​Sexual Objectification: The Man’s Brain When Faced With The Woman In A Bikini

We are well aware of the concept of “vase woman.” It is usually an idea linked to the world of marketing and entertainment societyspheres of public life that reach us especially through the major 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 unusual to see how the aesthetic aspect of women is commercially exploited in advertisements movies or sometimes even in sports.

Sexual objectification and neurons: the man’s brain when faced with scantily clad women

Since the woman’s body is so sought after by the cameras, it is worth asking if, beyond the economic results of hiring women vasethe heterosexual man’s brain has learned to behave differently around women when they are dressed scantily.

Could it be that the objectification of women was reflected in the way neuron tissues interact?

What is sexual objectification?

The reification can be summarized as the consideration that a person is actually something similar to an object When someone objectifies another person, they believe, to a greater or lesser extent and more or less unconsciously, that what they are seeing is an animated body, without taking into account the factors that characterize them as a human being capable of thinking and making decisions. autonomously. The sexual objectification specifically, consists of letting a person’s aesthetic and sexual attributes define them 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 entire woman, more beyond his condition as a human being. The philosopher Judith Butler said about this topic, from a more abstract point of view:

In the philosophical tradition that begins with Plato and continues with Descartes, Husserl and Sartre, the ontological differentiation between soul (consciousness, mind) and body It always defends relations of subordination and political and psychic hierarchy.

The mind not only subjugates the body, but eventually plays with the fantasy of totally escaping its corporeality. The cultural associations of the mind with masculinity and the body with femininity are well documented in the field of philosophy and feminism

And the objectification of women is not only degrading in moral terms, but It can have a very material and dramatic expression as it is linked to a desire to dominate everything feminine It must be taken into account, for example, that where there is dehumanization of women there is also a greater probability of sexually assaulting them or subjecting them to humiliating treatment, according to some research. Although, by definition, both men and women can be objectified, this fact is still alarming.

Everyday sexism

Furthermore, objectification occurs not only on television screens. Anyone can see these same trends reproduced on the street, in bars, in universities and even in homes. It is a very widespread phenomenon and this objectification of women may also be reflected in neural activation patterns inside 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 more as objects 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) machine while they were shown four types of images: women in street clothes, women in scanty clothes, men in street clothes, and men in scanty clothes. clothes.

Thanks to the results of the MRIs, it was possible to verify how looking at images of women with little clothing caused areas of the brain typically related to the handling of instruments to be activated (such as the premotor cortex), whereas this did not occur if the stimulus was a conventionally dressed woman, a scantily clad man, or a conventionally dressed man. The areas of the brain that are activated during the attribution of mental states to other living beings were less activated in those men who expressed a higher degree of hostile sexism (misogynistic attitudes).

Furthermore, this same group of men was more likely to associate images of sexualized women with first-person verbs (“grab”), and not so much with third-person verbs (“grab”). All of this leads us 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 similar to a human being.

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

How is this interpreted?

The significance of these results is unclear. Seeing clear activation patterns in the areas that are usually activated when you do something 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.

Regarding 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 Reification is too abstract a concept to be associated with such specific neural patterns based on a single investigation, but that does not mean that they could be related.

This experiment can be considered an invitation to continue researching in this sense since, despite the haze of uncertainty that surrounds these results, gender biases, machismo, objectification and their neural correlates is an area that deserves to be studied. Even if it is to avoid the appearance of barriers that separate both halves of the population.