Remember the “plain sex” view that sex is about pleasurable physical feelings, and need not be about “love” or anything else. This lends itself to the idea that, insofar as experiencing this pleasure requires interaction with others (and is not inherently “evil,” as some religious doctrines have it), all that matters in evaluating sex ethically is whether participants consent to what happens. If they do (not), then their freedom in pursuing their own ends is (not) respected. No other judgments can or should be made.

All the thinkers on “sex” we have studied have some doubts about this view: it is proposed and then doubted by Christina, questioned as “Romeo’s” view by Pinku and the “casual” view by Benatar, and criticized as “reductionist” by Morgan and as “meaningless” by Stewart.

Feminist thinkers have developed doubts like these into a powerful critical idea: “objectification.” This is the idea that, even if participants consent, there is something wrong with treating and using someone as an “object” in sex, for one’s own ends – and that this is particularly common in men’s treatment of women.

One famous example is Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin’s attempt to make pornography illegal. According to their proposed “Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance,” making or distributing material showing the “graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words” would be a crime not only if the performers or consumers were coerced in some way, but also if using the material could be shown to cause violence against women. For supporters of such a ban, then, “objectifying” women in pornography is part of men’s violent domination of them.

In the reading for this class, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum responds to MacKinnon and Dworkin’s views and examines some examples of “pornography” from literature and Playboy in an attempt to determine what is wrong with objectification and whether certain kinds of objectification may be inevitable, acceptable, or even positive parts of sex.

Note that Nussbaum’s essay is a little longer than our usual readings, even in the extracted form I have provided. I hope you find it accessible and interesting enough to read the whole extract. If not, please get as far as you can.

You might also be interested in seeing Timo Jütten’s, Patricia Marino’s, or Evangelia Papadaki’s different accounts of “objectification,” Ann Garry’s discussion of objectification in pornography, Andrea Dworkin’s account of the “antipornography ordinance,” or Ronald Dworkin’s (no relation!) argument against it.