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Role of Popular Culture in Objectification of Women

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Introduction

Women can have several identities based on what they imagine they are or what describes them,

but they will be faced with the greater challenge of being a woman at the center of all those roles.

Women throughout history are always seen as the second sex. They have not had the same

resources or rights as men and the media have continuously objectified them. In our lives,

popular culture, media, and advertising have a very strong effect on how we see and feel about

things. In various aspects of our lives, we are overwhelmed by commercials. On TV, the web,

apps, blogs, and news, we are exposed to the objectification of women. This publicity helps to

identify and influence the way women are perceived and treated by society. This objectification

of women by media is predictive of sexual and domestic crimes against women. A growing

concept has arisen in print ads that turn women's bodies into objects. This also leads to the

acceptance of a prevalent rape myth that if a woman dresses boldly, she asks for getting sexually

violated and loves being raped. Rape and sexual abuse exist in all cultures and social groups. The

elevating rates of crime against women tell us how horrific impact the objectification of women

in popular culture has over people in society. Apart from them, this objectification leads towards

unrealistic beauty standards, impossible to achieve in reality often produce self-esteem issues

and negative emotions amongst women. It also leads to self-objectification on part of women

themselves as they cannot see themselves apart from their body image (hip to waist ratio,

complexion, fashion, etc.). Exploring this impact and its possible consequences or ways to

modify its negative impact is very important for social scientists.

Objectification of Women in Mass Media is a Form of Exploitation

The mistreatment of women in mainstream media (a medium viewed by every social

class of any society; thus represents popular culture) is the use or representation of women in
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mass media to enhance the attractiveness of the product. This process involves posing women as

sexual objects and establishing expectations of attractiveness that females are supposed to

represent. Sexual abuse of women in media dates back to Paris in the nineteenth century, where

ballerinas/professional dancers were exploited by the male audience, given the hypersexual and

overtly romantic culture of France (Blakemore, n.d.). 

Popular Culture Advancing the Objectification of Women: Psychology of the Process

We have talked about the process, possible consequences, and ways the women are

objectified around us. An interesting question to be asked here is how popular culture plays a

significant role in the adaption of this trend. The Advertisement industry or mass media would

have never chosen to do so if society had disapproved/banned it. Fredrickson and Roberts (1997)

examined the role of culture in the objectification of women by suggesting that women's bodies

are culturally organized. They argued that bodies reside in sociocultural frameworks and are

therefore often built by socio-cultural practices and narratives. This point is made in part to

differentiate their perspective from the biological approaches to gender and body and lays the

framework upon which the theory of objectification was developed. While they intended to

theorize sexual objectification as it relates to all women, they acknowledged that a large part of

the scientific results overlooks the heterogeneity of women, thereby suggesting how sexual

objectification factors influence the lives of various subgroups of women in different ways. This

research demonstrates that culture is essential to objectifying women.

The key reason behind supporting this statement is that objectification of women has

different rates in different cultures. As far as humanness and objectification are concerned,

scholars have found that concentrating on the physical attributes of a woman is linked to
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dehumanization, but the argument we are concerned with is, that either women are similarly

objectified in various regions of the world, or that there is some cultural difference.

A researcher has studied the role of culture in objectifying women (sexually and

otherwise) by comparing Western samples with non-Western or Eastern samples. Respondents

were asked to assess the six-target individuals on the grounds of twenty characteristics and,

ultimately, to explore how uniquely human each one of these traits is. Respondents were also

asked to assess the mind of the targets on two dimensions: agency and emotional experiences.

Target sexualization decreased the logical mind allocation (agency/power) in three of the seven

samples, while the emotional mind allocation did not vary as a result of target sexualization.

Across cultures, perceptions assigned less moral status to sexualized targets, that is, sexualized

targets were seen as less deserving of compassion. People, for instance, were more likely to

inflict pain on them. Since these results did not show a definite pattern, the effects were relatively

independent of the personal characteristics of the sample. However, the effect of the target

sexualization on the mind allocation of sexual targets was present but greater in the West than in

the non-Western sample, suggesting that culture plays a very important role in sexually

objectifying women and considering them just attractive bodies rather than fully functional

humans (Loughnan et al., 2015).

Various feminist scholars have labeled the objectification of women as a product of long-

running patriarchy. Patriarchy is a social structure wherein the father or the masculine

representative has complete control over the extended family; by extension, apart from the male

head one or more men exercise total authority over the society overall. 19th-century scholars

attempted to shape a concept of unilineal cultural evolution, arguing that human social

organization "evolved" through a sequence of stages: animalistic sexual promiscuity followed by

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matriarchy, followed in turn by patriarchy. The consensus among contemporary anthropologists

and sociologists is that while authority is often concentrated on one sex or the other patriarchy is

not the unitary concept it was once thought to be, but is the result of cultural learning transmitted

by lineage and family practices in various societies at different rates (some societies have more

patriarchal cultures than others) (Rodriguez, 2019). This sociological argument is enough to

prove that objectification of women (not necessarily sexual) is a product of cultural learning in

patriarchal societies, where the male has the power to fabricate, manipulate and control the lives

of women, thus implying that they are not fully functional human beings with a will to live and

freedom of making choices; rather they are objects who can offer sexual gratification and

reproductive means to families.

Societal Change as a Marker of Objectification

The objectification of others and particularly of women is a mechanism that has

traditionally been recognized to play an important role in fundamentally negative social change

through crimes against marginalized groups. It may also contribute to social systems that, in less

transparent ways, affect groups of people and weaken their human and civil rights. Self-

objectives have not been specifically related to social change, but knowing the psychology of

marginalized people will help to highlight the interconnected mechanisms of objectification and

collective action to achieve change (Zurbriggen, 2013). This argument means that every time a

significant revolution has taken place, there are grounds for objectifying others for several

reasons.

Cultural Trend of Pornography

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Pornography is a cultural phenomenon of the working class that resembles a novel and

represents social dynamics in the same way as other aspects of popular culture do.  Feminist

theorists and protestors have asserted since the beginning of the second wave of women's

movements that women's objectification is a core aspect of patriarchy, one which must be

resolved if equal rights are to be accomplished. Sexual objectification has gained especially

intense focus from various writers. Dworkin (1991) claims that pornography is gender inequality

and abuse of women and focuses heavily on pornographic elements that objectively or

dehumanize women. For example, they included objectification as a key component of their

concept of pornography, pointing to representations in which women are "dehumanized as sex

objects, items or commodities," restricted to their body parts or portrayed in sexual positions

with objects or animals.

Conclusion

Objecting women (dehumanizing women through depicting them as sexual objects or

supporting objects, removing their human qualities through ads in social, mass, and print

media) in modern cultural diversity is increasing the incidence of sexual and other forms of

crimes against women. Cultural objectification of women by patriarchal societies also leads

women to self-objection where they cannot see themselves apart from their physical image and

reproductive means. The best example of this can be seen in different societies, where marriages

end if their wives are infertile. Infertility is not a major problem these days, considering modern

methods such as in vitro fertilization and surrogacy. Also, tough patriarchal societies have no

problem sustaining a society where second marriage for the sake of children is as appropriate as

any other social phenomenon. The level of rape cases, self-esteem issues, and other sorts of
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violence (acid-attack, domestic violence, etc) due to the objectification of women by popular

culture in various regions of the world.

This essay was constructed from an interpretive viewpoint, using various oral and written

attributes of different communities (eastern and western) by deducing that

women's objectification is a cultural phenomenon with different recognizable facets across the

globe. Future research must carry out objective scientific studies to establish global reasons

behind the objectification of women in various cultures.

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References

Blakemore, E. (n.d.). Sexual Exploitation Was the Norm for 19th Century Ballerinas. HISTORY.

Retrieved November 26, 2020, from https://www.history.com/news/sexual-exploitation-

was-the-norm-for-19th-century-ballerinas

Dworkin, A. (1999). Pornography : men possessing women. The Women’s Press.

Fredrickson, B. L., & Roberts, T.-A. (1997). Objectification Theory: Toward Understanding

Women’s Lived Experiences and Mental Health Risks. Psychology of Women

Quarterly, 21(2), 173–206. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-6402.1997.tb00108.x

Loughnan, S., Fernandez, C., Anjum, G., Aziz, M., Harada, C., Holland, E. H., Singh, I., Puvia,

E., & Tsuchiya, K. (2015). Exploring the role of culture in sexual objectification: A seven

nations study. Revue Internationale de Psychologie Sociale, 28, 125–152.

Rodriguez, E. (2019). Patriarchy | social system. In A. Augustyn (Ed.), Encyclopædia

Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/patriarchy

Zurbriggen, E. L. (2013). Objectification, Self-Objectification, and Societal Change. Journal of

Social and Political Psychology, 1(1), 188–215. https://doi.org/10.5964/jspp.v1i1.94