The Science Of Feminism: 9 Studies Of Gender (In)Equality

4. Female Objectification

rosie the riveter science
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When people talk about the "objectification" of women, it is largely seen as something of a metaphor, but new research suggests that the brain actually literally treats the female body as an object.

The brain has two different ways of processing information: Global and local. Global processing takes in an object as a whole and is often used when identifying a human, whereas an object will elicit a local response. For example, you probably wouldn't recognise even your best friend by looking at jut their nose, whereas you might be able to recognise a house by just its front door.

In a study, 227 participants were shown images of fully clothed women and men, given a short break, and then shown two versions of the image side by side, one of which was subtly altered in a sexualised region such as the chest or crotch. Sometimes they were shown the full image, sometimes it was just zoomed in on the body part and they had to identify which was the original, unaltered image.

The result was that both men and women found it easier to identify women by their body parts, and men as a whole. This is because they were processing the women's bodies locally and the men's bodies globally. In other words, they were literally objectifying women.

Before you go off saying that this means you simply can help it and it's just the way your brain is wired, the scientists also managed to prevent the effects by making the participants perform and exercise in global processing before looking at the images, leading them to believe that this is a learnt behaviour rather than an innate one. 

This is not so much as "why" as a "how" in terms of the objectification of women and the "why" is likely to be a much more complex combination of factors that simple brain processing.

 
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