What is the Word "Objectification" Supposed to Mean in Contemporary Discourse?

In modern Western philosophy the term "objectification" refers to what is called the "subject-object separation." What may be important to most here is that (I am trying to make this as simple as I can) the individual "subject" is aware of their own existence as a distinct entity ("I think, therefore I am" as René Descartes had it)--their "Self"--and the fact that the other things in the world are "Not Self." Recognizing this distinction between "Self" and "Not Self"--that is what the matter of objectification comes down in the end.

This may seem bewildering and even underwhelming given how we are likely to hear the word "objectification" used in actual discourse, as if objectification were self-evidently a great evil. After all, how can recognizing a distinction between "Self" and "Not Self" in which "Self" is the subject, "Not Self" an object--which would seem a condition of existence not just for humans but, on the evidence of the "mirror test," even a great many animals, be that?

The short answer is that recognizing the "Not Self" as such, and seeing it objectively, entails assorted possibilities. These include the possibilities of analysis, control, manipulation, use. Doing this, of course, is how humans have survived on the Earth, meeting their fundamental physical needs by figuring out how to acquire food and protection from the elements. However, those same capacities have also entailed the potential for destruction and oppression, not least in the control, manipulation, use of other people to one's ends. One could argue on that basis that objectification has potentials for good and bad and is in itself neutral. One can also argue that especially among humans the subject-object separation is never as tidy as a matter of being a subject or object, as humans are subjects even when to others they may seem objects, while humans can and do learn to recognize each other's subjectivity. (Even reading Francis Fukuyama's bastardized version of Hegel should make that clear, and in the process the extent to which this is not an either/or matter.) However, there is a line of postmodernist thought that all but treats the human self-awareness that makes for the subject-object separation as its equivalent of original sin and the Fall, responsible for all the human-caused calamities of the past and present. (The destruction of the environment? This is in their view a matter of humans having come to see the existence of the natural world in subject-object terms.) Of course, it is again the case that those who see the subject-object separation so negatively have no real alternatives to offer--the idea of stripping humans of all self-awareness and capacity to cognize the world in subject-object terms the stuff of science fiction, not a practical program. As a result what one ends up with, as the parallel with original sin and the Fall in theology suggests, is extreme pessimism about human reason, human nature and the human condition generally, pointedly manifest in anti-rationalism and irrationalism.

Of course, it will not do to leave the matter at that, because today we are apt to hear complaint about objectification in a very specific context--the matter of gender, with a particular line of feminist thought (I want to stress, a particular line, but also one that within popular discourse has become so widespread that many can and do equate it with feminism generally, often getting themselves into trouble in the process because this is one subject about which mainstream persons are quite ready to split hairs) denouncing "objectification" here. In doing so they draw on the postmodernist's pessimistic view of humanity--but it would seem very, very selectively. By and large those who raise the matter in this way are not concerned with objectification generally, even where there really is an issue of power and exploitation involved. They are not, for example, exercised over the ways in which the worker in the modern workplace is "objectified" by an employer who controls their actions for their own ends, as they dismiss the worker's subjectivity as irrelevant. ("Shut up and do as you're told!" is the rule on the job.) Rather their concern is exclusively with sexual objectification, with all the complications involved in this--given what objectification as described here means, the recognition of a difference between Self and Not Self, and the inextricability of this from the existence of self-awareness, there is no practical alternative (no "sexual objectification" pretty much meaning no sexuality). The result is that if few dare to say it flatly in the mainstream the issue is less hostility to the "objectification" than to the "sexual," with indeed the criticism directed not at sex generally but specifically male heterosexual objectification of women, critics of this often having no problem with other sexual dynamics, and sometimes even celebrating them. (Thus alongside the condemnation of the "male gaze" one sees the celebration of the "female gaze," and indeed the brushing off of any male objection to that.) Again, spelling all this out is verboten in our one-sideist media world, and so is drawing the obvious conclusion--that essentially what one ends up with is the weaponizing of an abstruse philosophical term for political ends obfuscated by said terminology, with a dispassionate observer quite capable of seeing here a demand that women never be discomfited by the existence of male subjectivity (but not vice-versa), a demand which many will hold to not be attainable or equitable, with that very fact providing grist to the mill of the culture wars and all their loathsomeness.