Up for Grabs? Sexual Objectification as a Mediator Between Women’s Alcohol Use and Sexual Victimization

Abstract

Sexual objectification, the tendency to reduce women to their bodies, body parts, or sexual functions for use by others, has been theorized to set the stage for more severe acts of violence but has been largely absent from the existing sexual victimization literature. The purpose of this study was to explore the role of sexual objectification in mediating the well-established link between women's alcohol use and sexual victimization. A large sample of undergraduate women ( N = 673) reported their alcohol use (frequency and quantity), experiences of sexual objectification (body evaluation and unwanted explicit sexual advances), and sexual victimization. Results indicated positive bivariate correlations among all study variables. Path analyses showed that mild forms of sexual objectification (body evaluation) mediated the link between the frequency of alcohol use and more extreme forms of sexual objectification (unwanted advances). Furthermore, the combined effect of sexual objectification (body evaluation and unwanted advances) mediated the link between alcohol use (frequency and quantity) and sexual victimization. The current findings are among the first to evaluate sexual objectification as a mechanism in the link between alcohol use and sexual victimization. Results suggest that efforts to prevent alcohol-related sexual violence may benefit from addressing sexual objectification.

Insights into Men’s Sexual Aggression Toward Women: Dehumanization and Objectification

“…One such variable is alcohol use and misuse, which has a wellestablished relationship with sexual aggression broadly (cf. George and Marlatt 1986;Davis et al 2006Davis et al , 2008Davis et al , 2009 and which has been shown to be mediated by objectification (Gervais et al 2014;Haikalis et al 2015). Based on this body of work, adding the role of dehumanization, particularly animalistic dehumanization, to alcohol studies of sexual aggression could be a fruitful future direction.…”

“…Those previous studies which have used sexual objectification as a predictor only looked at outcomes concerning specific attitudes about specific victims (e.g., blame; Loughnan et al 2013) or attitudes about specific perpetrators (e.g., blame; Bernard et al 2015). Those studies which examined men's sexual aggression interests and behavior as an outcome either treated dehumanization as an implicit measure (Rudman and Mescher 2012) or objectification as a mediator in the specific and limited context of alcohol use (Gervais et al 2014;Haikalis et al 2015). The present set of studies aims to partially replicate and extend this line of recent research, filling the gap by directly and explicitly examining the roles of dehumanization and objectification in men's sexual aggressionrelated attitudes and interests.…”

The Detrimental Effect of Sexual Objectification on Targets’ and Perpetrators’ Sexual Satisfaction: The Mediating Role of Sexual Coercion

“…For example, Davidson and Gervais (2015) showed that self-objectification was related to sexual violence victimization. Likewise, Haikalis et al (2017) showed that the link between alcohol use (frequency and quantity) and sexual victimization was mediated and thus explained by sexual objectification. More importantly, sexual objectification experiences are negatively related to the refusal of sexual acts, showing that there is an indirect relationship between body evaluation experiences and lower sexual assertiveness in women specifically related to the refusal of unwanted sexual acts because of self-objectification (Franz et al, 2016).…”

“…Elder et al (2012, p. 170) showed a high prevalence of sexual objectification perpetration by evidencing in their qualitative study that male participants frequently reported "looking at, " "watching, " "viewing, " and "checking out" female bodies. Importantly, sexual objectification perpetration has been related to sexual violence (Gervais et al, 2014) and could be considered a behavioral predictor of an extreme sexual violence manifestation, or in the words of Haikalis et al (2017), "Commonplace forms of objectification may play as potential contributors to full-fledged sexual assault" (p. 17). Moreover, Rudman and Mescher (2012), showed that objectifying perception of women predicts rape proclivity; when men implicitly objectifying women, they are more likely to sexually victimize them.…”

The role of stranger harassment experiences in college women's perceived possibility of gender crimes happening to them

“…Although we view the use of context-rich vignettes for the evaluation of gender crime perceptions to be a strength of this study, we also acknowledge that only a single context was given, which could have activated particular myths and stereotypes about these crimes, thus inflating or deflating responses to their perceived likelihood. For example, the rape vignette described a common situation that female students may find themselves in (e.g., socializing at the bar, have a few drinks, run into a friendly male acquaintance); however, the scenario also lends itself to rape myths by referring to alcohol intoxication and a woman agreeing to be alone with someone she did not know well (Haikalis, DiLillo, & Gervais, 2017). Future research would benefit from including more than one vignette for each crime, because differing cir- In this study we tested a model that implied causal pathways from stranger harassment to perceived likelihood of gender and nongender crimes through self-objectification, but confirmation of these pathways as causally determined is warranted.…”