magazine issue 2 2012 / Issue 14

“Look in my eyes. I said in my eyes!”: Antecedents and Consequences of (Self-) Objectification

• written by Philippe Bernard, Christophe Leys & Olivier Klein
• edited by Rosanna Guadagno

Recognition and Objectifying gaze: When the body is “checked out”

Theoretically speaking, one of the most relevant cues of sexual objectification is the objectifying gaze (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997; Swim, Hyers, Cohen, & Ferguson, 2001), which consists in scrutinizing body parts (Kaschak, 1992). The objectifying gaze is present in the media, but also in social interactions when an individual’s body is “checked out”.

Objectifying gaze can be detrimental to female psychological heath. Anticipating a male objectifying gaze leads to greater body shame and social physique anxiety among women (Calogero, 2004). In addition, experiencing such a gaze is aversive (Saguy, Quinn, Dovidio, & Pratto, 2010), impairs cognitive performance (Gay & Castano, 2010; Gervais, Vescio, & Allen, 2011) and it has been shown that experiencing an objectifying gaze is positively related to self-objectification (Kozee, Tylka, Augustus-Horvath, & Denchik, 2007), eating disorders (Moradi et al., 2005) and substance abuse (Carr & Szymanski, 2011).

One can conceptualize the objectifying gaze as involving a visual perception of others as similar to objects rather than actual persons. A major question remains: How can we operationalize such a gaze? In order to answer this question, recent studies have focused on cognitive correlates of the objectifying gaze by drawing on the distinction between configural and analytic processing. Configural processing depends on perceiving relations and configurations among the constitutive parts of a stimulus. This type of recognition is involved in face and body postures’ recognition (for a review, see Maurer, Le Grand, & Mondloch, 2002). For instance, people are more accurate to identify a correct nose between two noses when this element is included in a whole face rather than isolated (e.g., Seitz, 2002; Tanaka & Farah, 1993). By contrast, analytic processing does not take into account spatial relations among the stimuli parts and this type of recognition is involved in object-recognition. For example, there is no difference between the percentages of correctly identified isolated parts vs. whole drawings of house (e.g., Reed, Stone, Grubb, & McGoldrick, 2006).

Recently, Gervais and her colleagues investigated the processes underlying the recognition of male and female bodies (Gervais, Vescio, Maass, Förster, & Suitner, 2012). In line with objectification theory (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997) which posits that women are more likely to suffer from the objectifying gaze, it was assumed that analytic processing (i.e., object-like recognition) occurs when perceiving female targets, whereas configural processing is likely to occur when perceiving their male counterparts. In line with their predictions, Gervais et al. (2012) found that female body parts were recognized better than whole bodies (i.e., object-like recognition), whereas the reverse pattern emerged for male targets (i.e., person-like recognition). Women’s body parts were also better recognized than men’s body parts. In addition, these effects were equivalent for male and female participants. Bernard and his colleagues found the same pattern for sexually objectified women: Even when sexualized, only women are the targets of the objectifying gaze (Bernard, Gervais, Campomizzi, Allen, & Klein, 2012a, 2012b). Furthermore, the objectifying gaze influences how sexualized women are socially perceived. When people (men and women) have to evaluate the target’s physical appearance rather than her personality features, Latrofa and Vaes (2012) have shown that the longer they looked at the female (but not male) targets, the more they dehumanized them.

Self-objectification: Internalizing the objectifying gaze

In line with feminist theorizing (e.g., Bartky, 1990; Nussbaum, 1995), Objectification Theory (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997) argues that the focus on female physical appearance embodied in media representations and the objectifying gaze leads to gender differences in the development of body image and attitudes towards physical appearance. As one’s peers and the media continually remind women of the importance of physical appearance, they progressively internalize the way people look at themselves and become increasingly preoccupied with their physical appearance. This internalization of a perceiver’s perspective produces what Fredrickson and Roberts (1997) call self-objectification. It is defined as focusing attention on aspects of one’s own body that can be viewed and evaluated by others (i.e., physical appearance, e.g., Quinn, Kallen, Twenge, & Fredrickson, 2006).

As a consequence, objectification theory (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997) predicts that women are more likely to suffer from the detrimental consequences of objectifying pressures. Self-objectification is operationalized as a stable personality trait (usually trough the Self-Objectification Questionnaire: cf. Noll & Fredrickson, 1998) or a as a state, via an experimental manipulation consisting, for example, in wearing a swimsuit vs. a sweater in front of a mirror (e.g., Frerickson, Roberts, Noll, Quinn, & Twenge, 1998; Quinn, Kallen, & Cathey, 2006). In an illustration of the detrimental effects of self-objectification, Fredrickson et al. (1998) demonstrated that for women (but not men), wearing a swimsuit (i.e., the state of self-objectification) heightened body shame, and impaired math performance, compared to wearing a sweater. These effects specifically occurred for individuals who already reported a high level of self-objectification.