Sexual objectification: men’s brains in front of women in bikinis

Scantily clad women activate certain brain regions in men.

We are all too familiar with the concept of the "vase woman". It tends to be an idea linked to the world of marketing and show business, spheres of public life that reach us especially through the mass media.

We all see with relative normality that the role of hostess in a television program is almost always occupied by a woman who maintains a rather passive attitude. It is also not uncommon to see how the aesthetic side of women is commercially exploited in advertisements, films or sometimes even in thefilms or, sometimes, even in sports.

Sexual objectification and neurons: men's brains when faced with scantily clad women

Since women's bodies are so sought after by the cameras, it is worth asking whether, beyond the economic results of hiring women as women flower girlsThe heterosexual male brain has learned to behave differently towards women when they are scantily clad.

Could it be that the objectification of women is embodied in the way neuronal tissues interact?

What is sexual objectification?

The reification can be summarized as the consideration that a person is in reality something like an object.. When someone objectifies another person, he or she believes, to a greater or lesser extent and more or less unconsciously, that what he or she is seeing is an animated body, without taking into account the factors that characterize him or her as a human being capable of thinking and making decisions autonomously. The sexual objectificationIn particular, it consists of letting a person's aesthetic and sexual attributes define her completely.

The example of the stewardess mentioned above can be considered a form of objectification: the woman becomes only the part of her body that we perceive as an object, and it is this "object made of flesh" that represents the whole woman, beyond her condition as a human being. The philosopher Judith Butler said on this subject, from a more abstract point of view:

In the philosophical tradition beginning with Plato and continuing with Descartes, Husserl, and Sartre, the ontological differentiation between the soul (consciousness, mind) and the body always defends relations of subordination and political and psychic hierarchy. The mind not only subjugates the body, but eventually plays with the fantasy of escaping its corporeality altogether. The cultural associations of the mind with masculinity and the body with femininity are well documented in the fields of philosophy and feminism.

The objectification of women is not only degrading in moral terms, but it can also have a very material and dramatic can have a very material and dramatic embodiment because it is linked to a desire to dominate all that is feminine.. It should be borne in mind, for example, that where there is dehumanization of women there is also a greater likelihood of sexual assault or humiliating treatment, according to some research. Despite the fact that, by definition, both men and women can be objectified, this is still alarming.

Everyday sexism

Moreover, objectification occurs not only on TV screens. Anyone can see these same tendencies reproduced in the street, in bars, in universities and even in homes. It is a very widespread phenomenon and it is possible that this objectification of women is also reflected in patterns of neuronal activation within the brain.

An experiment conducted by Susan Fiske, Mina Cikara and members of Priceton University seems to suggest that, at least in some contexts, men's brains perceive scantily clad women as objects rather than as beings with feelings and subjectivity of their own.. Sexual objectification would thus have a material embodiment in at least part of the brains belonging to heterosexual men.

Searching for correlations in the brain

In the study, the brains of a series of heterosexual men were scanned with a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) device while they were shown four types of images: women in street clothes, scantily clad women, scantily clad men, and scantily clad men.

Thanks to the results of the MRI scans, it was possible to prove that viewing images of scantily clad women activated areas of the brain typically related to the handling of instruments (such as the premotor cortex), while this did not occur if the stimulus was a woman dressed in a (such as the premotor cortex), while this did not occur if the stimulus was a conventionally dressed woman, a scantily clad man or a conventionally dressed man. The brain areas that are activated during the attribution of mental states to other living beings were less activated in those men who displayed a higher degree of hostile sexism (misogynistic attitudes).

Moreover, this same group of men was more likely to associate images of sexualized women with first-person verbs ("agarro"), and not so much with third-person verbs ("agarra"). All this leads one to think of a world in which being a woman and taking off certain clothes can be a reason for men to take you for something that looks very much like a human being.

This, of course, would have very serious implications in case what was being seen was the imprint that objectification leaves on the brains of heterosexual men.

How is this to be interpreted?

The meaning of these results are unclear. Seeing clear activation patterns in areas that are typically activated when something is done does not mean that those areas of the brain are responsible for triggering those specific functions. Groups of neurons in the premotor cortex, for example, are activated in many other situations.

As for the association between verbs and images, although they serve in any case to reinforce the hypothesis that scantily clad women are seen as objects, it is not possible to ensure that the product of these activation patterns is sexual objectification.. Sexual objectification is too abstract a concept to be associated with such concrete neural patterns from a single investigation, but that does not mean that they could be related.

This experiment can be seen as an invitation for further research in this direction because, despite the haze of uncertainty surrounding these results, gender bias, machismo, objectification and their neural correlates is an area that deserves to be studied. If only to avoid the emergence of barriers that separate the two halves of the population.

Bibliographical references:

• Butler, J. 2007 [1999]. Gender in dispute. Feminism and the subversion of identity. Barcelona: Espasa.

• Cikara, M., Eberhardt, J. L., & Fiske, S. T. (2011). From agents to objects: Sexist attitudes and neural responses to sexualized targets. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23(3), pp. 540 - 551.

• Rudman, L. A. y Mescher, K. (2012). Of Animals and Objects: Men’s Implicit Dehumanization of Women and Likelihood of Sexual Aggression. Personality & social psychology bulletin, 38(6), pp. 734 - 746. doi:0.1177/0146167212436401