Does Sexual Objectification Make Erotic Love Impossible?

Abstract

Theories about the nature of sexual objectification and its relationship to heterosexual erotic love have largely failed to express why objectification is philosophically important, the relationship between gender and objectification and what we can do to get rid of objectification. This is because these theories understand sexual objectification as a morally harmful attitude arising in perception. I use the framework of social ontology to propose that we should also think about objectification as the imposition of the function ‘sexual object’ on social categories like ‘women.’ This is ‘institutional objectification.’ This approach reveals that institutional objectification is philosophically important insofar as it undermines the possibility of ethical erotic love between men and women. It also reveals that we have a moral duty to reform social categories that are subject to institutional objectification. This duty is especially pressing on proponents of heterosexual erotic love. Unfortunately, many feminist strategies fall short of meeting this duty, partially because they involve no direct intervention in the content of our social categories. Thus, I argue that we need to meet the moral duty to social category reformation by allowing for the elaboration of sexual difference. This approach represents the beginnings of a sufficient strategy to make ethical heterosexual erotic love possible.