Half-Naked Pinays as Objects?

A recent study found that some men may view scantily clad women as objects rather than as people. Male heterosexuals had their brains scanned by an MRI machine while they viewed a series of photographs of men and women, some of whom were fully clothed and others of whom wore only swimsuits. The pictures of bikini-clad women activated brain regions associated with objects or “things you manipulate with your hands”. These men also remembered the photos of the half-naked women better than they did any of the others noting that the subjects remembered the bodies, not the faces, most clearly. These results indicated that some men may objectify or dehumanize partially clothed women, though further research is needed to confirm these findings.

 Study participants were also asked to fill out a survey designed to measure how sexist they are. The researchers found that when the men whose surveys indicated that they were the most sexist saw the pictures of women in bikinis, they were least likely to activate a part of the brain associated with thinking about people’s minds and thoughts. This  relates to the effects of having pornography and sexualized images of women around and in the media because they spill over into how people treat women in general. These images may dehumanize women and encourage men to see them as objects. The reactions observed in the study might be a consequence of society’s emphasis on sexualized female imagery.

It was also noted that men do not look at their wives or sisters in the same way that they look at a sexualized image of a woman on an advertising billboard. Men’s perceptions of scantily clad women may be closely related to the ways people “dehumanize” groups from which they wish to distance themselves, such as homeless people and drug addicts.

Women may also see men as objects in some ways. These findings are not unique to men. The results would likely have been similar for women, perhaps in terms of male status.

It’s certainly not uncommon for men to reduce women to body parts; objectification is the reason that men say ‘get some ass’ and not ‘get some fully three-dimensional human. Women also objectify men, though that is often considered less socially acceptable. The findings seem to confirm what women have been complaining about for decades as they walk past construction sites, though they do give a new, scientific basis to the social phenomenon of objectification. The research appears to provide evidence of a more hardwired, less socially constructed tendency to objectify women, which will make eradicating the problem that much harder.

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