Scientific American: How Our Brains Turn Women Into Objects
Recent reports of a mountain lion or cougar stalking the campus of the University of Iowa prompted campus jokesters to tweet their surprise that Michelle Bachman was in town. A cougar, colloquially, is an attractive older woman who seeks out trysts with younger men, and to some, it seems that Bachmann fits the bill. This emphasis on appearance is nothing new for high-profile women who are anything but homely, and feminist scholars are quick to point out its potential detrimental effects on perceptions of female competence.
Of course, we don’t need to consider reactions to political candidates to understand this idea. There is a well-known tension between seeing someone as, and appreciating them for, a body as opposed to a mind. At least, that’s what parents tell their daughters when their school clothes veer too far towards the revealing.
Science has backed parents up on this. A recent study found that showing men pictures of sexualized women evokes less activity in areas of the brain responsible for mental state attribution—that is, the area of the brain that becomes active when we think we are looking at an entity capable of thought and planned action. Other studies have found similar results. When men see body shots of women as compared with face shots, they judge women to be less intelligent, likeable, ambitious and competent.
A new study by Kurt Gray and colleagues in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, however, suggests that this kind of objectification might not cause perceivers to see women as mindless bodies but instead cause a transformation in the kind of minds that they perceive.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-our-brains-turn-women-into-objects
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that's complete bullshit. This is the abstract of the article in which the researchers publish their findings:
According to models of objectification, viewing someone as a body induces de-mentalization, stripping
away their psychological traits. Here evidence is presented for an alternative account, where a body focus
does not diminish the attribution of all mental capacities but, instead, leads perceivers to infer a different
kind of mind. Drawing on the distinction in mind perception between agency and experience, it is found
that focusing on someone’s body reduces perceptions of agency (self-control and action) but increases
perceptions of experience (emotion and sensation). These effects were found when comparing targets
represented by both revealing versus nonrevealing pictures (Experiments 1, 3, and 4) or by simply
directing attention toward physical characteristics (Experiment 2). The effect of a body focus on mind
perception also influenced moral intuitions, with those represented as a body seen to be less morally
responsible (i.e., lesser moral agents) but more sensitive to harm (i.e., greater moral patients; Experiments
5 and 6). These effects suggest that a body focus does not cause objectification per se but, instead, leads
to a redistribution of perceived mind.
Keywords: morality, dehumanization, pornography, dualism, sexism
http://www.mpm.umd.edu/Gray,%20Knobe,%20Sheskin,%20Bloom%20&%20Barrett.%20(in%20press).%20Objectification.pdf
What this shows is exactly what some members here have argued against in the past couple of months: that view pictures of bodies increases the tendency of men to see women as objects, that exposure to porn decreases their sense that women have agency.
It shows how commercial images of bodies reconfigures the mind in ways that lead men to devalue women (see them as "less morally responsible."
Research into mind perception has found two dimensions along which we tend to categorize others: agency (the capacity to act, plan) and experience (the capacity to feel emotions). A robot, for example, is high on the dimension of agency but low in experience. It can think, but it can’t feel. When we see flesh, on the other hand, we tend to see experience but not agency—an entity capable of pleasure and pain but not necessarily the sharpest or most useful tool in the shed.
So, objectification might not lead to perceptions of women as inanimate objects but as different kinds of humans—ones that are capable of feeling but not thinking. To test this hypothesis Gray et al. presented participants with images of individuals and varied the amount of flesh shown in the pictures (the amount of “body focus”). In line with their hypothesis, seeing full bodies, as compared to just faces, caused ratings of agency to diminish but ratings of experience to increase. The same was true when naked bodies were compared with clothed bodies. Indeed, as the sexual suggestiveness of the images increased, perceptions of agency decreased and perceptions of experience increased accordingly.
Porn and other images of women remap the brain. It changes how the viewers see the object of their lust.
This is my nicest, least threatening, great grandma and the only one I never met:
She could write and shoot better than me and stare a mean horse or nasty man down. Situations I run away from. Especially mean horses. Mean horses frighten me. I have psychic scars. Several nieces carry on the family tradition, same with my wife. The boys in our family tend to pay more attention to art and machines.
My dad's an artist. His dad was a rocket scientist. My grandpa knew titanium. He was an engineer for the Apollo project, probably his proudest achievement. Some of his metalwork is in the Smithsonian. During War II he was the handsome captain who could get scientific and celebrity misfits deemed essential to the war effort out of jail. A driver, a big black car with flags, an impeccable Army Air Force uniform... these always impressed the local authorities and there would be nothing in the newspaper about it.
I've got a sister who is a firefighter and paramedic. She nearly made an Olympic team. She writes better than me too. And was an NBA basketball "girl" as a side job. Mass media "hot" in pictures only. Btoo man-scary for mass media celebrity.
My wife is a powerful woman too.
There is no precise yardstick.
Lust may be the first spark, but being the gentleman or gentlewoman and establishing a relationship is the next step.
Trapped by or servicing a perpetual state of mass-media driven lust is not a nice world to live in.
Easy. Grabbing popcorn and a fire extinguisher. 
