Sexual objectification is, in some circumstances, the fetishistic act of regarding a person as an object for erotic purposes. Allen Jones' sculptures Hat Stand and Table Sculpture, made in 1969, which show semi-naked women in the roles of furniture, are clear examples of the depiction of the fantasy of sexual objectification. (This particular interest, a form of sexual bondage that involves making furniture designed to incorporate a bound person, is also known as "forniphilia".)
A desire to be objectified occurs in many men and women's masochistic sexual fantasies. Objectification for fetishistic purposes may provide erotic humiliation for the person so regarded, whether male or female. As with most sexual activities, it is generally viewed as abusive if it is not part of a consensual arrangement, such as in BDSM play.
Taking this risk through eroticism is generous because it involves opening the lived body to the other and because it is, by virtue of this, creative in transforming the other's embodied situation and hence existence through a self-metamorphosis which, if we set aside Beauvoir's motif of unity, does not reduce the other to the self.
The erotic experience is one that most poignantly discloses to human beings the ambiguity of their condition; in that they are aware of themselves as flesh and as spirit, as other and as subject.
Beauvoir's second important qualification about the social objectification of women is the suggestion that ''the very difficulty of [the woman's] position protects her from the traps into which the male readily falls; he is an easy dupe of the deceptive privileges accorded him by his aggressive role'' (423).
Feeds |
Contact