A paper on objectification by Martha C. Nussbaum.

Where Immanuel Kant, Catharine MacKinnon, and Andrea Dworkin focused mainly on treating others as tools or means, Martha C. Nussbaum broadens the discussion in this paper, arguing that objectification has at least the following seven related but distinct aspects.

Instrumentality: Treating a being as a tool for one’s purposes.
Denial of autonomy: Treating a being as lacking autonomy and self-determination.
Inertness: Treating a being as lacking agency, or even activity.
Fungibility: Treating a being as interchangeable with other objects.
Violability: Treating a being as lacking boundary integrity, so that it can be invaded or broken into.
Ownership: Treating a being as something others can own, buy, or sell.
Denial of subjectivity: Treating a being’s experiences or feelings as things that need not be taken into account.

Where previous discussions of objectification have examined only its negative aspects, she also argues that positive objectification may exist depending on context. Nussbaum says that treating others solely as tools (instrumentality) is almost always morally problematic, while the other criteria require judgment in context.

As an example, Nussbaum presents three hypothetical situations. A woman, W, is about to leave for an important job interview downtown when a male acquaintance, M, says, “Do you really need to go? Just send a few photographs.” Is this utterance objectification?

If M is not a very close friend of W, it is almost certainly objectification: it treats her professional competence, attitude, and so forth as irrelevant to hiring, and only her face or body as meaningful.
Suppose M is W’s lover, they are lying in bed together, they deeply respect one another, the interview is for a modeling job, and M says this to tell W how attractive she is and because he wants to spend more time with her. There is still some ambiguity about calling it entirely unproblematic, but we can at least say that it differs considerably from the first situation.
What if M and W are close friends, and W has been hoping M will notice her physical attractiveness? W might have felt good on hearing M’s remark.

Humans are this complicated. Nussbaum’s claim is that it is therefore difficult to declare categorically, without considering context, whether a given instance of objectification is negative.