Physical appearance is one of the primary cues for individuals living in a society guided by a vast “sexual market” (Baumeister & Vohs, 2004). Physical appearance also influences people’s achievements in areas that are not directly related to the sexual domain, such as their career (e.g., Register & Williams, 1990) or their educational success (e.g., Crandall, 1991, 1995).

Beauty standards have become so severe in recent years (e.g., Katzmarzyk & Davis, 2001) that people can rarely expect to conform to them, and may suffer health-wise if they do (e.g., Monro & Huon, 2005; Moradi, Dirks, & Matteson, 2005). Moreover, judgments of physical appearance are influenced by culturally shared standards (e.g., Engeln-Maddox, 2006). In Western society, these standards are communicated through images of sexualized bodies. In our daily lives, we are indeed confronted with advertisements depicting individuals as sex objects. This paper aims to examine how these images influence the way people look at and perceive bodies, including their own.

Objectification and Sexual Objectification

Objectification is usually defined as focusing on physical appearance rather than on personality. This objectification or appearance focus may be applied to others (e.g., Heflick & Goldenberg, 2009; Heflick, Goldenberg, Cooper, & Puvia, 2011) or the self (see section on self-objectification). Heflick and Goldenberg (2009) were the first to demonstrate that perceivers attributed less humanness and less competence to a female celebrity and viewed her as similar to an object when focusing on her appearance as compared to her personality.

Sexual objectification is a specific type of appearance focus that is centered on the sexualized body. Sexual objectification consists in considering an individual as a body, or body parts, available for satisfying others’ needs and desires (Bartky, 1990). In social psychology, this concept has been recently operationalized by highlighting either the sexualized body (i.e., sexual objectification condition) as opposed to the face (e.g., Loughnan et al., 2010). Indeed, the face symbolizes the humanness and personhood of the target, whereas the sexualized body does not (Archer, Iritani, Kimes, & Barrios, 1983). Thus, focusing on the sexualized body of an individual could lead to dehumanization and diminished moral concern. The following section details these consequences.

Sexual objectification, dehumanization and moral treatment

It has been shown that the media primarily focus on body parts rather than the face when depicting women (i.e., face-ism bias), whereas this bias is usually absent or markedly reduced when men are portrayed in advertisement (e.g., Archer et al., 1983). Recent studies suggest that sexual objectification could cause negative social perception. For example, Loughnan and his colleagues (2010) have shown that people depersonalize men and women when they are portrayed as a body wearing a swimsuit or underwear (i.e., when they are sexually objectified) compared to when their face is highlighted (see also Gurung & Chrouser, 2007).

Moreover, Vaes and his colleagues have demonstrated that sexual objectification leads to animalize female targets (Vaes, Paladino, & Puvia, 2011). When completing a reaction time task requiring the categorization of words (i.e., animal vs. human words) and pictures (i.e., sexualized bodies vs. faces), people matched pictures to uniquely human characteristics less quickly than to animal characteristics, but only when the targets were sexualized women. These data suggest that people perceive women as closer to animals when their sexualized body is highlighted rather than their face. These authors have also shown that both men and women dehumanize sexually objectified women, but for different reasons. Women dehumanize sexualized female targets because they consider them as a disliked subcategory whereas men do so when a sex-goal is activated (Vaes et al., 2011).

Furthermore, Cikara, Eberhardt and Fiske (2011) have shown that men with higher hostile sexism scores are more likely to associate sexualized women (e.g., wearing a swimsuit) to first person verbs and non-sexualized (e.g., clothed) women to verbs at the third person. Given that attributing third person verbs denotes agency, these results suggest that sexualization diminishes attribution of agency.

In addition, the effects of objectification on dehumanized social perception may be more acute amongst people who hold sexist attitudes. Indeed, Cikara et al. (2011) found a negative association between hostile sexism and attribution of agency to sexualized female targets among male participants: The higher the level of hostile sexism is, the less they attribute agency to sexualized female targets. The level of this type of sexism, but not of benevolent sexism, was negatively correlated with the activation of neural networks involved in the attribution of mind.

Importantly, one of the implications of sexual objectification involves perception of rape victims and perpetrators. In the context of acquaintance rape, Loughnan and colleagues have shown that sexually objectified women are blamed more for being raped and viewed to have suffered less (Loughnan, Pina, & Vasquez, 2012). In addition, the effect of sexual objectification on anti-victim attitudes are explained by moral concern: People blame more a sexually objectified victim and evaluate that she had suffered less than a personalized one because they consider her as less deserving of moral concern.

Sexually objectifying media is one of the main sources of objectification. Another crucial channel of sexual objectification involves social interactions, notably trough the objectifying gaze.

Recognition and Objectifying gaze: When the body is “checked out”

Theoretically speaking, one of the most relevant cues of sexual objectification is the objectifying gaze (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997; Swim, Hyers, Cohen, & Ferguson, 2001), which consists in scrutinizing body parts (Kaschak, 1992). The objectifying gaze is present in the media, but also in social interactions when an individual’s body is “checked out”.

Objectifying gaze can be detrimental to female psychological heath. Anticipating a male objectifying gaze leads to greater body shame and social physique anxiety among women (Calogero, 2004). In addition, experiencing such a gaze is aversive (Saguy, Quinn, Dovidio, & Pratto, 2010), impairs cognitive performance (Gay & Castano, 2010; Gervais, Vescio, & Allen, 2011) and it has been shown that experiencing an objectifying gaze is positively related to self-objectification (Kozee, Tylka, Augustus-Horvath, & Denchik, 2007), eating disorders (Moradi et al., 2005) and substance abuse (Carr & Szymanski, 2011).

One can conceptualize the objectifying gaze as involving a visual perception of others as similar to objects rather than actual persons. A major question remains: How can we operationalize such a gaze? In order to answer this question, recent studies have focused on cognitive correlates of the objectifying gaze by drawing on the distinction between configural and analytic processing. Configural processing depends on perceiving relations and configurations among the constitutive parts of a stimulus. This type of recognition is involved in face and body postures’ recognition (for a review, see Maurer, Le Grand, & Mondloch, 2002). For instance, people are more accurate to identify a correct nose between two noses when this element is included in a whole face rather than isolated (e.g., Seitz, 2002; Tanaka & Farah, 1993). By contrast, analytic processing does not take into account spatial relations among the stimuli parts and this type of recognition is involved in object-recognition. For example, there is no difference between the percentages of correctly identified isolated parts vs. whole drawings of house (e.g., Reed, Stone, Grubb, & McGoldrick, 2006).

Recently, Gervais and her colleagues investigated the processes underlying the recognition of male and female bodies (Gervais, Vescio, Maass, Förster, & Suitner, 2012). In line with objectification theory (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997) which posits that women are more likely to suffer from the objectifying gaze, it was assumed that analytic processing (i.e., object-like recognition) occurs when perceiving female targets, whereas configural processing is likely to occur when perceiving their male counterparts. In line with their predictions, Gervais et al. (2012) found that female body parts were recognized better than whole bodies (i.e., object-like recognition), whereas the reverse pattern emerged for male targets (i.e., person-like recognition). Women’s body parts were also better recognized than men’s body parts. In addition, these effects were equivalent for male and female participants. Bernard and his colleagues found the same pattern for sexually objectified women: Even when sexualized, only women are the targets of the objectifying gaze (Bernard, Gervais, Campomizzi, Allen, & Klein, 2012a, 2012b). Furthermore, the objectifying gaze influences how sexualized women are socially perceived. When people (men and women) have to evaluate the target’s physical appearance rather than her personality features, Latrofa and Vaes (2012) have shown that the longer they looked at the female (but not male) targets, the more they dehumanized them.

Self-objectification: Internalizing the objectifying gaze

In line with feminist theorizing (e.g., Bartky, 1990; Nussbaum, 1995), Objectification Theory (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997) argues that the focus on female physical appearance embodied in media representations and the objectifying gaze leads to gender differences in the development of body image and attitudes towards physical appearance. As one’s peers and the media continually remind women of the importance of physical appearance, they progressively internalize the way people look at themselves and become increasingly preoccupied with their physical appearance. This internalization of a perceiver’s perspective produces what Fredrickson and Roberts (1997) call self-objectification. It is defined as focusing attention on aspects of one’s own body that can be viewed and evaluated by others (i.e., physical appearance, e.g., Quinn, Kallen, Twenge, & Fredrickson, 2006).

As a consequence, objectification theory (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997) predicts that women are more likely to suffer from the detrimental consequences of objectifying pressures. Self-objectification is operationalized as a stable personality trait (usually trough the Self-Objectification Questionnaire: cf. Noll & Fredrickson, 1998) or a as a state, via an experimental manipulation consisting, for example, in wearing a swimsuit vs. a sweater in front of a mirror (e.g., Frerickson, Roberts, Noll, Quinn, & Twenge, 1998; Quinn, Kallen, & Cathey, 2006). In an illustration of the detrimental effects of self-objectification, Fredrickson et al. (1998) demonstrated that for women (but not men), wearing a swimsuit (i.e., the state of self-objectification) heightened body shame, and impaired math performance, compared to wearing a sweater. These effects specifically occurred for individuals who already reported a high level of self-objectification.

Self-objectification is likely to exert a variety of psychological consequences among women especially, including body shame (e.g., Noll & Fredrickson, 1998) and eating disorders (e.g., Calogero, 2009). It also impairs psychological well-being (e.g., Mercurio & Landry, 2008), performance on tasks requiring peak motivational states (e.g., Fredrickson et al., 1998), self-efficacy (Gapinski, Brownel, & LaFrance, 2003), and sexual satisfaction (Calogero & Thompson, 2009; for a review, see Moradi & Huang, 2008).

Furthermore, women who self-objectify are more likely to objectify others, yielding a vicious circle. For example, women who are preoccupied with their weight and shape consider these dimensions as much more important than others when evaluating other women (Beebe, Hombeck, Schober, Lane, & Rosa, 1996). Strelan and Hargreaves (2005) found that self-objectification traits predict objectification when women evaluate other women: The more women focus on their appearance, the stronger they think that other women focus on theirs. Furthermore, Bernard, Gervais, Allen, Campomizzi, & Klein (2012b) found that the stronger people self-objectify, the more they perceive sexually objectified others similar to objects (i.e., self-objectification is associated to an impaired whole bodies recognition).

Conclusions

Objectification is a phenomenon exerting a major impact on social perception and moral concern. After a decade of studies centered on the consequences experienced by the targets of objectification, a new trend of research has focused on the psychology of the objectifiers (i.e., people who objectify). The few studies conducted in this area indicate that sexual objectification leads to diminished attribution of humanness and moral concern, and changes the way people look at bodies. Future research should aim at further examining the interpersonal consequences of this phenomenon (e.g., does sexual objectification impact the perception of women in everyday life?). Moreover, objectification is not necessarily detrimental to women (e.g., it is possible to capitalize on one’s “looks” to attain a goal). Thus, addressing when objectification becomes beneficial (e.g., Breines, Crocker, & Garcia, 2008), detrimental, or even pathological, is a major challenge facing future research.

Given that being exposed to objectifying pressures (e.g., media and gaze) is likely to be internalized, undermining physical and psychological well-being, especially among women, how can we fight it? It seems difficult to change the impression formation processes elicited by viewing sexualized women as this process is largely automatic. Nevertheless, one solution could involve urging advertisers to use sexualized images of women only when these are directly related to the product (e.g., for selling beauty products and underwear). Relying more on faces rather than bodies could actually increase the “personhood” of the product and, simultaneously, contribute to breaking the vicious circle of objectification.

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