  Kant is worried that when people exercise their sexuality outside the context of monogamous marriage, they treat humanity merely as a means for their sexual purposes. In the Lectures on Ethics Kant often speaks about ‘degradation’, ‘subordination’, and ‘dishonouring’ of humanity when exercise of sexuality is involved. He goes so far as to say that sexual activity can lead to the loss or ‘sacrifice’ of humanity (Kant Lectures on Ethics, 163–4). The loved person loses what is special to her as a human being, her humanity, and is reduced to a thing, a mere sexual instrument. Kant’s notion of objectification, therefore, focuses largely on instrumentality: the treatment of a person as a mere tool for the lover’s purposes. Objectification, for Kant, involves regarding someone “as an object, something for use” (Herman 1993, 57). According to Alan Soble, for Kant, “both the body and the compliant actions of the other person are tools (a means) that one uses for one’s sexual pleasure, and to that extent the other person is a fungible, functional thing” (Soble 2002a, 226). The idea that within sexual relationships people are reduced to objects, that they lose their rational nature, is an extreme one. Halwani rightly points out that this reduction to the status of an object rarely happens in sexual objectification. He explains that “Outside rape, it is rare to treat our sexual partners as objects: not only are we aware of their humanity; we are also mindful of it.” (Halwani 2010, 193) Halwani offers a more sensible reading of Kant’s claim here, in admitting that there is truth to the idea that “Sexual desire is powerful enough to make reason its own tool; it can subvert our rational capacity to set ends” (Halwani 2010, 209). In this way, people can “endanger their dignity by undermining their reason” (Halwani 2010, 209). Therefore, even though the view that humanity is completely destroyed when people exercise their sexuality is an unappealing one, it is not unreasonable to think that, in some cases, sexual desire and exercise of sexuality can undermine our rationality.