Sex Object
Questions abound if, and when, men see women as sex objects.
In one study, participants were randomly assigned to receive a picture of a woman either clothed, naked or in a sexual depiction.
They were asked to judge the degree to which she was capable of self control, planning and acting morally, termed agency, and also about the degree to which she was capable of feeling fear, feeling desire and feeling pleasure, or, experience.
One plausible hypothesis would be that as the woman's body was made ever more provocative, people would be ever more inclined to treat her as a mere object and would therefore be less inclined to attribute psychological states to her, across the board.
But that didn’t happen. Instead, the results came out as follows,
In other words, when the body was made more evocative, people decreased their ascriptions of agency, but they actually increased their ascriptions of experience.
A new terminology is born, animalification—treating a woman as though she lacks the capacity for complex thinking and reasoning, but at the same time, treating her with respect.
Of course, this can be an extremely degrading and harmful form of treatment, but just the same, it is something quite different from treating a woman, merely, as a sex object. The problem here doesn't have to do with ignoring a person's mind but rather with focusing exclusively on just one part of that mind.
Psychology Today
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