Being a Body: Women’s Appearance Related Self-Views and their Dehumanization of Sexually Objectified Female Targets

By Elisa Puvia, Jeroen Vaes. Sex Roles, 2012

90 citations recorded by the source corpus.

When sexually objectified, women are reduced to their bodies or sexual body parts and become likely targets of dehumanization. Not only men, but also women engage in this process. In the present research, we tested the link between women’s appearance related self-views and their tendency to dehumanize sexually objectified female targets. Specifically, we test two mediational models and predict that (1) women’s motivation to look attractive to men and (2) their tendency to internalize the sociocultural beauty standards are linked with the dehumanization of sexually objectified female targets, and their level of self-objectification mediates both relations. To test these hypotheses, a sample of 55 heterosexual undergraduate female students from Northern Italy volunteered. Participants’ motivation to look attractive to men, their level of internalization of the sociocultural beauty standards, and their tendency to self-objectify was measured. Results confirmed that only sexually objectified female targets were significantly dehumanized, while their non-objectified counterparts were not. Moreover, both participants’ motivation to look attractive to men and their tendency to internalize the sociocultural beauty standards were positively linked with the dehumanization of sexually objectified female targets. As expected, these relations were mediated by participants’ level of self-objectification. These results show that higher levels of self-objectification among those women who are motivated either to look attractive to men or to internalize the sociocultural beauty standards are linked with their tendency to dehumanize sexually objectified female targets.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Marketing, Museology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/718391d0fae2f18c0bcc9fe20433be1b40b2fc29

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Marketing

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Sarah J. Gervais

Citations in the corpus

Sexualized Avatars Lead to Women’s Self-Objectification and Acceptance of Rape Myths (2015, background): “Puvia and Vaes (2013) found that women’s self-objectification led them to dehumanize other women.”
My Eyes Are Up Here: The Nature of the Objectifying Gaze Toward Women (2013, background): “Yet, this finding is consistent with the idea that women may internalize the male gaze and self-objectify, which in turn leads them to exhibit the objectifying gaze toward other women (Puvia and Vaes 2012).”
Revisiting the Jezebel Stereotype (2018, background): “Further, in line with previous work (e.g., Puvia & Vaes, 2013; Vaes et al., 2011), we expected sexualized targets to be more strongly implicitly associated with animals and objects than their non-sexualized counterparts.”