 Jennifer Saul explores the possible connection between objectification—treating people as things—and personification—treating things as people. Saul critiques earlier feminist claims that men’s use of pornographic images involves treating pieces of paper like women, and therefore involves conflating women with inanimate instruments (Saul 2006a, 49–50). Melinda Vadas, for example, argues that the production of objects that can be used, like women, to satisfy sexual appetites places women and their pornographic substitutes in a single ontological category—e.g., the category of entities that can arouse and satisfy sexual desire. This reinforces the sexist idea that all that female and alluring things, whether persons or not, are sexually consumable without consent, or that is, rapeable (Vadas 2005). Saul argues that personification and objectification are only linked in troubling ways if some conditions for morally problematic objectification are already met. Saul draws on Rachel Maines’s historical work on the development of a device now known as the personal vibrator and contends that women’s use of vibrators to achieve sexual pleasure and orgasm represents a form of personification. For some women, vibrators eventually replaced a service that had been provided by doctors (and midwives and spas). Yet this is not a troubling form of personification—one linked to troubling forms of objectification—because doctors are not likely to be confused with sex toys as a result of women’s masturbatory use of vibrating technology. Doctors have other acknowledged medical uses, as well as ends of their own. Therefore, the transformation of their historical role in treating sexually frustrated (or “hysteric”) women, by both new understandings of women’s reproductive and sexual health and advancements in vibrator technology, does not contribute to the oppression of doctors. Saul’s discussion of the possible equation of people and things, and the background circumstances that may permit this, is useful for considering some new technological developments in pornography. New digital imaging and personal computer technologies enable users to interact and “have sex” with playmate animations on one’s computer screen. Computer-mediated interactions with digitally-simulated but fictional people can sometimes be difficult to distinguish from computer-mediated online interactions with real people. Yet such pornographic possibilities do not necessarily involve morally troubling objectification or personification, as long as the social background conditions require us to differentiate flesh and blood, non-virtual humans from passive objects and treat the former as subjects, or as active and autonomous agents.