I came across the Objectification article on Wikipedia. The entire article is a good read. I thought this excerpt about sexual desire and objectification was relevant to this sub-Reddit.

Immanuel Kant believes that sexual desire is a powerful desire that is necessarily objectifying. When people are sexually aroused, we have an urge to take in and engulf the other person for the purpose of sexual satisfaction. Our sexual desire manifest itself as a denial of autonomy which one wishes to dictate how the other person will behave, so as to secure one's own satisfaction. It is also as a denial of subjectivity that one stop asking how the other person is thinking or feeling, bent on securing one's own satisfaction. Sexual desire is so acute and powerful that it drives out other thoughts that consider the well-being of others and people start to reduce others as a set of bodily parts. Sexual Objectification is a general feature of sexuality that both parties eagerly desire both to be objectifiers and to be objects.

Catherine Mackinnon and Andrea Dworkin adopt Kant's understanding of sex as inherently objectifying but refuse to accept that both are objectifiers and the objectified one. They argue that objectification of men and women as asymmetrical. The way men express sexuality and the way women express sexuality are structured by a larger social and culture context that the power between men and women are unequal. Men express their sexuality in a dominant way by objectifying women while women express their sexuality in submissive way by being objectified or self-objectified. Hence, women are more vulnerable to violability and lack of subjectivity and autonomy. Nussbaum argues that it is important to put male-female sexuality in a more macro-perspective in which Mackinnon and Dworkin ignore the personal histories and psychologies that are equally morally important.

Be careful with sexual desire. If you objectify the other person too much, you will no longer respect their boundaries and get into trouble when they say no. Men, be careful when thinking about women only in terms of breasts, butts or vaginas.

Here are ways to objectify someone (again from the Wikipedia article).

  1. Reduction to body – the treatment of a person as identified with their body, or body parts
  2. Reduction to appearance – the treatment of a person primarily in terms of how they look, or how they appear to the senses
  3. Silencing – the treatment of a person as if they are silent, lacking the capacity to speak
  4. Instrumentality – treating the person as a tool for another's purposes
  5. Denial of autonomy – treating the person as lacking in autonomy or self-determination
  6. Inertness – treating the person as lacking in agency or activity
  7. Fungibility – treating the person as interchangeable with (other) objects
  8. Violability – treating the person as lacking in boundary integrity and violable, "as something that it is permissible to break up, smash, break into."
  9. Ownership – treating the person as though they can be owned, bought, or sold
  10. Denial of subjectivity – treating the person as though there is no need for concern for their experiences or feelings