In a feminist subreddit I won't mention, a recent thread asked the question:

Do you think some men crave to be objectified the way that women are, or are they just confused about the sexual attention that women receive?

I found myself supporting the controversial (?) thesis that objectification per se is not factually negative, as the object of desire gains the power to deny the objectifying person what they want.

As it happens when you present a certain thesis to a group of people whose belief system is incompatible with that thesis, I found myself having to respond to a number of distracting side claims. The most popular were:

  • Objectification means that the object is inanimate and has no right to oppose a desire; this attacks the definition of "objectification" to one where harassment is always implied, effectively changing the original question to "do you think some men crave to be harassed?", which is totally meaningless.

  • Men are being delusional: not even straight men like it when they are being objectified by gay men. This is a distraction in two ways: first because the disgust of being approached by gay men is largely linked to phobic impulses that even some progressive men have; and secondly, because the straight man/gay approach vs straight woman/straight approach is improper: you need to use gay man/gay approach to make the analogy fly.

Only a few comments pointed out the relevant aspects:

  • Physical compliments get old fast when you receive too many -- and women do receive such compliments, men much more rarely if ever.

  • It all boils down to consent: women should be free to not want to be objectified -- and men to want to be.

Of course, these two points imply that whether objectification is good or bad, is a subjective matter. And as we got to this point, as you would exxpect, my account got banned.

Ironically, when you go to the Wikipedia page about "Sexual objectification", you are greeted with a picture of women in a bikini contest; one has to assume that those women weren't forced to enter the contest at gunpoint, meaning that the pros of objectification are well understood by women, contrary to the apparent belief of feminist groups.

Now I want to conclude with a final remark that I couldn't make in the other subreddit due to my ban. As men are increasingly discouraged from certain behaviour typical of active sexuality, such as starting a sexual approach, it is natural that they will be pushed to adopting elements of passive sexuality, such as craving objectification.