Objectifying women is reducing them to a passive object of satisfaction.
concretize something abstract
Any abstract concept can be reified, such as "sadness."
Suppose a novelist writes: “The old man took the sadness in his hands and threw it violently against the floor, making it explode.” As you can see, in this case, the writer turns a feeling into an element that can be taken with your hands, and can even be broken.
Therefore, an idea, concept or abstraction can be transformed into something palpable , physical or material . By reifying it, we give it characteristics typical of tangible objects. It is a way of representing or simplifying something complex, reducing it to a concrete and perceptible entity, assigning it physical qualities or attributing to it a physical form in order to make it more understandable or easily manipulated.
Reification can be used as a cognitive tool to better understand or communicate something that would otherwise be difficult to conceptualize. However, it can also have negative implications, especially when used in social or human contexts. In this sense, objectification can be seen as a process that reduces or degrades the dignity and value of people, treating them as simple objects or commodities.
Objectify a person
To reify is also to reduce a human being to the condition of a thing . This is the second meaning that we can find in the RAE dictionary. This is the most common use of the concept today, since we often talk about the objectification of women.
Objectifying a woman implies seeing her as a sexual object . That is, it is stripped of its multiple attributes and qualities and is considered simply as a means to obtaining pleasure.
According to feminism , the media often contributes to objectifying women. Showing naked or scantily clad girls in television programs or advertisements, to mention one possibility, is usually pointed out as a form of objectification.
The objectification of women is based on the idea that women exist primarily for the visual and sexual pleasure of others, and that their value lies solely in their physical attractiveness and their ability to meet the beauty standards imposed by society. society. Women are represented as passive objects available for consumption or the satisfaction of male desires, and are denied their autonomy, intelligence, and abilities beyond their physical appearance.
For Marxism
For Marxism , objectification or reification appears when a person is taken as if they were an object . Social bonds, in this framework, are also reified when they become bonds of consumption.
For Marxism, reification means taking people as things.
Marxist thinkers maintain that human labor was reified by being converted into a commodity . It can be said that workers, in a similar way, are objectified by performing as operators on an assembly line. In other words, reification manifests itself in the fact that relationships between people become mediated by the things they produce and sell rather than established directly between them.
In this framework, reification is a concept that is closely related to the Marxist critique of capitalism and alienation . According to Marxism, in a capitalist society, social relations are characterized by reification due to the way production and exchange are organized. In such a system, people produce goods and services for sale in the market, with the aim of making a profit. The products of human labor become commodities that acquire an exchange value and are separated from their real usefulness to satisfy human needs.