https://digest.bps.org.uk/2018/08/17/brainwave-study-suggests-sexual-posing-but-not-bare-skin-leads-to-automatic-objectification/

The phrase “sexual objectification” began popping up only 50 years ago, but it’s now ubiquitous, reflecting our concern that seeing someone sexually amounts to perceiving them as eye candy or a piece of meat. More recently, psychologists and neuroscientists have gathered evidence that sexualisation can literally lead us to perceive people less as whole humans and more as an assemblage of parts – the same way that the mind normally processes objects.

But the picture is complicated by new work published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin from a team mainly drawn from the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Their experiments on the impact of various forms of sexualisation on the perception of the body find that objectification does not necessarily follow.

In their first experiment, Bernard’s team focused on an obvious way to sexualise a person, by reducing their clothing. Twenty-one participants (average age 22, and in all experiments a balance of genders, with no gendered effects observed) viewed pictures of males and females with pixellated faces wearing black jeans and shirts or black swim-trunks/bikinis. The change in N170 caused by inverting the pictures was similar for both scantily-clad and well-covered bodies – in other words, at a neural level there was no evidence for greater objectification of the more sexualised models.

It was in further experiments that neural evidence of objectification emerged, once researchers introduced pictures of models engaged in sexually suggestive postures (see image above). Regardless of their amount of clothing, when the models posed suggestively inversion did not lead to a change in the N170, which means that they were being perceived more like objects.

As far as I see it, suggestive posturing is a volitional act that we make in the moment, one that is intended to express “see what’s on offer”. That people respond to such invitations by checking out the wares rather than the person seems to me to reflect the response working as intended. In contrast, skin exposure need not be any kind of signal to a viewer – we expose skin when we wash, swim or stay cool (or just because we want to). That seeing skin can rouse some sexual feeling, but doesn’t automatically make us see the person any less, seems to me to be a fairly decent and respectful way for our perceptual and cognitive architecture to be put together.

I should leaven this optimistic take by recognising that these actions take place in a cultural context. In the hunt for ways to titillate and capture attention, media and advertising have exploited the sexual and objectifying qualities of the provocative pose, in a way that inundates and threatens to normalise this way of viewing.

In an ideal world, the way you pose is at your discretion, a consensual act. But where people feel pressure to actively signal sexuality, whether on Instagram or on a night out, the choice is less clearly free. And individuals who through inclination or conditioning are eager to objectify may not require suggestiveness from their target in order to do so; more work is needed to shed light on this. What this study tells us is simple: you can be seen as sexual, without being seen as an object

The study does seem to admit that bare skin triggers sexual association, but that association is contextual and doesn't automatically make us see the person as an object. It is the pose that dictates whether or not we process them as a person or as an object on a neurological level.

Fashions trends are often ephemeral, but trends that endure (such as high heels for females) emphasize sex-specific aspects of the body. Producing a permanent feminine gait and pose while standing may explain why heels have endured, while other styles such as shoulder pads have gone in and out of style.

Q4All: Do you believe the the objectification of men and women is natural?

Discussion on the study and its ramifications.