Objects of desire

Without wanting to be too controversial it is safe to say that, although at some levels women and men are united, there are also ways in which they are undeniably different. You only have to look at audience demographics for The Bachelor or the Formula One Grand Prix to appreciate this fundamental fact. It is also true that women and men are perceived as being different and that difference in perception even goes as deep as how we literally “see” the two sexes.

Psychologists have established that your brain sees people and objects in different ways. For instance, while you can easily recognise a whole face, just part of a face can be difficult to recognise. By contrast, recognising part of chair is just as easy as recognising the whole chair. This reflects the different ways your brain processes information in identifying people and objects.

A traditional psychological method for testing whether someone is seeing something as an object is by turning it upside down. Pictures of people are hard to recognise when turned upside down but pictures of objects of objects don’t present that problem.

In a new study researchers used images of men and women in their underwear and in sexual poses. Some of the images were the right way up while others were upside down. After each picture there was a second of blank screen and then two images came on the screen right way up and the subject had to choose which one matched the one they had just seen.

People had a difficult time matching images of men that had been turned upside down. This suggests that they were seeing the men as people. In contrast, people had no trouble matching the images of the women whether they were upside down or the right way up. This suggests that the women were being seen as objects as turning them upside down made no difference to how they were perceived. Female and male participants showed exactly the same results, so it was not to do with desire, just “objectification”.

Sexualised images of women are splashed across billboards and buildings everywhere. Does this reflect a way we are disposed to see the world, or have we created that disposition through such widespread use of such images? The researchers say that they want to go on and investigate how these perception biases influence how we behave toward people in real life situations and that is the burning issue.