People focus on the parts of a woman's body when processing her image, according to research published in June in the European Journal of Social Psychology
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A glimpse at the magazine rack in any supermarket checkout line will tell you that women are frequently the focus of sexual objectification. Now, new research finds that the brain actually processes images of women differently than those of men, contributing to this trend.
Women are more likely to be picked apart by the brain and seen as parts rather than a whole, according to research published online June 29 in the European Journal of Social Psychology. Men, on the other hand, are processed as a whole rather than the sum of their parts.
"Everyday, ordinary women are being reduced to their sexual body parts," said study author Sarah Gervais, a psychologist at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. "This isn't just something that supermodels or porn stars have to deal with." [6 Gender Myths, Busted]
Objectification hurts
Numerous studies have found that feeling objectified is bad for women. Being ogled can make women do worse on math tests, and self-sexualization, or scrutiny of one's own shape, is linked to body shame, eating disorders and poor mood.
But those findings have all focused on the perception of being sexualized or objectified, Gervais told LiveScience. She and her colleagues wondered about the eye of the beholder: Are people really objectifying women more than men?
To find out, the researchers focused on two types of mental processing, global and local. Global processing is how the brain identifies objects as a whole. It tends to be used when recognizing people, where it's not just important to know the shape of the nose, for example, but also how the nose sits in relation to the eyes and mouth. Local processing focuses more on the individual parts of an object. You might recognize a house by its door alone, for instance, while you're less likely to recognize a person's arm without the benefit of seeing the rest of their body.
If women are sexually objectified, people should process their bodies in a more local way, focusing on individual body parts like breasts. To test the idea, Gervais and her colleagues carried out two nearly identical experiments with a total of 227 undergraduate participants. Each person was shown non-sexualized photographs, each of either a young man or young woman, 48 in total. After seeing each original full-body image, the participants saw two side-by-side photographs. One was the original image, while the other was the original with a slight alteration to the chest or waist (chosen because these are sexualized body parts). Participants had to pick which image they'd seen before.
In some cases, the second set of photos zoomed in on the chest or waist only, asking participants to pick the body part they'd seen previously versus the one that had been altered.
Objectifying women
The results showed a clear schism between the images of men and women. When viewing female images, participants were better at recognizing individual parts than they were matching whole-body photographs to the originals. The opposite was true for male images: People were better at recognizing a guy as a whole than they were his individual parts.
People were also better at discerning women's individual body parts than they were at men's individual body parts, further confirming the local processing, or objectification, that was happening. [Cleavage Countdown: 8 Facts About Breasts]
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49 Comments
Add CommentWow what an elaborate way to basically say men are pigs.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow about a simpler explanation, the brain is typically efficient in how it works. We may not understand how it works but one proven fact is the human brain is thousands of times more powerful than super computers all while running on a carrot.
So taking into account the likely efficient worked into identifying people, it could be the brain just focuses the smallest number of identifiers to determine what something is or who someone is. Considering most male bodies are relatively similar and have few features to distinguish one male from another from something like a view of a chest, the brain probably needs the entire male body to determine who it is.
Women, with bodies that have many more shapes and parts that are different, it probably does not take her entire body to determine who she is.
But this nonsense in the article, where it all automatically becomes objectification of women, it is a load of BS. There may be plenty of objectification of women out there but it has nothing to do with the programming in the brain and how it might be seeing something for indexing and identification.
Objectification of women comes from centuries of social programming, not nature. Centuries of religions and arrogant tyrants or self appointed upper class fools teaching each other and other men that women are objects. At the same time those same influences from religion and society teaching women that their bodies are somehow evil for the fact that nature designed the woman's body to be able to attract males. This is where objectification of women comes from.
Keep it simple. Men do not have a variety of shapes and parts to distinguish them from each other, women do have a variety of shapes and parts, so it makes sense for the brain to use two different methods of viewing. It is exactly the same as a previous discovery that men hear women's voices with parts of the brain usually used for music, while women hear both men and other women without that influence from the right side of the brain, and men hear other men exactly the same way as women hear men. So again, it is all natural, likely there because the primary goal of these things would be to allow humans to procreate with the highest rate of success.
"It's both men and women doing this to women," Gervais said. "So don't blame the men here."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisObjectification of women is biological. No amount of church or nagging will change the way humans are wired. Too bad this offends you.
Good points, but I think you are over complicating it as well. I think it's much simpler. Consider evolution, and the reasons for identifying a male vs a female. Recognizing a male was important for identifying potential threats. But recognizing a female was not a threat assessment issue, but more an issue of assessing potential mating or help with any of various tasks. So the only important information the brain needed when identifying a male was (a) that it was indeed male, and (b) the male's identity, and possibly (c) his physical ability to threaten. However, when identifying a female, lots of other factors were of value, age, apparent health, apparent breeding issues (already pregnant, for example), apparent strength for carrying items, etc.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo while I agree it's efficiency of the brain's processing, I think it's the usual human habit of classification and in this case simply sorting out important information and discarding useless information.
Please read page TWO of the article. Its not entirely due to biology and both men and women do it. "the media is probably a prime suspect."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think your observation is wrong. Men have as many parts as women do, and as many bodily shapes. While women may have greater variation in terms of breast size, men have greater variation in terms of gut size. Apart from the breast example (which is itself questionable... heard of moobs?) Women have no "parts" that men don't also have.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerhaps you are upset that "objectification" might have a biological basis, and that is coloring your analysis. Because the analysis just doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
I suspect porn is the primary means by which we create reactions which objectify others, and I suspect women don't watch much porn so they're left with the media's straight male-pandering, objectifying influence, leading to the results of the present study.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think an interesting follow-up would be to repeat the experiment using gay and bisexual men while also measuring porn consumption. I predict the results would reverse, particularly for gay, heavy porn consumers. Several interesting variations on this theme are possible--eg. comparing straight low and high porn consumers, particularly women.
I disagree that this is a biological / nature / hard-wired thing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI do agree with Gervais (the researcher) where she notes, "the media is probably a prime suspect. Women's bodies and their body parts are used to sell all sorts of products, but we are now for everyday, ordinary women, processing them in a similar way."
I also agree with Gervais that the result showing that both men and women do this supports the notion that this is a learned thing, not an in-born thing.
I would also say that the results showing that the letter-mosaic task "swept the effect away" indicates that this is one of the many, many ways in which our brain is shaped by our environment. i.e., if we can so easily un-learn it, then we probably simply learned it in the first place.
The ubiquitous objectification of women through ads, movies, etc. emphasizes specific body parts, using several modes of emphasis (lighting, movement, etc.), while building an association between such impressions and notions of success, popularity, power, control, desire, and so on. The aim -- and the effect -- is to construct a relentless image of "the woman I want to be with" or "the woman I want to be".
It's no wonder in this milieu that when our eyes fall upon a real woman, our brain parses her up into the parts that the media tells all of us all the time are the most important things to our own status and happiness.
Simply because both men and women show this behavior does not mean it's biological. Much of our mental processing is learned, making environment a reasonable culprit. The second experiment demonstrated this quite well.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou should probably wait until after reading the article to post a comment about it. Your post is unnecessarily long yet it manages to avoid any superfluous understanding of the actual article itself. It is just a sexist rant. The article clearly states that the objectification is not unique to one sex and that it can be easily unlearned.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo sexual objectification is historically traceable to the porn industry? Would then things like the Bible be considered porn or just the product of porn?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswrjames -
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour assessment is flatly one-sided, from a male point-of-view. For a woman, a women can be a threat, and men are the customary mating partners.
Besides this, even men viewing other men as threats need to take into account several things, like the things you mentioned for assessing a potential mate: age, health, apparent strength, etc.
I'd say that you simplified it a bit too much there.
Throw this into the pot:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe are likely conditioned to look at women parts more (by media, culture, men, women, and or by healthy bouncy shapes (motion more easily brings energy via eyes and naturally is generally known to draw eye attention in humans and many animals).. more so than to look at men).
Further, looking at men parts is generally also more intimidating, for many women because they don't do that and to avoid a complicated encounter, for men because it's uninteresting (more so than looking at women generally) and also to avoid a more complicated encounter.
I think reinforcing this last point also is that men tend to be more slaves of sex (for long periods of time: external sensitive body part rubbing/ chemicals released/ trigger on (likely sexual) imagery .. leading to mind enslavement of triggers after triggers). This makes (more) men more likely to avoid looking at other men (to avoid problems and habits) and to react angrily to an uncomfortable situation.
A gene mechanism that identifies women and men from before birth is very unlikely to exist in any significant form to rival environmental cues (which obviously do leverage our bodies and associated genes in creating the trigger avalanches), but feel free to describe how you think a gene might possibly play a role. I'm curious.
Oh, here is another guess at a part of the puzzle. Men might be less likely to see women like themselves than vice-versa. I have not analyzed this too much and may certainly not be true, but if true, the failure to see opposite sex like self may aggravate the situation with greater probability across men than across women (ie, this potential difference being more likely to be turned into sexual relief for males, supporting some of above points). As an aside, as a male, I have significantly detoxicated myself in part with the help of seeing women as a "me with a little different luck at birth or a little different planet surrounding me". Tapping sexual energy starts to disappear if the other thing is that much less interesting. [And being less of a slave allows you to be more focused and have more time for self, less vulnerable, less irrational and uncontrolled, obviously less likely to cheat, more likely to control/guide sexual action as you prefer rather than as slave to self, etc.]
LOL! I read the responses to this article and I can't help but laugh. All these people who have decided that they don't "like" what this article says and therefore the results need to be reinterpreted based SOLELY ON THEIR OWN INTUITION.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGuess what, folks, men and women objectify men and women. Know what else? It has biological roots and we reinforce that behavior in our social structures. Don't like that? Tough sh*t. Facts don't alter themselves to fit your preferences. Think those "pigs" get "let off the hook" in the results of this study? Think those "sweet innocent girls" aren't just as guilty of all the same behaviors?
Science doesn't care how you feel about a subject, it just informs. YOU have to learn how to deal with the implications. We hope they are not dealt with by simply dismissing them and creating your own BS to put in it's place.
wwwordsmith, I agree this is complex. Let me point out that a "threat" can lead to study. The female is less threatening as a source of physical immediate harm or complication so it is easier to study on the spot with less worry about consequences from a reaction. This applies both to males and to females as lookers and would be learned behavior.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA main driver is that I am guessing men more easily (or more likely) build up a lot of misleading and strong mental triggers when contrasted with women (I mention more in earlier comment), and are more likely in many societies to react with greater harm (or at least give that appearance to the looker) when feeling threatened, vulnerable, etc. The threat issue may form an important reason you don't over-study males. The "more likely to think sex" issue may reinforce why males tend to parts more in females than females do in males.
Big Ralph Smith, you could have been more specific about the comments here so that it would not be so hard to address your general arm waving opinion (I can't tell if I agree with you a little or what). Also, how do you think this study shows that "men and women objectify men and women?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@priddseren: It's not identifying people. It's noticing boobs, cleavage, but, and other thingies which (boys)men are inherently attracted towards (girls)women! Call it because of social programming, or thousands of years of male domination, that is the fact.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt would be interesting if the research were repeated blocking out different parts of women's bodies. Like just showing the person from the neck up, or from the back, or holding an object placed strategically to obscure different parts. I seem to recall that most infants, both boys and girls, respond to the sight of breasts, for a very good reason of course, and that would be reinforced by breastfeeding. The question is whether it is just breasts that are objectified, not the whole woman. Try repeating the experiment without showing the upper torso. Another possibility might be to obscure the hair, or to use models of varying attractiveness. After all, I have noticed that when an attractive woman walks into a room, both men and women get very attentive, for opposite reasons, and that process could definitely involve objectification.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisContrariwise, (I always wanted to use that word, but I'm not sure it actually means what I want it to) try including pictures of men with close fitting bathing suits, so that the presence of a provocative body part is actually discernable, and see if that increases objectification.
Our brains see men as whole and women as parts, because we live under an oppressive system that has trained us to believe that men are actual humans and women are livestock.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo protect itself, the system convinces us that it doesn't exist. When we see its effects everywhere, we dismiss them. "It's hard-wired into our brains by evolution!" is an excuse not to even try to do anything about it. Thus science is misused to justify oppression.
Scientific American used to be a respectable magazine, but with stories like "Cleavage Countdown!" it's pretty much become an evo-psych tabloid.
Correction: no amount of reason will change an oppressor's desire to oppress.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI never admitt, nowadays, that sexual implications carry any true meannig that deserves objecting about. Sexual expedients are natural and the only purppuse it has is to give continuity to the race that didn't stabilized to get rid of such momentary illusions. And if man might racionalize the spectral of woman, behind that is the purpose to fecundate, to have the initiative, but it is not more than an illusion (more hormonius in his blood). Woman think it roundly obviously because is less considered by nature taking that response, once man is being built while woman as a mother has the more complete sense of holliness. Like the steps, man and woman evolve the nature of things. While one advances the other stays on the ground.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI never admitt, nowadays, that sexual implications carry any true meannig that deserves objecting about. Sexual expedients are natural and the only purppuse it has is to give continuity to the race that didn't stabilized to get rid of such momentary illusions. And if man might racionalize the spectral of woman, behind that is the purpose to fecundate, to have the initiative, but it is not more than an illusion (more hormonius in his blood). Woman think it roundly obviously because is less considered by nature taking that response, once man is being built while woman as a mother has the more complete sense of holliness. Like the steps, man and woman evolve the nature of things. While one advances the other stays on the ground.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA typical example of contrived "experimentation", fabricating an "experiment" in such a way that it will say what you want it to say.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo begin with, what does recognizing or not recognizing and individual or their body part say? Do they respond differently to women's breats than men's because, basically, women have more of a breast to pick out details on? Or, for that matter, that they have bigger hips than the average man, giving more for a person to remember? Is it considered that maybe people see men more "as a whole", by their whole body, because they need that much information to recognize them, the individual body parts not necessarily having enough detail to make it memorable?
But, then, are the responses graded on whether the person recognized the indivifdual's bodies or not? The article doesn't say! It could just as well be a test of image retention than of "objectification"!
And let's shovel out the garbage. Many if not most judge men by appearance, too! Quality of haircut; full head of hair or bald; short or tall; pear shaped or muscled; good clothes or shabby clothes; well fitting clothes or off the rack; expression from mild mannered to unfocused to "planning the next caper". The question can be legitimately asked, is the "objectification" necessarily so harmful to women, or is it that a politically powerful, economically well healed group, what the "feminist" movement aimed its message at, are particularly affected by it? And are they affected by it because it is so toxic to them, or because they hate men so much, they resent them being allowed to appreciate what they see? And, frankly, where does it say that, if someone reegisters what they see that they necessarily don't go farther and also address the person as a person? These aspects have never, ever been assessed! It's always been assumed as a fundamental, unquestioned facet in design and analysis that all women think the same, that none display utterly outlandish reactions to stimuli, that none predicate their reactions on a resentment toward men. For so long, for examplel it was tourted that many girls engage in anorexia and bulimia because "they are forced to to conform to magazine images", but even the most emaciated supermodels don't look like the living skeletons these girls turned themselves into! Those points have been dismissed as without legitimacy, but there was never any proof provided that that is the case.
I don't see where the connection to "objectification" is being made, one way or the other. The feminist term refers to a concept wherein women are seen as "objects" and not as people. That's great, so where does this experiment show that viewers were seeing men as people but women as not people?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisKeep in mind that with men, women are incredibly focused on height. You can't judge a man's height if you don't consider his entire body. What this experiment shows is that what we already know about how people are judged in terms of attractiveness is pretty much in line with how we then look at others. Does that mean that one sex is seen as more or less human than the other?
There are so many confounding factors involved here, including the fact that men and women have entirely different fashions. Including, for women, much tighter fitting clothing that accentuates their sexuality. Let's dress men and women in orange prison suits and then do this experiment again. And then let's dress men and women in skin-tight leotards and do it again. And then let's do it for men and women dressed as clowns. Let's compare how people perceive women in a regular pair of pants versus women in a pair of pants with "princess" written in pink across the buttocks.
And even then, I still won't be completely satisfied. Women's fashion is spectacularly varied. Go into a department store and notice how women's clothing options outnumber men's clothing options by an order of magnitude. Women may draw attention to their individual body parts as a group just by having more ways to decorate their bodies - even a plainly dressed woman is more unique than a plainly dressed man. So people could be preconditioned to look for those tell-tale differences coming into this experiment. I suggest this - show people a spread of male fashion models in extravagant clothing versus women who are all wearing the same exact thing. Then do the experiments over again to see if this has an effect on what they're able to remember.
I almost forgot the obvious - let's remove fashion from the equation altogether and do this experiment with nude models wearing hair nets and no makeup.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLol. This is too ironic.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt certainly sounds as though the media is to blame here. In particular, the so-called "LiveScience" media. This study says absolutely nothing about "the brain". It's just a basic psychology study with a bunch of undergrads.
The task was to look at pictures of men and women. Then, after a short break to look at the same pictures with a slight change to the waist or chest region of the images. Some of the pictures were "whole pictures" in other words identical to the original image, and others were "local pictures", e.g. images of the altered region (just the chest or waist). When shown images of the "local" pictures, participants were more likely to correctly identify altered images (e.g. a rumpled shirt around the waist in the new image) if those images were of women. How much better were they for women than men? About 7%: they went from 55% correct to 62%.
In an exact replica of the task only this time everybody performed a "local processing" priming task where they looked at a bunch of big and small letters (don't ask me why this makes people "locally process" things), the effect got a little bigger. In this replication it was about 15%.
Any major flaws? Well... hmmm. Let me see.
Well, to start with the blatantly obvious: why did they choose "waist" and "chest" are target regions for people to pay attention to?
The authors note: "sexual objectification studies ... have found that chests and waists are sexually objectified for both men and women... the specific attractiveness ideals may differ for men (e.g., attractive men have broad, muscular pectorals and narrow muscular waists ... and women (e.g., attractive women have large breasts and slim waists)".
Wow, that is pretty... obvious. But I guess there's a literature on even this stuff.
So, did the authors account for differences in the attractiveness of male and female images (e.g. in the pictures they used, did the men have chests that were just as broad as the womens' breasts were large?). Well, in a word... no they didn't. They previously asked a different group of students to "rate the degree to which each image stereotypically fit the cultural ideal of beauty compared to most women (or men)", but that is not the same as asking them "how memorable were the chests and waists of the men and women in these pictures". Until they answer that question, this study may just be a function of their materials. Also, as a control, it would have been good to run the same study with "non-sexual" body parts (e.g. eye brows, knees. shoes).
Two things struck me about this article:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1) I wonder how the results would turn out if this same experiment was done in a variety of non-Western cultures? (I suspect all participants were from the Nebraska region or equivalent and not from many different cultures.) This might help show the degree to which it is nature or nurture.
2) In many brain studies, priming is used to make the brain pay attention differently in order to influence the next outcoe. It only makes sense that, in the mosaic letter test you are priming the brain to pay attention globally so that when you complete the next task you are now paying attention in that manner. This just confirms that the brain can be primed to pay attention differently (if that was the point).
The first memorable priming example is (answer as quickly as possible): What colour is snow? What animal gives milk? What do cows drink? (Answer later).
The most recent example is from an email I received: At the base of a large coconut tree sat a monkey, giraffe, squirrel, and lion. They were all hungry. Which animal would be the first to get the banana?
Answers: Cows drink water (calves drink milk) and none of the animals will get the banana--what kind of tree was it?
well said.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have to tell you-- there is as much variation between pectoral shape and size, nipples, hair-- as there is between women's breasts, nipples and, I suppose, cleavage. All other parts of male anatomy as well, are as variable as the parts of female. You haven't noticed that because you have never been interested. Any woman -- or man-- who loves men will agree with me, however!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn fact we can say that nature has designed men's bodies to be attractive to women. Or, perhaps... it's simply that women's bodies are attractive to men because that's what women's bodies look like. And vice versa.
"Everyday, ordinary women are being reduced to their sexual body parts,"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt really doesn't take any study to know this. This is a normal and even dull universal trait among all men.
Why heck, even us out in the pasture know this.
Regarding men, there is one universal physical characteristic that men and especially women equate to fitness: chest size. Generally the large the chest the stronger and healthier. Determined in one single glance.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMen are programmed by tens of thousands of years of evolution to seek healthy females for reproduction. Health and fitness are judged, rather subjectively, by glowing eyes, teeth, healthy skin and hair, physique, fat or lack thereof, muscle tone, etc. Determined by looking at the components separately.
Human culture merely modifies this. In the early 1900's, women with a tan were perceived to be poor quality. They had a tan because they were poor and had to work outside the home. Years later, women with a tan were generally preferred. It's was a sign of having enough leisure time, made available by income, to sit outside and tan.
Women know all these things as well and have to size other females up to determine where they might fit in the pecking order.
Humans are chimpanzee's with an intellect they can't fully utilize.
So here's a wrench in the entire thing. I am a gay male. I have been since I was 5. I grew up first having crushes on other boys, and eventually sexualizing them. I have never had an interest in women other than platonic friendship. A nude woman presented to me elicits what I can only assume the same response is for heterosexuals when seeing a naked person of the same gender.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have never objectified a woman, not specifically because I somehow think it's unethical, but because sexually women do nothing for me. I have, though, and here's the fun part, objectified men's bodies. I have broken it down into parts, just like this article describes, whether it be a well toned chest, impressive arms, a shapely posterior, or an especially large endowment (you have all heard the term Size Queen, I trust).
Articles like this annoy me because they continue to make sexuality into a black and white, male/female thing, despite years of scientific, social scientific, and psychological evidence showing that sexuality is a spectrum. You can't have a conversation about sexuality and leave out the bulk of sexuality.
Perhaps what this article shows us is that we as human animals do break things down into parts, but maybe it's based on sexual attraction. Maybe women do it too because it's much more "socially acceptable" for women to find other women attractive then for men to do the same for men. Maybe we do this for biological/procreation reasons: sussing out the different parts to see if they are good for raising children or are good for keepin the family into safe from harm.
And let's not fool ourselves. I know plenty of women who objectify men and break them into parts.
This study and/or the reporting of it has done very little to shine a light on a social phenomenon, in my opinion.
I wonder what the results would be if done on a nudist beach? It seems to me that clothing would contaminate any results because it covers and manipulates our perceived body image. Also how does this test perform in a culture where people live virtually free of clothing?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIsn't Cosmopolitan a magazine for women? There are more shots of cleavage in that magazine than in Playboy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour basic premise that women's bodies "have many more shapes and parts" and that men's bodies have "few features to distinguish one male from another" is flawed. Women and men come in all shapes and sizes and are no different in this way. Perhaps your VIEW of men vs women is proving the author's point. I can recognize anyone of my male friends from behind and in the dark. They each have their own unique shape. Also, nowhere in this article does it imply that men are pigs. As far as the study goes the article referred to what "participants" did and how "people" saw men and women. It didn't say that men saw women one way and women saw women another way. In fact, the article specifically said both men and women do it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo, in other words, I'm OK if I just stare at their breasts, ignoring them, even when they reach their hand to me and start pushing or worst, pinching. It's clear to me, as a man, that women have evolved in a way they atract our sight in a very comunicative manner, letting us to see they have grew up and so, are ready to have descendents. To me it is not only sexual behavior, but social entanglement with the other sex, because as women see men totally, they are able to judge their qualities as supplier and protector. As if men were triangles, muscled torso, ready to hunt, fight, carry heavy loads or walk long distances, because hips and legs are muscled, but ready to start doing efforts to survive. Women, at the other hand, must be seen as possible carriers of our offspring, and our nonborn childs, so they are seen in our brain as parts: breast are ready to lactate our (theirs and ours) newborns, hips are wide enough to let babes heads pass trough, and I believe is the best way to enhance communication, a primordial form of understanding: It is not serving well today, but it still says: You're good to me (Am I good to you?)/You're good to me (Am I good to you?).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo, in other words, I'm OK if I just stare at their breasts, ignoring them, even when they reach their hand to me and start pushing or worst, pinching. It's clear to me, as a man, that women have evolved in a way they atract our sight in a very comunicative manner, letting us to see they have grew up and so, are ready to have descendents. To me it is not only sexual behavior, but social entanglement with the other sex, because as women see men totally, they are able to judge their qualities as supplier and protector. As if men were triangles, muscled torso, ready to hunt, fight, carry heavy loads or walk long distances, because hips and legs are muscled, but ready to start doing efforts to survive. Women, at the other hand, must be seen as possible carriers of our offspring, and our nonborn childs, so they are seen in our brain as parts: breast are ready to lactate our (theirs and ours) newborns, hips are wide enough to let babes heads pass trough, and I believe is the best way to enhance communication, a primordial form of understanding: It is not serving well today, but it still says: You're good to me (Am I good to you?)/You're good to me (Am I good to you?).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo forestall this sexualization and objectification of women, Islam encourages wearing the hijab.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe study is interesting only because it shows that the way women are seen by the highly restricted group of test-subjects, can be very easily unlearned! Other than that, the study is of very limited interest, because the findings undoubtedly apply only to the culture and age-group of the test-subjects used.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo who cares, when humans come in many different age-groups, and even in our modern world, they still occur in a tremendous variety of culture, not to mention sub-divisions that often exist even within one and the same culture?!
Really naive comment that is!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs usual, the American feminists who HATE men the most and HATE biology & nature even more are at it again, ruining it for all the rest of us rational pragmatic secure women who actually care about the REAL issues concerning women. As a scientist, this is OLD news to me, it's a shame so many women hate their nature and their male counterparts to such an extent. You have been wrong all your lives thanks to your feminist mothers who took the nutty route, now admit it and chill and move on. MALE animals CHASE after FEMALE animals and in nature, BOTH genders are needed equally for survival. Male animals are complementary to female animals and visa versa. Get off the insecure horse. MEN are AFTER you in a different way that you may be after them, REALIZE these natural differences and work around it and with it. In my entire life, I have never had any issues with men with my natural perspective, indeed, I barely find men sexist. I typically find the issues with the radical feminists, mostly residing in the USA and I find them incredibly sexist and irrational, to be perfectly honest. You have a very twisted idea and sorry, your man hating attitude is the reason women will stay OUT of the board rooms in serious leadership positions. Men have often complained to me why they have to always be on their toes around women, they can never say any joke that would not offend them or a flirty comment or whatever. Get a thicker skin or don't work around men. Sorry. Most of them will perhaps want to sleep with you if you are descent enough. If you don't like it, dress differently, act differently, or just avoid working in male dominated professions, which is really still many professions. Women power is about their BRAIN and their security, their guts in taking jokes instead of whining. Everytime I hear a joke that may be sexist, I say one back and say a more intense joke. Men LOVE toughness, in men and in women. Cave women ancestors didn't act like you gals, they were HAPPY in their crucial role as gatherers and child bearers and raisers and never felt they were inferior. Why do you? Men have told me that they are FASCINATED by ability of women and their language skills,their multi-tasking, attention to details, tactfulness,carrying a child for 9 mts and giving birth,etc. Why do you hate yourselves so much? Why can't you understand that naturally, MOST women are more emotional. Most women are physically less strong, they have less muscle mass. Most women cannot turn into killers. Most women are great nurturers.Respect biology and science.Please
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere seems to be a huge amount of stereotyping or current cultural assumptions here, both in the article and in many of the comments. ("Women are objectified." "The media are at fault." "It's all social programming."), none of which is supported by the research.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHowever, on this point:
"Numerous studies have found that feeling objectified is bad for women. Being ogled can make women do worse on math tests,"
an earlier SciAm article <http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-interacting-with-woman-leave-man-cognitively-impaired> said essentially the opposite under similar conditions: "women’s performance on the test did not differ, regardless of whether they were expecting a man or woman to observe them. But men who had been told a woman would observe them ended up doing much worse"
The whole experiment, as much as I would like to believe it, seems bogus to me, or at least the way it is described here, and has internal contradictions. What, for example, are "non-sexualized photographs?" Does that mean that you could not discern if the photo was of a man or a woman? And why is it a surprise that the viewer of the second photo with the altered waist or breast is able to match it with the first photo? They could have stuck a red patch on the second photo and done the same thing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn fact, I wouldn't mind seeing some of the photographic evidence. ;-)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAh Yes, This study is only the proverbial Tip of the Iceberg. An Intro for the Lay Person to stimulate an interest. If the Darwin Theories are used; birds or people would try and choose the fittest for survival. As Humans developed, traits such as healthy teeth, strong bodies, and muscular development would be used to build a team or community that would prosper. Since Women had and have such varied responsibilities historically, specific traits may come under closer scrutiny. Men would be chosen simply by a single physical trait such as muscular development or being a strong runner. Scrutiny would go to women. Clothing, be it animal skins or Designer fashions, would make a great difference also by showing skills at capturing game or social status. Only 2 or 3 generations in most families, from a small rural society to being modern city dwellers. Learned habits or something biological and how much of each?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI agree, I was looking forward to a study not this. Religion is the core of plenty of the crude separation of woman from mind. It's being socially instituted and forgotten as a source. Many people assert the significance in the bible blatantly stating that a woman turned man to sin..thus being evil. It's a BS belief passed on from pope and king alike. I wanted a source with stats. and instead I got a source regurgitating a thought that women are in parts which then perpetuates that sort of thinking and come is not progressive. all in all wasted a few minutes by setting an account just to respond to this and I got a project due. damn. ps i am a female with a core belief in societal influence.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDoes it bother anyone else that the subtitle of the article suggests the effect is because of evolution, when other implicit effects (IAT test) have been shown to be caused by the environment (specifically, media exposure)? (Sorry if this was brought up in an earlier comment, there were too many long ones to read through!)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would've liked to see that question addressed before an attention-grabbing subtitle about evolution was slapped on. I know it says "might," but evolution is the only cause offered in the subtitle. And this quote from the article actually seems to be saying the opposite:
"There could be evolutionary reasons that men and women process female bodies differently, Gervais said, but because both genders do it, "the media is probably a prime suspect."
Actually, what you have suggested is not true. A study very similar to the one quoted here ("Integrating Sexual Objectification With Object Versus Person Recognition : The Sexualized-Body-Inversion Hypothesis", Bernard et al. 2012, Psychological Science vol. 23, pg. 469) showed that sex was NOT a factor in how the brain recognises men vs. women. I repeat, your suggestion that "perhaps it's because women have more parts (?)" or whatever does not influence recognition. The study showed that the difference in recognition is a function of both gender and of how sexualised the image being recognised is. That is, men, either sexualised or not, and non-sexualized women, were recognised as one unit, while sexualised women were recognized by a configurational process (a fancy way of saying "objectification").
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI also think you misread the implications of this result. I do not see any claim that this is a hard-wired response, rather that it is the result of the culture we grow up in (as you suggest).
Your opening sentence says you are taking this way too personally for what it is. Then you devolve into saying something has been proven as fact on a scientific magazine... "proven fact". Hmmm. Do you understand how science works?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBy the way, your very reasoning (male similar; female varied) actually supports the hypothesis of the article.
Goodness gracious.
You have a very small group from which to extract data and they come from one campus? Not reliable simply due to the absence of diversity. Even if the participants were split 50/50 gender they have been forged by the same staff for years. "a total of 227 undergraduate participants". Please don't tell me anyone is going to take this as scientific fact.
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