Representation of Women in Advertisements and the effects on self-objectification and self-dehumanization

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When women are exposed to sexually objectifying advertisements, they experience many adverse effects such as increases in self-objectification and dehumanization of other women (Vaes et al., 2011). Because these effects might be amplified by food advertisements in which the line between a woman’s body and a food item is non-discernible, we are examining whether “women as consumable” advertisements lead women to implicitly self-dehumanize and experienced reduced body satisfaction. Women (N=198) will view a hamburger ad in which a woman is portrayed either as consumable (burger and woman are inseparable), sexualized (topless woman with burger), or neutral (non-sexualized woman with a burger). They will then complete two new IATs that assesses implicit self-dehumanization and a “selfie measure” that records the number of selfies taken before image-satisfaction. We predict that women in the consumable condition will have higher self-dehumanization scores and take more selfies relative to the other conditions. Our findings could extend the extant research to understand how explicit portrayals of women as objects for male consumption affect women’s psychological outcomes.