We are well aware of the concept of “woman vase”. It tends to be an idea linked to the world of marketing and the society of the spectacle , spheres of public life that reach us especially through the big media.

We all see with relative normality that the role of hostess in a television program is, almost always, occupied by a woman who remains in a rather passive attitude. Nor is it rare to see how the aesthetic side of women is exploited commercially in advertisements , films or sometimes even in sport.

Sexual objectification and neurons: men’s brains in the face of scantily clad women

Since the woman’s body is so sought after by the cameras, it is worth asking if, beyond the economic results of hiring vase women , the brain of the heterosexual man has learned to behave differently in front of women when they are dressed in little clothes.

Could it be that the reification of the woman is embodied in the way the neuron tissues interact?

What is sexual objectification?

The reification can be summarized as the consideration that a person is actually something like an object . When someone reifies another person, they believe, to a greater or lesser extent and more or less unconsciously, that what they are seeing is an animated body, without taking into account the factors that characterise them as human beings capable of thinking and making decisions autonomously. The sexual reification , in particular, consists of letting a person’s aesthetic and sexual attributes define them completely.

The example of the stewardess mentioned above can be considered a form of reification: the woman becomes only the part of her body that we perceive as an object, and it is this “object made of flesh” that represents the whole woman, beyond her condition as a human being. The philosopher Judith Butler said on this subject, from a more abstract point of view:

In the philosophical tradition that begins with Plato and continues with Descartes, Husserl and Sartre, the ontological differentiation between soul (consciousness, mind) and body always defends relations of subordination and political and psychic hierarchy.

The mind not only subdues the body, but eventually plays with the fantasy of totally escaping its corporeality. The cultural associations of the mind with masculinity and the body with femininity are well documented in the field of philosophy and feminism .

And the fact is that the objectification of women is not only degrading in moral terms, but can have a very material and dramatic expression because it is linked to a desire to dominate everything feminine . It should be taken into account, for example, that where there is dehumanization of women there is also a greater probability of sexually assaulting them or subjecting them to humiliating treatment, according to some research. Despite the fact that, by definition, both men and women can be objectified, this fact is still alarming.

Everyday sexism

Moreover, reification occurs not only on the TV screen. Anyone can see these same trends reproduced on the street, in bars, at universities and even in homes. It is a widespread phenomenon and this reification towards women may also be embodied in patterns of neural activation within the brain.

An experiment conducted by Susan Fiske, Mina Cikara and members of Priceton University seems to suggest that, at least in some contexts, men’s brains perceive scantily clad women more as objects than as beings with feelings and subjectivity of their own . Sexual objectification would thus have a material expression in at least part of the brains belonging to heterosexual men.

Looking for correlations in the brain

In the study, the brains of a number of heterosexual men were scanned with a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) device while they were shown four types of images: women in street clothes, women in light clothing, men in light clothing and men in light clothing.

Thanks to the results of the resonances, it was possible to see how viewing images of women with little clothing activated areas of the brain typically related to the handling of instruments (such as the premotor cortex), while this did not occur if the stimulus was a woman dressed in a conventional manner, a man with little clothing or a man dressed in a conventional manner. The areas of the brain that are activated during the attribution of mental states to other living beings were activated less in those men who manifested a greater degree of hostile sexism (misogynist attitudes).

In addition, this same group of men was more likely to associate images of sexualized women with first-person verbs (“agarro”), rather than with third-person verbs (“agarra”). All of this leads us to think about a world in which being a woman and taking off certain clothes can be a reason for men to take you for something that looks very much like a human being.

This, of course, would have very serious implications if what you were seeing was the imprint that reification leaves on the brains of straight men.

How do you interpret this?

The meaning of these results is not clear. Seeing clear activation patterns in the areas that are usually activated when something is done does not mean that those areas of the brain are responsible for triggering those specific functions. Groups of neurons in the premotor cortex, for example, are activated in many other situations.

As for the association between verbs and images, although they serve in any case to reinforce the hypothesis that women with little clothing are seen as objects, it is not possible to ensure that the product of these patterns of activation is sexual reification . Reification is too abstract a concept to be associated with such concrete neural patterns from a single investigation, but this does not mean that they could be related.

This experiment can be seen as an invitation to further research in this regard since, despite the haze of uncertainty surrounding these results, gender bias, machismo, reification and their neural correlates is an area that deserves to be studied. If only to avoid the appearance of barriers that separate both halves of the population.

Bibliographic references:

  • Butler, J. 2007 [1999]. The gender in dispute. Feminism and the subversion of identity. Barcelona: Espasa.
  • Cikara, M., Eberhardt, J. L., and Fiske, S. T. (2011). From agents to objects: Sexist attitudes and neural responses to sexualized targets. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23(3), pp. 540 – 551.

  • Rudman, L. A. and Mescher, K. (2012). Of Animals and Objects: Men’s Implicit Dehumanization of Women and Likelihood of Sexual Aggression. Personality & social psychology bulletin, 38(6), pp. 734 – 746. doi:0.1177/0146167212436401