Sexy women’s bodies in ads seen as objects

United Press International:

Both men and women see images of sexy women’s bodies in advertisements as objects, but they see sexy-looking men as people, Belgian researchers found.

“What’s unclear is, we don’t actually know whether people at a basic level recognize sexualized females or sexualized males as objects,” Philippe Bernard of Universite libre de Bruxelles in Belgium said in a statement.

Study co-authors Bernard, Sarah Gervais, Jill Allen, Sophie Campomizzi and Olivier Klein said one way psychologists found to test whether something is seen as an object is by turning it upside down. Pictures of people present a recognition problem when they’re turned upside down, but pictures of objects don’t present that problem, Bernard said.

Bernard and colleagues used a test in which they presented pictures of men and women in sexualized poses, wearing underwear. Each participant watched the pictures appear one by one on a computer screen with some of the pictures right side up and some upside down.

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