For many gender equality is prevented by the sexual objectification of women. Objecitification theory implies that a womans appearance is primarily assessed by her sexual body parts, while the body as a whole and the face are of lower significance. Consequently perception of women as persons would underlie a sexual objectification bias.
The undeniably delicate debate on sexual objectification was further fueled by Sarah J. Gervais and coworkers, who tested for a ‘sexual body part recognition bias’. Being cognitive psychologists, the authors tried to elucidate whether the perception of men and women is processed globally, as attributed to persons, or locally, as attributed to objects and whether women’s sexual body parts are of greater importance in recognition than their entire bodies.
The reader may understand the two levels of perception by thinking of a photo mosaic: On a first glance one sees merely the overlying structure, which is perceived as a whole by global processing. A second process of close scrutiny reveals the individual images, since the overlying structure is disassembled into detaiils this represents local processing. One individual image in isolation however would again be globally processed at first. Local processing is common for objects: One can recognize an object although only a part is visible, a task which is thought to fail for persons.
The authors chose to test chests and waists which function as everyday-life indicator in gender discrimination and are found to be equally sexualized for men and women. In a first experiment Gervais and coworkers presented images of whole bodies, male and female, as original and as a version featuring a slight modification at chest or waist. The participants were asked to identify the original. A second experiment was identical except for showing only isolated body parts, meaning chests or waists, thereby enforcing global processing.
The authors hypothesized that if perception of women would underlie a sexual body part recognition bias their body parts would be recognized equally well when presented in context of the whole body, thereby underlying local processing because they are a part of the whole, and when presented as isolated body parts which underlie global processing, since they are the only content of the image.
The intriguing result of the study: Women’s sexual body parts are recognized equally well in the context of their whole body and in isolation. This is independent of the perceiver’s gender. In contrast men’s sexual body parts were recognized better when presented in the context of the whole body, again independent of the perceiver’s gender.
Are men and women really perceived in different ways? If so: Why is this difference independent of the perceiver’s gender? Is there a cultural reason for this difference? And if cultural reasons would be identified: Should we change our culture? Many questions remain.
Felix Spenkuch
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[1] Sarah J. Gervais, Theresa K. Vescio, Jens F?rster, Anne Maass and Caterina Suitner, European
Journal of Psychology 2012, 42, 6, p.743-753.