character of the leader or whatever.
Do feel free to present others. (I confess that I’m not quite sure what you mean: aren’t the only valid options for doing what? I say you should paraphrase or recategorize because if you keep the words and keep their meaning then you end up representing people who complain of “objectification” as saying something absolutely 100% ridiculous, which it is not reasonable to suppose they are doing. Are you saying there are other options for interpreting their words that don’t require them to be total morons? Or are you saying that you’re quite happy treating them as total morons, and that’s what your other options are for?)
The remainder of your comment appears to me to have nothing to do with the point at issue, being more a general complaint that feminists are unreasonable and socially incompetent people pander to social movements. Whatever truth there may be in that, it has very little to do with what people mean when they talk about treating people “as objects”.
I do not believe you.
(Of course there are some people ignorant of what “Wahhabi” means, but it is not honest to take whatever they may say about Islam generally and pretend that they are saying it specifically about Wahhabism. If you give an accurate description of Wahhabi Islam to those regular folk they will mostly not defend it. If they happen to be regular folk who know what Wahhabism is, they will mostly not defend it.)