A new study says we may be born to sexually objectify women. But science can help.
Psychologists measure overall objectification, seeing the parts rather than the whole, with an upside-down test because we are worse at recognizing faces and bodies better that way. About 80 percent get right-side humans correct versus 55 percent when they are upside-down. Yet that disparity is far less with objects like buildings.
That's something of a puzzle so a team of social science scholars have studied it for some time. In a 2012 experiment, for example, volunteers saw a photo and then quickly had to choose it from the photo
they saw or its mirror image. Men and women both did better correctly choosing photos of men in underwear when the photos were upright, yet both did as well with women in similar poses even if the photos were upside-down. Like we are able to more easily do for objects.
Men upside down are less memorable than women in basically any situation, as demonstrated by this photo of Academy-Award-winning-actress Kim Basinger (left) and terrorist Nidal Hasan (right).
Result: Advertisers are correct, and a sexualized woman will be far more memorable than a sexualized man. Including to women, who seem to objectify other women as much as men do. Some argue that objectified women are seen as less human, which is a puzzle to those who argue women have far more advantages.
The belief was augmented by a 2015 experiment that blurred out women’s chests and groins or described them as raising money for cancer research. Then, people were able to recognize female bodies as well as they could men.
It is the social sciences and replication of anything except the statistical method for things like survey results is challenging. It had nearly as little acceptance as the Tyrone Hayes claim that a weedkiller 'turns frogs gay.' To try and affirm it, a 2022 paper used a meta-analysis, which is itself problematic, but by trying to normalize 41 papers they determined the “upright advantage” is still greater for sexualized women than men, just less.
Social critics contend that women who have impostor syndrome because they feel more objectified (i.e. attractive) have worse mental health and that objectification creates tolerance for violence against women, but that is cultural speculation and stereotyping both women and men. What may instead be the common factor, the scholars argue, is 'power.' Men and women who wrote about a time they felt powerful then showed the object-like pattern for sexualized photos of the opposite sex while the powerless showed only the upright advantage for both.
What seems to be real in any case is that there is a fix - an electric shock. Yep, what was humor in Ghostbusters, or at best a way for academics to pick up students, is harkening back to its glory days of the 1960s.
The authors drew that conclusion using either randomized shocks - transcranial direct current stimulation - on participants or a placebo (a tingle) that switched off after 30 seconds.
The placebo group maintained the usual pattern, women were far more memorable even upside-down, while the group getting the electric shock showed not only did the recognition gap between male and female images disappear, recognition of women in upright images even improved. The authors speculate that some features grab attention, such as The Thatcher Illusion, where the former England Prime Minister's eyes and mouth were flipped upside down on her head, which horrified people even more than Thatcher did socialists.
They say maybe that also applies to sexualized body parts and an electric current weakens that link, at least temporarily.
Citation: Ciro Civile & Arwen Stephens (2026). Disrupting objectification: transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) enhances the inversion effect toward sexualized women. Social Neuroscience, 1–14. DOI: 10.1080/17470919.2026.2751696
