“Look at the ass on that one!”
“I got some pussy last night!”
“Hey tits!”
“I need some dick…”
At this point, you are probably wondering if I’ve finally divorced myself from reason and descended into the pits of vulgarity – and indeed it is an understandable wonder. However, do you not notice a trend among these statements? Look again and see if a pattern emerges to you.
The connection between the above expressions is that they are objectifying or dehumanizing – they are statements which are intended to take the human person which is their subject and dehumanize them: i.e. make them into an object or something less than human.
The cause of this phenomenon is either ignorance or evasion – with the ultimate effect being the evasion of the nature of the action. By this I mean that some people don’t ever realize that by thinking of others in terms of objects, they are effectively denying their humanity – through ignorance of their own cognitive processes or ignorance of the result of the process they fail to recognize what they have done. This leads them to distortions in their thinking. For example, a woman who thinks “I need some dick” is thinking merely in terms of a physical act and she recognizes that she needs a penis in order to perform this act – yet she misses the fact that penises do not just grow on trees or sprout from the ground, as with any part of anatomy they are necessarily tied to a living human body. To think “I need some dick” is a way to avoid the question “Whose?” and its attendant moral questions. The person with this thought process is trying to evade (implicitly or explicitly) the implications of their actions and their true significance.
This process of evasion has become rampant in our society and is part of the myriad rationalizations which are used to “justify” the current deluge of decadence.
What leads people to this clearly fallacious pattern of thinking? It seems to me that it’s a combination of evasion and a desire for hedonistic indulgence divorced from consequences. If, to continue our example, our woman greatly desires sex and does not want to think of herself as a woman who would just sleep with any man – then by thinking of going out in search of penises instead of men allows her to “fool herself”. By thinking of the action in terms of the mere physical process while evading the knowledge of the person with whom it is done, she can satisfy her hedonistic desires while evading the knowledge that her action is immoral.
All of this leads us to question why some people seem to be unable to control their desires. This question, however, warrants its own essay.