I said, "I think treating people--and ourselves--as if they/we are 'just' hunks of animal flesh is pathological and pathogenic."
And I realize this may be very misleading. And I likewise realized that explaining what I mean is not going to be easy.
I could start with analogous examples, perhaps.:
"A Stradivarius is just a hunk of wood with some strings attached."
"The Bach Cello Suites are just a bunch of markings on paper and/or, perhaps, some vibrations in the air."
"The Louvre in Paris is just a building holding a bunch of pigmented pieces of canvas and carved rocks."
There may be those who think because we're animals and not weightless spiritual angels in the sky that there can be nothing (nothing material on Earth) sacred. But I certainly do not hold that opinion.
To treat sacred things as just a hunk of material stuff, with no meaning or value, is to desacralize what shows up as sacred -- even if we are secularist non-theists (such as myself). The sacred did not disappear when we learned modern science. It's still here! But now it's on a different plane of existence which some philosophers call "the immanent plane" -- meaning within this very world, not descending from Heaven and arising out of the dictates of a distant sky god.
If we have no appreciation for the sacred, we are in the thrall of pathology. It's all well and good to pluck the angel wings from humankind, but why then toss him / her in the sewer?
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A bit of cultural history from my perspective...
I'm thinking of traditional religions of all kind as having been engaged in gilding the lily. The original lily was beautiful without such gilding, but formalized religions took it upon themselves to appropriate all ungilt lilies to themselves, whereupon every lily that could be found was covered in gold leaf. Natural lilies became practically extinct, as the very definition of "the sacred" became defined as the gilded lily of religion. That is, religion decided that there was the lower world of "mere" stuff (just animals) and a "higher" world of ultimate transcendence way up and above us and quite invisible -- not of this world.
Along come Enlightenment philosophers and, with these (in a dance of enfolded inspirations), modern science, which showed that in fact angels are not needed to move the stars across the sky. Modern naturalism was born. And with that it seemed to so very many that all of the "true sacred" was stripped away, revealing mere (just) lilies. After all, "the sacred" was defined as the Great Distance between The Above and Far Away Not Here, which sometimes graces the merely here with its magical fairy dust, rendering some things or places (such as churches and priests) "sacred".
But all along the lily (this very world, our animal flesh) has been sacred, and no gold leaf was ever necessary in the least for the sacred to be dazzlingly present to all who have eyes with which to see, ears with which to hear and 'hearts' with which to feel. (Here, I'm not referring to the blood-pumping organ.) The sacred is not Beyond and Far Away, but right here. It's been here all the while. Nothing of it has been lost in stripping the lilies of their gold patina.
So, as you see, I do think of the human (sexual or otherwise) objectification process as a rather extreme form of desacralization of the sacred, resulting in a pathetic diminishment of the dignity of the human beings caught up in this diminishment. It's actually, to my mind, a pathological incapacity to see, hear, taste and touch … all very animal / bodily things, right? But, along with myriad poets (Blake, Whitman, Ginsberg et al) I regard human flesh as holy, divine.... Only these words (holy, divine) are not for me really theological terms. For me, the natural world (including its human bodies) and cosmos must either be sacred or … not. When we treat it as anything other than sacred and holy we tend to spit on it, blow it up with explosives, poison it, or otherwise mistreat it. So I'll go with "It's all holy / sacred".
