Hot Chicks in Bikinis: Seen as Less Than Human?

Posted by Tana Ganeva, AlterNet at 4:50 AM on February 18, 2009.

For years now, all those whiny, irritating feminists have been blah blah blah-ing about the sexual objectification of women.

And, you probably thought they were just jealous, right?

Well, you can shove it, cause get this: a recent study confirms that some heterosexual men literally view attractive women as objects.

Scientists put 21 heterosexual men into MRI machine and showed them pictures of fully clothed men and women, and men and women dressed in skimpier outfits.

In one of the many discomfiting results of the study, a memory test at the end showed that men best remembered the photos of the scantily-clad women whose heads had been digitally removed.

But even stranger was that brain scans revealed that when the men were shown photos of women in bikinis, their premotor cortex lit up -- the part of the brain that is activated when men are exposed to objects like power tools. 

Meanwhile, among men who displayed sexist tendencies, photos of hot women shut down the part of the brain responsible for social interaction. Men who tested as "hostile sexists" showed no activity in the brain region that interprets human intentions and emotions. Apparently, the women did not register as human beings.

Susan Fiske, a Princeton psychologist who reported on the findings at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said "The lack of activation in this social cognition area is really odd, because it hardly ever happens."

According to the National Geographic, the only other instance in which brain scans revealed a total lack of activity in this region of the brain occured when test subjects were shown pictures of homeless people and drug addicts -- those, apparently, are the other groups that people see as not fully human.

Fiske also argued that the unending stream of hot women in the media is at least partly to blame. According to the Daily Princetonian, Fiske said "I think [the study] does relate 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 … You have to be aware of the effect of these images on people … They're not neutral. They do have an effect on how people think about other women."

Viewing women as objects, unsurprisingly, has real-world real world repercussions. According to Fiske, "We know from other research that after men see sexualized images of women, they treat other women in a more sexualized way, even in an irrelevant and inappropriate context such as a job interview."

And while Fiske does not in any way advocate censorship, she says that it's important for people "to be aware of these unintended consequences."

Tagged as: media, women, sexism, sexuality, objectification