Feminists would certainly claim it was obvious that men perceive sexy women in bathing suits as objects, but now there’s some science to back this theory up.

New research shows that, in men, the brain areas associated with handling tools and the intention to perform actions light up when viewing images of women in bikinis, suggesting that sexy images can shift the way men perceive women, turning them from people to interact with, to objects to act upon.

The research was presented this week by Susan Fiske, Professor of Psychology at Princeton University, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Professor Fiske said:

This is just the first study which was focused on the idea that men of a certain age view sex as a highly desirable goal, and if you present them with a provocative woman, then that will tend to prime goal-related responses.

The study focused on a region of the brain just above the eyes, called the medial pre-frontal cortex, which, when activated seems to damp male tendencies to express hostile sexist thoughts about women.

Professor Fiske continued:

Men who express the strongest sexist tendencies tend to have a less active medial cortex. It becomes deactivated in men who are the most hostile to women, but only for women in bikinis.

So basically they are particularly likely to treat these women as objects, at least that is the interpretation of the data we have so far. It is a preliminary study but it is consistent with the idea that they are responding to these photographs as if they were responding to objects rather than people.

It was shocking to find that the pictures of scantily clad women deactivate the medial pre-frontal cortex. The only other time we’ve observed the deactivation of this region is when people look at pictures of homeless people and drug addicts who they really don’t want to think about what’s in their minds because they are put off by them.

The participants, twenty-one heterosexual male undergraduates at Princeton University, first took questionnaires to determine whether they harbour “benevolent” sexism, which would include the belief that a woman’s place is in the home, or “hostile” sexism, a more adversarial viewpoint which includes the belief that women attempt to dominate men.

The volunteers were then placed in a fMRI brain scanner whilst viewing a set of images of women in bikinis, women in clothes and men in various types of clothes. The scientists also used “sexualised” images, where the head of each semi-naked photograph was digitally removed, so that only the torso was visible. The men were given memory tests afterwards, concerning what they had remembered about each image, with and without the heads.

The results showed that men had the best memory for the sexualised bodies of women (the ones with the heads digitally removed) even though they had only seen the bodies for 200 milliseconds. In the men who scored highest on “hostile” sexism, the part of the brain associated with analyzing another person’s thoughts, feelings and intentions shut down while viewing the scantily clad women.

A supplementary study of both male and female undergraduates found that men tend to associate bikini-clad women with first-person action verbs such as I “push,” “handle” and “grab” instead of the third-person forms, such as she “pushes,” “handles” and “grabs.” On the other hand, men associated fully clothed women with third-person forms, indicating that these women were perceived as being in control of their own actions. The females who took the test did not show this effect.

Professor Fiske said:

The broader purpose of the research was to explore circumstances under which people treat one another as the means to an end.

Taken together, the research suggests that viewing certain images is not appropriate in the workplace; when there are sexualised images in the workplace, it’s hard for people not to think about their female colleagues in those terms. It spills over from the images to the workplace.

I’m not advocating censorship, but people need to be aware of the associations people will have in their minds.

Women may also depersonalize men in certain situations, but published research on the subject has not been carried out, experts say. But, Evolutionary Psychology would theorize that men view women as objects in terms of their youth and apparent fertility, while women might view men as instrumental in terms of their status and resources, Fiske noted.

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Posted by Jonathan in Anthropology, Sociobiology

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