Authorship as Visualization

Objectification is usually treated as a visual problem. We talk about the damage done by advertisements, films, fashion, pornography, or the digital avatars stamped across the gaming industry. We talk about the exaggeration of bodies, the slicing of people into consumable parts and the way a camera can turn a moment into a marketable fantasy. We write as though words are innocent… untouched by this same impulse to flatten, reduce, simplify, and commodify. Yet writing does exactly what the camera does, and sometimes more deftly. It can freeze a character into a body, distil them to their curves or muscles or “exotic” features, and present that reduction as truth.

Writers often imagine themselves as separate from the visual economy of desire. We tell ourselves that we build inner lives, not billboards. We convince ourselves that our craft is driven by empathy rather than appetite. But authorship, whether we admit it or not, shares the same substrates of power, tradition, and cultural conditioning that shape the visual world. And because written language can appear refined, literary, or stylistically justified, objectification becomes even easier to hide. A sentence can disguise a wound behind elegant phrasing.

I say this as someone who has participated in it. I have written scenes where I lingered on the body of a character as though their humanity lived only in the lines and shadows of their frame. I have described features in detail, believing it was simply “good description,” only to look back later and see how easily a single paragraph can turn a person into an object rather than a being. If writers want to critique objectification with any credibility, we must first recognise how quickly we fall into it ourselves.

Objectification in authorship does not always look like overt sexualisation. Sometimes it hides inside craft conventions. Sometimes it hides inside the habits we inherit from genres we love. Sometimes it hides in the way we introduce a character, the way we think a reader needs to see someone, or the way we measure desirability using expectations we never examined.

Words are not immune to flattening. They often do it more quietly than images.

The Quiet Mechanics of Objectifying Language

Objectification in writing tends to move through familiar channels. These aren’t stylistic choices as much as inherited reflexes: things we were taught without realising we were taught.

Reduction to traits.
Writers routinely describe characters almost exclusively in physical terms. “Her curves.” “His strong jaw.” “Their exotic eyes.” These phrases feel normal because we have seen them a thousand times. They are shorthand descriptions that create an instant silhouette in the reader’s mind. Yet the cost of this shorthand is agency. A character who enters the story embodied only by traits becomes a consumable image rather than a fully realised person.

Tropes as templates.
Genres love repetition. Romance has its seductive archetypes. Noir has its femme fatale. Fantasy has its graceful maiden with dangerous beauty. Thrillers often use the damaged woman or the cold, muscular protector. Even LGBTQ+ literature is not free of this: the tragic trans figure, the hardened butch, the ethereal gay man. Tropes allow narratives to move quickly. They also flatten characters into roles that serve the reader’s expectations rather than their own interiority.

The marketplace rewards objectification.
Publishing knows what sells. Sexualised prose, archetypes built around desirability, and bodies transformed into narrative currency move books. Writers often fall into objectification not out of intent, but out of pressure from agents, editors, genre conventions, or even imagined readers. Desire becomes commodified. Characters become packaging.

This is not a call to remove desire from our stories. Desire is fundamental to humanity. But when desire becomes the only lens through which a character is written, something essential is lost. Objectification operates by narrowing, not expanding.

A Humanist Framework for Authorship

From a humanist perspective, objectification is not only ethically troubling; it is philosophically thin. Humanism rests on the belief that every person has inherent dignity, regardless of gender, identity, body, or background. Writing, at its best, enlarges that dignity.

Kant famously argued that people must be treated as ends in themselves, not merely as means. This applies as much to fictional characters as to real people. A character written solely as an instrument of desire has been stripped of purpose beyond the reader’s consumption. A character written with agency, intellect, humour, and complexity honours the humanist ideal far more deeply.

Humanist writing demands universality. It insists that the dignity of a character is indivisible and non-negotiable. Women deserve this. Men deserve this. Nonbinary people deserve this. Trans people deserve this. Anyone whose identity is often reduced or caricatured deserves writing that sees their full humanity, not their marketable bits.

Objectification violates that principle. Not always maliciously. Often unconsciously. But violation by habit is still violation.

The Cost of Objectifying Authorship

Objectification does not remain confined to the page. It has consequences—subtle, cumulative, and culturally potent.

It conditions readers.
When stories present people as consumables, readers begin to expect this. They learn that bodies are narrative shortcuts. They learn that desirability can replace depth. They learn that character introductions ought to announce attractiveness first and interiority second, if at all.

It conditions writers.
Every craft workshop that teaches “describe her appearance first” trains a writer to prioritise objectification. Every genre beat sheet that anchors romance in bodily allure reinforces the notion that a character’s humanity can be summarised by a glance. Every editorial note that says “make her more appealing” teaches the wrong lesson. Writers begin internalising these patterns until objectification becomes muscle memory.

This also determines who gets left out. Characters whose bodies fall outside narrow beauty standards vanish from stories altogether. Older characters, disabled characters, fat characters, trans characters, neurodivergent characters, gender-nonconforming characters, characters of colour, or anyone who does not meet the template of desirability is often erased or reduced.

It reinforces cultural hierarchies.
Writing does not exist in isolation. When authors reproduce objectifying norms, literature echoes the same profit-driven logic that shapes advertising, pornography, and entertainment. The page becomes a mirror, not a challenge.

It impoverishes literature.
Perhaps the most painful cost is artistic. When characters are reduced to objects, literature loses one of its greatest strengths: its ability to reveal what cannot be seen. Writing is uniquely capable of expressing inner life. Objectification strips that away.

Toward a More Human Form of Desire

Resisting objectification does not mean removing desire from fiction. It means expanding it and moving beyond the surface into the rich terrain of intellect, voice, curiosity, contradiction, and emotional resonance.

Attraction does not begin and end with the body. Many of us have experienced the deeper kind… the moment when someone’s mind, humour, wisdom, or confidence becomes more compelling than their appearance. You can show attraction without collapsing someone into their shape.

A character can feel drawn to someone because:

• their words carry unexpected clarity.
• their intelligence sharpens the air.
• their compassion unsettles assumptions.
• their presence feels grounding or electric.
• their humour catches the heart off guard.

Consider a moment like this:
A woman sits in a lecture hall and feels her pulse quicken; not because the speaker possesses perfect features, but because his analysis unravels a problem she had spent years wrestling with. Her arousal is not rooted in his body but in his mind. Desire here does not diminish anyone; it expands them.

This is the difference between objectifying desire and humanising desire. One collapses a person into a material thing. The other deepens them.

Ethical Intimacy: Writing Desire Without Reduction

Ethical intimacy in writing is not prudish or restrictive. It is simply attentive.

It honours the interiority of both participants. It acknowledges agency. It includes consent not as a moral necessity but as part of the emotional and psychological texture. It allows vulnerability to coexist with sensuality. It treats desire as a meeting of minds, histories, and embodied experience, not a unilateral gaze.

Consider this scene:

Two characters sit together after a long day. When one reaches for the other’s hand, the gesture functions not as an act of possession but as a tentative inquiry. The pause that follows is central; it establishes that the meaning of the touch depends on reciprocity rather than assumption. The warmth of the received hand is not framed as evidence of ownership. Instead, it operates as a subtle marker of trust and mutual willingness. Their conversation continues uninterrupted, and the shared contact becomes integrated into the broader interpersonal rhythm. In this context, desire is not expressed through the consumption or acquisition of the body. It emerges through the recognition of relational openness and the acknowledgement of another’s closeness.

Ethical intimacy says:

• desire can be powerful without being possessive.
• eroticism can reveal depth rather than hide it.
• the body is one part of a human being, not the entirety of its being.

Writing intimacy with dignity does not dilute the sensual. It enriches it.

A Brief Look Back: History as Proof

Objectification in writing is not a modern phenomenon. Even in periods where modesty was enforced with cultural rigidity, we engaged in the reduction of women to aesthetically acceptable shapes.

Victorian literature, for example, upheld strict standards of propriety. Visible skin, beyond the face and hands, was taboo. Yet women’s bodies were still moulded into narrow ideals through corsets, posture expectations, and linguistic framing. Writers described women in ways that reinforced these constraints, often without questioning them. The surface remained a site of control, even when the surface itself was concealed.

This should remind us that objectification adapts. It survives prohibition because it is rooted not in nudity, but in power.

A Humanist Approach to Writing

To resist objectification, authors do not need to reinvent the craft. They need to practice intention.

They can choose to write beyond the body, anchoring characters in intellect, humour, defiance, empathy, contradictions, and desires that reach beyond physical appeal. They can push back against reductive tropes and refuse the easy caricature. They can write characters with dignity even in messy, sensual, erotic scenes.

Most importantly, they can treat every character as a full human being, not a shorthand for desire.

This is not about moral purity. This is about artistic ambition. Literature thrives when its characters are complex, contradictory, vibrant, and human… not when they are packaged as consumables.

Conclusion

Objectification in writing is not a small issue. It shapes how readers perceive one another. It shapes who gets to exist in stories. It narrows human experience into a narrow set of acceptable margins. Words can degrade as easily as images, and sometimes with greater subtlety.

Writers cannot claim innocence simply because our tools are ink rather than lenses. Authorship is a form of visualisation. Every description, every character introduction, every trope deployed or challenged becomes part of how the world sees itself.

A humanist approach to authorship insists that no identity should be reduced to an object of desire. It demands dignity, depth, and interiority for every character. And it reminds us that writing—at its best—does not flatten. It expands.

Literature can resist commodification. It can push against the narrow ways culture defines beauty, desire, and worth. But only if we choose to write people rather than objects, humanity rather than silhouettes, and stories that see their characters as ends in themselves rather than consumable parts.