The neuroscience of objectification.
In advertising, one of the most common selling techniques is to use the sexualisation of women, where women are portrayed as sex objects. Psychologically, this has contributed to a lot of the attitudes in everyday life that negatively effect women, because advertising that treats women as sex objects leads to men objectifying women and women objectifying themselves, but does this also have any implications neurologically?
There have been many studies into how the sexualisation of women affects Theory of Mind. Theory of Mind is a psychological paradigm where you use your own mental state as a reference to work out the mental state of others (what they may be thinking or feeling or even how they may be thinking). This mechanism allows us to assess whether an entity is capable of feeling or thinking and plays a large part in how the sexualisation of women will cause the objectification of women.
(In the following studies, the researchers utilise a brain imaging technique called fMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging, this technique allows the visualisation of which brain areas become active when doing certain tasks).
Grey et al used fMRI scanning to monitor the activity in the brains of men when viewing images of sexualised women from advertising. They specifically monitored the areas of the brain which activate when we view an entity that is capable of thought and planning action (the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate and temporal poles). They saw that when men viewed this images of women, that these areas of the brain became less active, meaning that they viewed these women as incapable of thinking or being in charge of their own lives.
They also presented images of women in a range of types of clothing, some more revealing than others. As the sexualisation of women increased the perception of capability to think independently decreased.
Other studies also support Grey’s findings. Fiske et al monitored the brain activity of straight males using an fMRI machine, and showed them images of clothed men and women, or scantily clad men and women. When they took a memory test afterwards, the men remembered the images of women wearing swimsuits and whose heads were digitally removed the best (aka, the images where the women were sexually objectified to the highest degree). The brain scans showed that when the men saw the images o the women’s bodies, the area of the brain related to taking action (the premotor cortex) becomes increasingly active. This same brain region becomes increasingly active before using a power tool to do DIY.
These findings were not male specific, even though men showed this attribute more consistently, when the same task was done on women this sort of brain activity can also be seen (but in a less intense way). This may indicate why many women are likely to self-objectify, viewing themselves as objects that don’t have their own voice and as a body that needs to altered for the satisfaction of others. This sort of behaviour in women is highly linked to women being less likely to vote and become politically active as well as being linked to higher rates of eating disorders/depression in women.
Fiske also asked these men to complete a questionnaire which would identify how sexist the participants were. The men who scored the highest in questionnaire (the men who showed higher levels of outward sexism) showed very little activity in the prefrontal cortex when viewing the images, this indicates that these men were not viewing these women as fully human.
These findings show that it is possible that this kind f advertising has conditioned us to consider women as objects and led to a high proportion of men viewing women as in less control of their own lives and as a tool for sexual gratification. Thus, it is incredibly important to limit (or eradicate) the exposure to the sexualisation of women in advertising, as this will help to combat the normalisation of using women as sex objects and prevent this unconscious psychological mechanism from causing men to objectify women.
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