Origin & Objectification

"The research, commissioned by Kellogg’s Special K, surveyed 2,000 women around the country. Fifty-four per cent said “bird” was a word they’d like to consign for ever to Room 101; 45% would bin “doll”; 44% would choose “chick”, while 38% loathe “babe”. They’re all diminutives, you’ll notice. Infantile, in the case of “chick” and “babe”. In all four cases, incapable of speech or even complex thought. Cute, but ultimately unable to change a light bulb unaided" - Hattie Garlick, The Guardian, 2016

Objectification: Martha Nussbaum (1995, 257) has identified seven features that are involved in the idea of treating a person as an object:

1. instrumentality: the treatment of a person as a tool for the objectifier's purposes;
2. denial of autonomy: the treatment of a person as lacking in autonomy and self-determination;
3. inertness: the treatment of a person as lacking in agency, and perhaps also in activity;
4. fungibility: the treatment of a person as interchangeable with other objects;
5. violability: the treatment of a person as lacking in boundary-integrity;
6. ownership: the treatment of a person as something that is owned by another (can be bought or sold);
7. denial of subjectivity: the treatment of a person as something whose experiences and feelings (if any) need not be taken into account.

Rae Langton (2009, 228–229) has added three more features to Nussbaum's list:

8. reduction to body: the treatment of a person as identified with their body, or body parts;
9. reduction to appearance: the treatment of a person primarily in terms of how they look, or how they appear to the senses;
10. silencing: the treatment of a person as if they are silent, lacking the capacity to speak. 

I began researching in to objectification and what it really means, after looking at my primary research responses and seeing that so many women are referred to as intimate fragile objects. 

Below is an exert from ‘Sweetie talk’: Unthinking endearment that’s meant to comfort instead can feel demeaning by Rachel Toor, a professor of creative writing at Eastern Washington University 

"When my mother suffered from a terminal illness, I took her to doctor’s appointments, sat with her during dialysis, and stood like a Gorgon by her hospital bed. Most of her caretakers were kind, respectful. But when my mother, shrunken by cancer but still herself, still someone who had taught at an Ivy League university, published books, and made a living as an artist, was called sweetie or honey, these attendants became the locus of my silent, impotent rage.

I thanked them for their sympathy and hated them for their insensitivity. I wanted to scream that my mother was not a child, to educate them about how their language infantilized her, took away a gravitas she had spent years earning. Instead, I said nothing." 

Within the article, Toor discusses how in some circumstances pet names or terms of endearments given my female strangers can sometimes be comforting, however they can also be demeaning, stripping people of their accomplishments or personalities, reducing them to a sweet object. She then goes on to discuss the power of naming, more specifically the ways in which people don't understand the power in what they're saying and how it can make a person feel. I decided to collect more primary research, this time asking people what they're called and how it makes them feel, seeing whether there would be any difference of feling depending on whether it was a man or woman speaking to them.