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The Media's Sexual Objectification of Women, Rape Myth Acceptance, and Interpersonal Violence
The Media's Sexual Objectification of Women, Rape Myth Acceptance, and Interpersonal Violence
To cite this article: Kaylee Vance, Megan Sutter, Paul B. Perrin & Martin Heesacker
(2015) The Media’s Sexual Objectification of Women, Rape Myth Acceptance, and
Interpersonal Violence, Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 24:5, 569-587, DOI:
10.1080/10926771.2015.1029179
Download by: [Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries] Date: 29 September 2015, At: 10:30
Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 24:569–587, 2015
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1092-6771 print/1545-083X online
DOI: 10.1080/10926771.2015.1029179
Violence
KAYLEE VANCE
Department of Psychology, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA
MARTIN HEESACKER
Department of Psychology, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA
569
570 K. Vance et al.
There is no doubt that sex sells. In Western culture, the advertising industry
has found great success in using the sexual exposure and objectification of
women as a vehicle for selling consumer products (Hennessy, 2000). Women
are depicted draped over cars, evocatively posing to sell bottles of perfume,
scantily clad to model clothing, and seductively biting into a chocolate bar.
Recently, a new trend in advertising has emerged in which women’s bodies
have become morphed literally into objects (Guthrie, 2007). These increasing
levels of objectification pose the question of what effect objectifying women
in advertising has on people’s real-life perceptions of women.
OBJECTIFYING ADVERTISEMENTS
People who view women as objects or as less than human are likely
to excuse treating them as less than human through emotional abuse,
physical violence, and rape (Ohbuchi, Ikeda, & Takeuchi, 1994; Zillman
& Bryant, 1984). Excusing one’s actions in this way is termed moral
disengagement, which occurs when an individual disengages his or her
moral self-sanctions from inhumane actions (Bandura, 2002a). Moral self-
sanctions begin to develop at an early age through normal socialization and
govern individuals’ actions, prohibiting people from acting against social
norms that would create feelings of self-condemnation (Bandura, 1999).
However, because individuals sometimes act against their self-sanctions,
they develop methods of reducing the shame incurred by these infringe-
ments. Bandura (2002a) discussed a variety of these methods, but the method
perhaps most pertinent to the objectification of women is dehumanization.
Dehumanization occurs when individuals attempt to ease the guilt and dis-
comfort of victimizing another person by lowering that individual to a state
572 K. Vance et al.
THIS STUDY
The purpose of this study was to take the previous research a step further,
examining not only the effects of viewing sexually objectifying print adver-
tisements on men and women, but also the new and emerging trend in print
advertisements of morphing women’s bodies literally into objects. This study
examined the extent to which these conditions affected participants’ inferred
excusal of sexual aggression through the following constructs: acceptance
of interpersonal violence, rape myth acceptance, adversarial sexual belief
endorsement, rape likelihood, and moral disengagement. In addition,
this study also examined the degree to which moral disengagement and
dehumanization influence rape likelihood through rape myth acceptance.
To achieve this aim, the study used the cover story that the research
involved the study of drunk driving. Accordingly, this study contains three
hypotheses: (a) Males and females who are exposed to advertisements
that depict women as objects, whether explicitly or inferred, will be more
574 K. Vance et al.
METHOD
Participants
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Advertisements were grouped into three categories: (a) control, (b) sexual
objectification of women, and (c) women as objects. Both experimental
Objectification 575
This scale was created for this study to help create a cover story and produce
a time lag between viewing the conditions and completing the questionnaires
(Mitchell & James, 2001). The drunk-driving questionnaire is not valid for
analysis and was not analyzed in this study.
that no one would know and that you could in no way be punished for
engaging in the following acts, how likely, if at all, would you be to commit
such acts?” Participants respond to items on a 5-point scale regarding how
likely they would be to commit one of the acts. The two items are treated
as separate indexes of rape likelihood as the first taps into force and is
not specific of a sexual act, whereas the other item of rape is considered
more severe and directly assesses rape likelihood. Construct validity of the
RMAS has been demonstrated such that self-reported rape likelihood has
been associated with aggression toward women, both by self-report and
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VALIDITY CHECK
The research questionnaire included the following three validity check ques-
tions: How many of these advertisements, if any, have you seen before today?
Of the advertisements you’ve seen, how often, before today, have you seen
those advertisements? What did you think the purpose of this research study
was, and at what point did you decide on this purpose?
DEMOGRAPHICS QUESTIONNAIRE
Procedure
Participants received a link to the online survey through their university
courses or through an email from their professors. The link sent participants
to the consent page, where participants were told that the survey would
examine the effects of viewing alcohol and car advertisements on drunk
driving and social behavior. When participants clicked the agreement, they
were randomly assigned to one of the three conditions (control, sexual
objectification, and women as objects). The control condition included
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RESULTS
Validity Checks
The three validity checks were coded as pass–fail and then correlated with
each of the scales measuring endorsement of sexual violence (Subscales
1 and 2 of the RMAS, the two rape likelihood questions, the two RMAS
percentage questions, the Attitude Toward Interpersonal Violence Scale, the
Adversarial Sexual Beliefs Scale, the Dehumanization subscale of the MDS,
and the MDS total score) to determine whether validity checks should be
included as covariates in the subsequent analyses, or if participants who
failed the third validity check (who prematurely determined the purpose of
the study) should be excluded from analyses.
For the validity checks, 114 participants stated that they had seen the
advertisements before the experiment (M = 2.48 number of times seeing the
advertisements, of those who had seen at least one; SD = 1.88). Fourteen
participants identified the purpose of the study. None of the correlations
between the validity checks and the scales measuring endorsement of
Objectification 579
Hypothesis 1
For Hypotheses 1 and 2, the data were analyzed using a 3 × 2 factorial anal-
ysis of variance (ANOVA). The independent variables were condition (three
levels: control, sexual objectification of women, and women as objects) and
sex (male and female), and the dependent variable was each of the measures
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Hypothesis 2
The second hypothesis, that Hypothesis 1 effects would be stronger for men
than for women, was not statistically supported because none of the inter-
action terms for condition by sex yielded statistically significant results, all
F(2, 364) < 2.12, p > .121. All η2 values for this analysis were within the
small-sized range of .00 to .01. However, there were significant main effects
for sex on excusing sexual aggression. For the two rape likelihood ques-
tions, males had significantly higher scores than females, F(1, 364) = 26.87,
p < .001, η2 = .07, and F(1, 364) = 6.89, p = .009, η2 = .02, respectively.
Males also had higher scores than females on the MDS, F(1, 364) = 26.48,
Rape Likelihood 1 1.19 0.61 1.22 0.66 1.16 0.59 1.21 0.58 .672
Rape Likelihood 2 1.09 0.49 1.17 0.67 1.06 0.42 1.05 0.31 .719
MDS total 57.92 14.98 58.75 16.07 56.91 14.60 58.06 14.24 .527
ASB total 18.20 6.17 17.71 6.06 18.15 6.11 18.91 6.39 .143
RMA Subscale 1 19.11 6.03 18.95 5.81 18.99 6.35 19.39 5.95 .424
RMA Subscale 2 9.67 4.70 9.57 4.42 9.74 5.41 9.70 4.25 .243
AIV total 11.59 3.32 11.49 3.56 11.62 3.33 11.68 3.07 .346
Note. MDS = Moral Disengagement Scale; ASB = Adversarial Sex Beliefs; RMA = Rape Myth Acceptance;
AVI = Acceptance of Interpersonal Violence; Condition 1 = control; Condition 2 = sexual objectification;
Condition 3 = women as objects.
580 K. Vance et al.
Males Females
p < .001, η2 = .07. In addition, males scored higher on average for accep-
tance of interpersonal violence compared to females, F(1, 364) = 27.64, p <
.001, η2 = .08. Finally, males scored higher than females for both rape myth
acceptance subscales, F(1, 364) = 37.96, p < .001, η2 = .07, and F(1, 354)
= 21.69, p < .001, η2 = .06, respectively. For means and standard deviations
of dependent measures in this analysis, as well as p values of effects, see
Table 2.
Hypothesis 3
Tests of mediation (Preacher & Hayes, 2004) were performed separately for
women and men to examine whether rape myth acceptance (RMAS Subscale
1) mediated the relationship between moral disengagement (MDS total)
and rape likelihood. Preacher and Hayes’s (2004) bootstrapping method for
mediation is a state-of-the-art method for conducting this type of analysis,
because it can be used with continuous, dichotomous, or multicategorical
independent variables. It can test both direct and indirect effects, includ-
ing bootstrapping and Monte Carlo confidence intervals for indirect effects.
Moreover, it automatically conducts a test of homogeneity of regression.
Bootstrapping increases power and can be used with smaller sample sizes
compared to Sobel’s test (Preacher & Hayes, 2004). The mediation was
evaluated using a bootstrapping resampling procedure in which 5,000 boot-
strapped samples from the data were drawn to estimate the mediation for
each resampled data set (Preacher & Hayes, 2004). The SPSS macro MEDIATE
was used to conduct analyses (Hayes & Preacher, 2014). Table 3 presents a
summary of the mediation analyses, which used 5,000 bootstrapping resam-
ples and 95% confidence intervals. A power analysis was conducted using
G∗ Power (Faul, Erdfelder, Buchner, & Lang, 2009) to determine the appro-
priate sample size for the mediation analysis. The program recommended a
Objectification 581
TABLE 3 Mediation of Moral Disengagement and Rape Likelihood by Rape Myth Acceptance
Boot-
strapping Overall
B SE t (SE) LLCI ULCI model R 2 F (df )
(0.00)
Females 0.11 18.02
(2, 279)∗∗∗
MD−RMA (a) 0.13 0.02 5.54∗∗∗
RMA−RL (b) 0.01 0.00 2.67∗∗
MD−RL (c) 0.01 0.00 5.32∗∗∗
MD−RMA−RL (c’) 0.01 0.00 4.27∗∗∗ 0.00 −.0004 .0048
(0.00)
Note. LLCI = lower limit confidence interval; ULCI = upper limit confidence interval; MD = moral
disengagement; RMA = rape myth acceptance; RL = rape likelihood.
∗
p < .05. ∗∗ p < .01. ∗∗∗ p < .001.
revealed that rape myth acceptance did not mediate the relationship between
moral disengagement and rape likelihood for women. As a result of these
findings, Hypothesis 3 was supported for men, but not for women.
DISCUSSION
In this study, viewing print advertisements that sexually objectify women and
morph their bodies into objects did not increase women’s and men’s rape
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than that occurring in the mid- to late 1990s, when Lanis and Covell col-
lected their data. College campuses are full of advertisements for clubs,
alcohol, bar promotions, and the like, which prominently feature images
of sexualized women. Likewise, the Internet is now in nearly universal use
among college students, and it is a plentiful source of images of sexualized
women. This oversaturation could minimize or eliminate the priming effect
of the conditions in this experiment.
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Mediational Findings
Rape myth acceptance fully mediated the significant relationship between
moral disengagement and rape likelihood for men but not for women.
In other words, for men only, the relationship between moral disengagement
and self-reported rape likelihood required participants to accept some or
all of the rape myths assessed in Burt’s (1980) scale. One way to think
about this effect is that male participants needed to justify higher rape
likelihood by espousing a set of beliefs that shifts the blame for rape onto
the victim and away from the perpetrator. Therefore, moral disengagement
justified the aggression, and rape myth insulated the aspiring perpetrator
from blame. This insulation from blame is evidently very important; without
it, moral disengagement was unrelated to self-reported likelihood of men
committing rape. This finding illuminates a possible pathway by which moral
disengagement leads to rape likelihood and as a result has implications
for interventions to decrease the likelihood of rape on college campuses.
Educational interventions aimed at correcting men’s false beliefs about rape
could help break the pathway by which moral disengagement leads to rape
likelihood.
There has been little research into how men’s moral disengagement
leads to acts of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse toward women.
However, there have been discussions on the proclivity of men to believe
rape myths and how this proclivity might increase sexual violence toward
women. Brownmiller (1975) defined rape myths as “the distorted proverbs
that govern female sexuality . . . that most men hold” (p. 312). The attitudes
of men might have changed since 1975, and thus Brownmiller’s definition
should be examined in light of modern, current society. Indeed this study
found what Lonsway and Fitzgerald (1994) asserted, that rape myths “serve
to deny and justify male sexual aggression against women” (p. 134).
Although rape myths don’t fit neatly into any of Bandura’s moral
disengagement subscales, they make sense under the subscales of
dehumanization and attribution of blame, in which case, rape myth accep-
tance could be viewed as a type of moral disengagement. However, it can
also be hypothesized that accepting rape myths serves as critical step in
transforming moral disengagement into sexual violence, and is therefore a
584 K. Vance et al.
women in the study likely cannot account for the failure to support the
hypotheses. The fact that all participants were college students, however,
is a larger concern. Most universities, including the university sampled,
have active awareness initiatives regarding rape. In addition, collegiate sam-
ples tend to be wealthier, healthier, younger, better educated, and more
predominantly White than other samples. Additionally, all measures were
self-report and responses are subject to biases associated with this method
of measurement.
There is also concern that the way the advertisements were shown
was ineffective at priming objectification of women. As mentioned earlier,
perhaps the saturation of sexually objectifying advertisements in college
students’ lives caused the experimental primes to be ineffective. Also, the
study’s focus on drinking, drinking and driving, and sex might have made
issues of morality and ethics highly salient to the participants and thus could
have created an unanticipated bias in participants, a bias to protect their
self-images as moral and ethical people. Future research in the area of sex-
ual objectification in the media might need to use different primes in a
context that is unlikely to trigger participants’ focus on their morals and
ethics. Additionally, future studies should assess the level of salience of sex-
ual objectification of women in each condition to test the potency of sexual
objectification in controls versus sexual objectification of women and women
portrayed as objects in advertisements.
Future research should explore the effect of subtypes of moral
disengagement, especially dehumanization and attribution of blame on rape
likelihood, perhaps in the context of other types of advertisements sexually
objectifying women. The subscales could provide important insight regard-
ing more specifically how perpetrators morally disengage from violent and
sexual actions and whether advertisements play a role in the process. As doc-
umented in previous research, advertisements have the potential to influence
the endorsement of rape myths, which as shown in this study, play a sig-
nificant role in a man reporting his likelihood to rape a woman. It might
be important to implement rape awareness education programs through
advertisements conveying public service announcements to inform the pub-
lic about the realities of rape, thus dispelling rape myths in an attempt to
reduce rape and sexual violence.
Objectification 585
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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