Being opinionated, i couldn't let this thread slip by unnoticed.
I think society does encourage objectification (I love polysyllabic words!). Its a hard one to pin down ,I think it's mainly a subconcious thing, but it does come across strongly in things like films and advertising, especially clothing and fragrence adverts; you know, the ones using the drop dead gorgeous models who don't even look like that in reality?
The modelling industry I think is the worst offender. The images they ingrain into our psychy tell us what to find attractive, and beauty becomes something essential. The whole message portrayed in, for example, clothing adverts, is "wear our clothes and you'll be beautifull and attractive like these models". I think the enphasis on physical beauty makes us far more concious of it on a whole, and we treat people differently simply by how they look or what image they put across.
Obviously we'd do this anyway, but I think that fashion etc. sort of, warp and extend it, and make beauty so essential that we almost forget about personalities, and focus on physical attractiveness, making the body almost a commodity.
Films I think are also guilty in a bizarre way, especially action films. I think they desensitise us to violence against human beings, or atleast they tend tohave tht effect. It trivialises human life on a human scale (on a large scale we're pretty trivial anyway), and that I think makes us objectify other human beings.
I also agree with Onslow when he says:
Now mind you, I did single out the media; but, it is not just them. Who among us has not seen a sportsman/sportswoman in some way objectified? High school football players--especially a star Quarterback or a top level baseball pitcher--are often objectified by their own peers in school. Girls want to date the big football star--already the guy has been put in a realm of fantasy (which is essentially what objectification is). A macho jock wants to date the pretty cheerleader (or maybe just have at the coaches ass if he's a gay guy). Again a person has been taken from the world of reality and actual being and placed in a different dimension.
It also works in the opposite direction. If a person is viewed as geeky, nerdy, dorky, not part of the in-crowd, they have been objectified in the negative manner of which I spoke earlier.
Thats objectification coming out pretty directly jsut through society, regardless of the media.
In the end however, I don't advocate banning action films and the fashion industry; I think that objectification happens just inherently in humanity, I think we often (if not allways) simply do it without realising because we lack the information to treat the person as another human being. Example: if I say "wow, he's hot!", in a way objectifying "him", it's not because I want to treat said person as an object, it's because I don't know him as a person, so I can only make a sort of object-like general comment about "him", if i knew him personally I wouldn't treat him like an object.
I also think it allows us to deal with large numbers of people. When I'm standing in a shopping centre, surrounded by hundreds of moving people, they are just "people" to me, a mass of moving objects. If I tried to realise every one of them fully as a person, my head would probably explode.
