Topics Feminism

Question A majority of feminists as I understand them argue that the per se enjoyment of the physical body and particularly the female form is a form of "objectification". I completely disagree because in my opinion the female form has aesthetic qualities that are not "object" like at all and are actually quite human and therefor the appreciation of the female form is not objectification. Are there feminists who agree with that stance?

Accepted:
May 18, 2011

Comments

Many philosophers committed to feminism are concerned with 'objectification', i.e., roughly, treating a person--often, as in this case and henceforth, a woman--as a thing in some way. While the concept of objectification is slippery, as noted in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the topic, from which I profited and which one can access by clicking here, the case you present is clear-cut.

While there are senses of objectification that are akin to taking the female form as an object of aesthetic appreciation--such as the reduction of a person to her body or her appearance--the mere appreciation of the beauty of the female form in particular or of the human body in general does not seem to me, in and of itself, to constitute a form of objectification, and I would be surprised if it were indeed the case that the majority of feminists would consider the aesthetic appreciation of the human body to be a form of objectification. To be sure, if one rigorously and uniquely adopts an 'aesthetic attitude' towards the human body, one might come to objectify the body, but one certainly need not do so, and so I do not think that the consideration of the human body as an object of aesthetic appreciation should actually be seen as a form of objectification.