Sexual objectification and dehumanization: Implications for women’s sexual agency

While ideally sexual activities would only take place when mutually desired, many women participate in sex that they do not want. During their lifetimes, between 18% and 25% of women will experience rape or attempted rape, and 50% or more will experience some form of unwanted sexual activity (Gavey & Senn, 2014). The present research tests whether women’s ability to exercise sexual agency is undermined when her internal sense of humanness has been diminished by others thinking of and treating her like an object. In patriarchal cultures, women are chronically sexually objectified: represented as sexual objects, existing primarily for men’s sexual use. Conceptually, objectification implies dehumanization and previous research has found that when people evaluate another person’s appearance, they dehumanize women but not men (Heflick et al., 2011). When women or men are dehumanized by others, they self-dehumanize (i.e., experience diminished human characteristics and feel more object-like) (Andrighetto et al., 2018; Baldissarri et al., 2017; Bastian & Haslam, 2010; Loughnan et al., 2017) and experience diminished agency (Andrighetto et al., 2018; Baldissarri et al., 2017). Building on this previous research, the present research has two goals. Study 1 tests whether women are more commonly viewed as less human than men. In Study 2, experiences of being dehumanized were then examined as a cause of diminished agency (self-reported self-efficacy and sexual agency) due to self dehumanization. Women and men do not experience dehumanization equally. When people focus on another person’s appearance, women are viewed as less human than men; when instructed to focus on their performance or on them as a person, women and men are not viewed differently (Heflick et al., 2011). The conclusion from this research was that women are viewed as less human than men when the focus is on their appearance. Study 1 of the present research tested an alternate hypothesis: that women are generally viewed as less human than men except when the focus is on their personhood. Before viewing a video featuring either a woman or a man, participants were either given no instructions or were asked to focus on one of three things: the subject’s appearance; the subject as a person; or the video. Consistent with the hypothesis, when given no instructions, participants viewed the women as less human than the men (i.e., lower on competence and human characteristics). Study 2 then examined whether being dehumanized impacts women’s sense of their own humanness and, consequently, their sense of agency. After recalling either an experience of having their appearance evaluated by others or an experience of being treated primarily as an instrument in the workplace, women and men rated their internal feelings of humanness. Moderated mediation analyses demonstrated that both situations caused women and men to self-dehumanize and in turn report lower self-efficacy. Contrary to predictions, however, self-dehumanization did not diminish either women’s or men’s sexual agency. Challenges examining sexual agency are discussed.