The Eyes of Medusa: The Objectification of the Self and Others
Objectifying Another Person
Objectification of the body, and its sexual objectification in particular, is omnipresent in our society and is inescapable because it is an inherent result of biopsychosocial motivations driven by neural circuitry and hormonal cycles of sexual desire as well as cultural and psychological images and beliefs about the nature of masculinity and femininity, and what is beautiful and desirable.
Women are subject to a disproportionate focus on their physical traits in both the media and in their daily lives. The female body is objectified for its erotic desirability far more than the male body and common example of this is found in how society views its competitive athletes. An analysis of the covers of Sports Illustrated of summer Olympic athletes (n = 78) spanning 60 years was conducted to chart gender differences in levels of muscularity and degrees of sexual objectification. Historically, males have received more media attention than females, but this is changing. The percentage of female athletes participating in the summer games has risen from 13.3 percent in 1956 to 45 percent today. Men are still more frequently depicted, but while the images of women are increasing these are drawn more often from the aesthetic sports. Male images are drawn from the endurance sports. One gender difference is in the portrayal of the cover subject. “Overall, female athletes were generally depicted as smiling and posed for the camera, with over half of them depicted in ways unrelated to their sport, while male athletes were portrayed engaged in physical activity, generally their sport,” (Dafferner, Campagna, & Rodgers, 2019, p. 159). One trend is that athletes are being posed for the camera to increase their attractiveness while another is that both men and women have increased muscularity. These findings are consistent of the prevalent objectification of attractive male and female bodies in advertising and entertainment magazines.
Recent research confirms that emphasizing the physical aspects of the female body by others causes women to be perceived like and act like objects lacking mind. This is known as literal objectification and is based on attributing to women fewer humanizing traits and more non-human, object-like traits. Women, when they are conscious of this focus, often respond by behaving more like passive objects than independent agents (Heflick & Goldenberg, 2014). So people can be objectified by others and objectify themselves and often the two forces go together.
There are seven ways to objectify a person’s body:
- Using a person’s body as a tool with or without the body owner’s assent.
- Negating a person’s personal power to act as an independent, self-willing individual.
- Treating a person’s body as if it was entirely devoid of self-motive power; like a sack of potatoes.
- Making a person’s body into a homogenous commodity by treating it as equivalent and interchangeable with any other body.
- Making a person so irrelevant that his or her boundaries may be violated at will.
- Turning a person into a possession to be owned, bought and sold.
- Treating a person as they were totally devoid of feelings (Nussbaum, 1995).
One part of the problem is having one’s body become visually targeted for sexual excitement; the so-called objectifying “gaze” which is a philosophical concept originated by Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) in Being and Nothingness and pirated by feminism and some areas of sociology. The objectifying gaze is defined as visually inspecting a woman’s body or sexual body parts for personal enjoyment. Sexual objectification occurs whenever a woman’s body, body parts, or sexual functions are separated out from her person, reduced to the status of mere instruments, or regarded as if they were capable of representing her (Bartky, 1990). In other words, when objectified, women are treated as just bodies and, in particular, as bodies that exist for the use and pleasure of others.
Historically, such gazing has been known as “ogling,” “leering,” and “checking out.” This gaze turns the female body into an object thus depriving her of her own personhood. One study which confirmed the nature of the objectifying gaze asked 29 college and 36 college men to focus on the appearance of female images. The images included female bodies that conformed to cultural ideals of large breasts and average waist-to-hip ratios. Eye tracking while viewing revealed that more time was spent looking at the chest and waist areas (Gervais & Holland, 2013). Sexually-objectifying gazing has been shown to inhibit cognitive performance and attention focus in women (Guizzo & Cadinu, 2017). Women find the male gaze more objectifying than that of another woman’s in that the former evokes more body shame and social physique anxiety (Calogero, 2004).
Another study compared three different types of objectifying gazes: male, female, and self-gaze. Results showed that a female’s own self-gaze results in the strongest experience of self-objectification while there was little difference between the effects of male and female gazes (Yilmaz & Bozo, 2019). Objectifying the body of another is always socially and morally reprehensible to some degree, but, unfortunately, objectification is a ubiquitous part of modern society to to sell products and services. “The common thread running through all forms of sexual objectification is the experience of being treated as a body (or collection of body parts) valued predominantly for its use (or consumption) by others” (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997, p. 174). This is done by turning the body into a symbolic object to attract consumer attention, to sexual stimulate as in the case of pornography or exotic dancing, or to entertain as in sports performance. Human bodies are “commodified” by mass market culture. Both the male and female body is transformed into objects of commerce, but women’s bodies far more so than those of men. The beauty and diet industries both exploit feminine fears and fantasies to sell products. This has led to high body dissatisfaction in children as young as six in the Western industrialized nations. Women’s bodies are objectified by being turned into images to be looked at mainly by men (Rice, 2014).
The concept of someone’s gaze having negative psychosocial effects upon another tends to be rather questionable, yet research confirms that it does have effects on those with poor self-esteem, low ego strength, body shame, and appearance anxiety. The effects can be rather powerful as they include shame, anxiety, depression, sexual dysfunction, heightened body-self surveillance, inhibited cognitive performance, and disordered eating. Other personality traits that make a person to vulnerable objectification are neuroticism, narcissism, and perfectionism especially vanity and the need for admiration (Carrotte & Anderson, 2018). The latter would indicate an ego weakness.
While much research has affirmed that self-objectification stems from the objectifying behaviors of other people, it has recently found to be related to the subjective observations of one’s own body. Thinking about one’s physical appearance in a negative light contributes to self-objectification. This is mainly the case for women, but, interestingly, not so much for men. In this regard, men tend to score lower than women in self-objectification and body image disturbance, but not by much as they too are subject to bodily self-objectification own self-worth based on their physical appearance along with the degree they engage in body-self surveillance (Moya-Garófano & Moya, 2019).
Heterosexual women respond strongly with increased body shame and body surveillance. Lesbian women and gay men respond less strongly. Body surveillance and body shame are not as high in heterosexual men. So, as opposed to heterosexual men, heterosexual women appear to be in double jeopardy. They have the highest levels of body surveillance and body shame. Also, their body shame correlates with increased eating disorder (Engeln-Maddox, Miller, & Doyle, 2011).
Gay males share the same problems of heterosexual women. Research indicates that gay males experience greater body dissatisfaction than other groups due to their higher levels of gender non-conformity. Sexual objectification as a form of psychosocial oppression is just as present in the gay community as it is in the heterosexual one (Wood, 2004) and on levels par with heterosexual women (Engeln-Maddox, Miller, & Doyle, 2011). Likewise, lesbian women experience sexual objectification and self-objectification at levels similar to heterosexual women, but they report less body-self surveillance in response (Engeln-Maddox, Miller, & Doyle, 2011; Hill & Fischer, 2008).
Objectifying Your Body-Self
How does one turn one’s body-self into an object? The answer is in a variety of different ways and situations ranging from the mundane, everyday to the not-in-a-good-way extraordinary. The process of sexual self-objectification is rather straightforward. It is a distinct somatopsychic event resulting from the activation of specific body-brain processes. Self-objectification is a three-fold chain of events starting with accepting being objectified, internalizing this view, and then behaving accordingly. First, a person is gazed at or interacted with in such a way to emphasize their sexual body-self. They then internalize this viewpoint which lowers their body image and emotional state. This then begins a cycle of body shame, increased self-consciousness in the form of body surveillance and body checking, depression, and self-objectifying behaviors (Engeln-Maddox, Miller, & Doyle, 2011).
The first neural process that helps create the experience of self-objectification is spatial cognition. Body consciousness has an egocentric perspective and an allocentric perspective. The egocentric representation of the body in space orients toward the environment and objects in relation to ourselves. The allocentric view is taking a perspective outside of ourselves regarding objects especially those not visible to us. These two frames of references are depending on memory storage and retrieval. Therefore, the allocentric brain processes predominate when feeling objectified. It is possible for a person to become trapped in this self-reinforcing cycle. This is known as the allocentric lock hypothesis which was developed to explain, in part, the psychological fixations of anorexia nervosa. The effects are threefold. First, it gives the person the fixated experience of having the “wrong” body and, no matter what they do to modify their bodies, the results never match their internalized ideal. Second, self-objectification puts a person’s memory out of synch with present reality. Finally, it motivates striving for unrealistic goals in everyday social interactions and situations. There is no winning for persons locked into self-objectifying processes (Riva, Gaudio, & Dakanalis, 2015).
Self-objectification in general begins with small things. A common example is that of a person exercising and pushing their body harder and harder and eventually just treating it like a machine. Another is a woman applying cosmetics, hairstyling, and padded clothing to disguise her true looks into a more sexually-attractive appearance. More extreme examples are those of exotic dancers and prostitutes who sell their bodies for sex (e.g., see Coy, 2009). Another extreme is that of bodybuilders and competitive athletes who engage in dangerous practices of androgenic-anabolic steroid use and disordered dieting. Then there are cases of people who pursue a fantasy-ideal of physical perfection, drug addiction, extreme body modification, self-mutilation, and suicide which all require that the body be turned into an object.
While women experience self-objectification after being looked at sexually, men are also susceptible. A study of 227 female and 193 male undergraduates viewing the images of athletes in either a sexualized format or of them performing their sport showed that for both men and women the sexualized images increased self-objectification (Ruh-Linder & Daniels, 2018). Women who view magazine advertisements feature models who reflect the thin ideal are more prone to self-objectification, become more anxious about their weight and more dissatisfied with their bodies (Harper & Tiggemann, 2008).
Closing Thoughts
Objectification, especially the sexual objectification of children, is reprehensible and I’m not here to defend objectification in any of its myriad ways, shapes, and forms, but to point out it occurs on a spectrum, and anyone is vulnerable to being objectified (including the non-sexual), and that it appears to be neurologically-hardwired. And, conversely, anyone can objectify another person. Psychologically separating your body–or any part of it–from the self is invocating a mind-body split and so fall into the darkness of the Cartesian Gap.
I argue that objectification is a neurologically-determined ability for several reasons. First, there is the biological aspect. Physical characteristics we naturally find attractive and exciting are youth, health, potential fertility, size (small and large depending on gender preference), shapeliness versus muscularity (depending on gender preference) and larger secondary and primary sex organs (also depending on gender preference). The fact, and this is rather frightening to consider, is just how biologically hardwired men are to evaluate the sexual potential of another body. Eye-tracking studies of men looking at women’s bodies affirm that men can scan a woman’s body in milliseconds. They focus on the midriff and buttocks when looking at a woman’s back and at the breasts and waist when viewing the front. Male visual tracking prefers a waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) of 0.70 and larger breasts (Dixson et al., 2010, 2011). Even blind men prefer low WHRs (Karremans, Frankenhuis, & Arons, 2010). These physical ideals are neurologically-based and cannot be changed by social conditioning although they may be modified and controlled with education and training.
This neurological hardwiring is demonstrated by the well-established fact that people tend to see the entire, global totality of a structure rather than the parts or local details. Those come later. The female body, however, violates this rule most likely because several of its parts are highly sexualized visual signals: breasts, waist, legs, and buttocks. Viewers of female bodies, both men and women, have a sexual body-part recognition-bias in which they see women’s sexual body parts in isolation from the entire body. The same viewers, however, see the male body as a whole rather than its sexual parts (Gervais et al., 2012; Seitz, 2002; Tanaka & Farah, 1993).
Second, consciousness has the natural ability to self-reflect upon itself and so turn itself into an object of reflection. This allows us to categorize, separate, compartmentalize, and dissociate. We can make ourselves into an object or turn another person into an object simply by thinking, believing, and perceiving in certain ways.
While men are more blatant, aggressive, and often tasteless about the whole thing, women are not exempted from doing the same upon occasion as they have their internal standards of optimal sexual attractiveness. Worse, consider that our society along with entire industries are founded on objectifying the body for sexual titillation, entertainment, or just to push consumer products. Body objectification—especially those bodies which meet the cultural ideals of physical beauty–is a profitable enterprise in media, sports, entertainment, and fashion. The mass media and digital media’s transmission of sexualized images is fast and thorough. These images are virtually unavoidable in American culture. The sexual objectification of the female body has permeated our cultural milieu and so must affect the self-perceptions of girls and women to various degrees (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997).
What I think is needed here is education—probably concurrent with the introduction of sex education—with a special emphasis on male proclivities and their negative consequences. Adolescence is the time when girls experience growing amounts of sexual objectification and the beginnings of objectified body consciousness (Lindberg, Grabe, & Shibley Hyde, 2007). Boys especially need guidance given the intensity of their burgeoning sexual desires—and boys are rarely given any support or education along these lines—and their susceptibility to sexual stimulation; i.e., pornography which is now widely available via the Internet (see Jhe et al., 2023).
Paul Shane, Ph.D., LMT
Director, Academic Content
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Revised 05-03-24.