Up for Grabs? Sexual Objectification as a Mediator Between Women's Alcohol Use and Sexual Victimization

Sexual objectification, the tendency to reduce women to their bodies, body parts, or sexual functions for use by others, has been theorized to set the stage for more severe acts of violence but has been largely absent from the existing sexual victimization literature. 

The purpose of this study was to explore the role of sexual objectification in mediating the well-established link between women's alcohol use and sexual victimization. A large sample of undergraduate women (N = 673) reported their alcohol use (frequency and quantity), experiences of sexual objectification (body evaluation and unwanted explicit sexual advances), and sexual victimization. 

Results indicated positive bivariate correlations among all study variables. Path analyses showed that mild forms of sexual objectification (body evaluation) mediated the link between the frequency of alcohol use and more extreme forms of sexual objectification (unwanted advances). 

Furthermore, the combined effect of sexual objectification (body evaluation and unwanted advances) mediated the link between alcohol use (frequency and quantity) and sexual victimization. The current findings are among the first to evaluate sexual objectification as a mechanism in the link between alcohol use and sexual victimization. 

Results suggest that efforts to prevent alcohol-related sexual violence may benefit from addressing sexual objectification.

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By: Haikalis M1, DiLillo D2, Gervais SJ2.

• 1University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA MichelleHaik@gmail.com.
• 2University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA.  

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Cute Little Things: The Objectification of Prepubescent Girls

In two studies, we examined the impact of sexualization of prepubescent girls on college students’ perceptions of girls’ mental capacity and moral standing. Previous research has shown that women depicted in sexualized and other body-focused ways are perceived as lacking mental capacities and moral standing; these perceptions reduce concern about them when they are victimized. However, no other research to date has examined whether the same effects hold for young girls. 

Study 1 demonstrated that college students attributed lower mental capacity and lower moral status to girls dressed in revealing attire in the same way, and to the same degree, as they viewed sexually mature women. 

In Study 2, we replicated this finding and found that objectifying perceptions are associated with less sympathetic responses to girls in a bullying scenario. Participants showed less care that sexually objectified girls had been harmed, less favorable attitudes towards helping them, and a greater belief that the girls were responsible for being victimized. 

Taken together, these findings suggest that the potentially damaging manifestations and consequences of objectification are manifest before girls reach womanhood. We suggest recommendations for reducing the sexualization of young girls. 

Additional online materials for this article are available to PWQ subscribers on PWQ’s website at http://pwq.sagepub.com/supplemental

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By:  Elise Holland, Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Redmond Barry Building, Victoria 3010, Australia.

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Power, Objectification, and Recognition of Sexualized Women and Men

In contemporary society, sexual objectification is usually thought of as something that men do to women. However, this notion risks conflating the gender of the perpetrator with the fact that men often hold more social power than women. In the current study, we investigated whether power itself was associated with changes in processing of sexualized human targets, independent of the gender of the power holder. 

In Experiment 1, we primed separate groups of female participants to high-, low-, or neutral-power. We then engaged them in a recognition task involving upright or inverted sexualized images of men and women. Previous research using stimulus inversion manipulations has found that inversion of faces/bodies, but not of objects, disrupts recognition performance, suggesting a reliance on more configural processing in face/body perception compared to object perception. 

We found that women primed to high-power did not show an inversion effect for sexualized men but did show an inversion effect for sexualized women. In contrast, women primed to low-power showed an inversion effect for sexualized men and women. In Experiment 2, we replicated this finding and found a similar effect of power for male participants perceiving sexualized images of women. We discuss our results with reference to the literatures on objectification and the cognitive processes involved in the perception of sexualized men and women. 

Our study provides seminal evidence that power, rather than gender per se, may play a central role in sexual objectification.

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By: 

Ciro Civile1⇑

Sukhvinder S. Obhi1

¹Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behavior (PNB), McMaster University, Ontario, Canada 

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