Women Seen as Sex Objects? Now There’s Scientific Proof
Women Seen as Sex Objects? Now There’s Scientific Proof - Worldcrunch - All News Is Global
Women are just sex objects! Making a classic male sexist comment like that has long been taboo in Western societies. Yet two studies, one Belgian, the other American, actually go a long way in proving that women really are perceived that way.
A team working with psychologist Philippe Bernard at the Université Libre in Brussels found that lingerie-clad women on photographs were perceived more as objects than as people although this was not the case with scantily clad men.
To demonstrate this, the psychologists made use of a mechanism known as the inversion effect. If photographs are viewed upside down, viewers find it more difficult to recognize faces and people. However they have no problem recognizing objects, such as buildings or cars, when photographs of these are shown to them upside down.
For the experiment, 78 test subjects were shown photos of men and women wearing underwear or bathing suits. The subjects were then shown each picture again with an inverted version, and asked to say which one they had originally seen.
The result was that the subjects had much more trouble recognizing the photos of men that were shown upside down. This was not the case with photographs of women, where it didn’t seem to make much difference if they were standing on their head or not.
Checking out a potential partner
In an article published in Psychological Science magazine, the researchers concluded that men tend to be perceived as persons, while women tend to be perceived as objects. And the most surprising thing, says Sarah Gervais, a psychology professor at the University of Nebraska and co-author of the study, is that the blame for this cannot just be shunted onto men: women perceive other women in exactly the same way.