APA task force report on the sexualization of girls

[Rimbo]

Main Page (http://www.apa.org/pi/wpo/sexualization.html)
Executive summary (as HTML) (http://www.apa.org/pi/wpo/sexualizationsum.html)

[Anaxagoras]

Those people don't know what an executive summary is, apparently.

[Uncle Larry]

Is Rimbo atoning for his Pole Vault Girl stalking?

[Rimbo]

Those people don't know what an executive summary is, apparently.

9 pages (for the PDF) vs. 67 (for the PDF of the actual report). Yeah, I think they could've tightened that baby up a bit.

[Matthew Gallant]

http://www.truemeaningoflife.com/images/apa.jpg

[cesare]

Acolytes. FUCK YEAH.

[SpookyKG]

Sexualization occurs when

-a person’s value comes only from his or her sexual appeal or behavior, to the exclusion of other characteristics

Virginity pledges, WOO!

[GloriousMess]

Or alternatively, any pop artist currently in the UK charts.

[Rimbo]

Or the US. Or Japan.

[Wisbechlad]

Thank heaven for little girls
for little girls get bigger every day!

Thank heaven for little girls
they grow up in the most delightful way!

Those little eyes so helpless and appealing
one day will flash and send you crashin' thru the ceilin'

Thank heaven for little girls
thank heaven for them all,
no matter where no matter who
for without them, what would little boys do?

Thank heaven... thank heaven...
Thank heaven for little girls!

Oddly, when I searched for the lyrics, found them on a wedding song site, that suggested this was suitable for fathers/ daughters to sing together.

[Murbella]

Executive summary: WOW GUYS SEX SELLS STUFF DID YOU KNOW?

[Ephraim]

Interesting summary. Murbella, I don't think the summary's take-home message is quite what you posted. The take home message is that there is scientific (suck it, Danger, I said scientific) evidence to show that there are negative consequences to the sexualization present in almost all forms of media.

And yeah, psychologists tend to have a problem with tight language. My supervisor is actually a neuroscientist, and because he agreed to take me on as a student, he's been spending more time with the psychology faculty, which led him to exasperatedly exclaim to me one day, "Psychologists talk a LOT!". Psychologists aren't supposed to be journalists, so I think it's still OK.

[Murbella]

I guess the real execute summary would be something along the lines of: WOW GUYS SEX SELLS STUFF BUT THIS IS BAD FOR GIRLS DID YOU KNOW?

There are many similar messages in media as well which kind of makes a study like this silly (hence all of the jokes in this thread). Of course society tries to push certain images on women, it does on men too. For every tv ad promising that a woman can look like this model if they buy this (whatever), there is another promising that a guy can have models like this lining up to ask him out if he buys this (whatever). I'll be the first to admit that there is more pressure on women, but it isn't like men aren't also pressured to look and act a certain way. If you watch tv, you don't see a whole lot of overweight men in key roles for example, many of the younger ones have eight pack abs and/or are millionaires.

[Ephraim]

If you watch tv, you don't see a whole lot of overweight men in key roles for example, many of the younger ones have eight pack abs and/or are millionaires.

Yes, that's true. Luckily for men, males seem to employ some interesting cognitive strategies for discounting the images of what society deems they're supposed to look like. As one of the studies reported in the summary, men who were taking a quiz in a bathing suit do no worse than men who were in regular clothes, but women did significantly worse. This is why the visual sexualization of women in the media is potentially harmful. You should read about Claude Steele's "Stereotype Threat" theory if you want to understand the roots of this impact on achievement. The APA is trying to fulfill its mandate to educate the public and media about harmful psychological consequences through this summary, so I'm glad it's getting some discussion here.

As for men, they are influenced by society in detrimental ways as well, mostly having to do with gender role expectations (e.g., always be strong and don't cry). The terrible male role models in the mass media have a different impact, probably just as harmful in the long run, but not something that hurts them when they sit down to write the MCATs, LSATs, GREs or GMATs to get into grad school, which gets them the top paying jobs. One problem at a time, though.

[unbongwah]

If you watch tv, you don't see a whole lot of overweight men in key roles for example, many of the younger ones have eight pack abs and/or are millionaires.
Seth Rogen looks down from his throne of gold and laughs derisively at you for 103 pts of dmg!

[Rimbo]

Seth Rogen looks down from his throne of gold and laughs derisively at you for 103 pts of dmg!

hahahahhaa!

[Kraaze]

Seth Rogen looks down from his throne of gold and laughs derisively at you for 103 pts of dmg!

Have you seen the dude recently? He slimmed waaaay down, probably so he wouldn't get typecast as someone who could only do funny stoner fat guy roles.

[Eric P]

it was for the green hornet, wasn't it?

[skedastic]

As one of the studies reported in the summary, men who were taking a quiz in a bathing suit do no worse than men who were in regular clothes, but women did significantly worse. This is why the visual sexualization of women in the media is potentially harmful.


Not a good example. The paper used a sample of 40 undergraduate men and 42 women. Not a great deal can be learned from tiny samples of undergraduates in general, but these students were also selected on the basis of their scores in pre-testing: only those with atypically low or high "self-objectification scores" for their gender were included. Very little can be learned about even the population of undergraduates, much less the population in general, from these data. Subsequent research showed that sampling more broadly from the population of undergraduates removes the effect reported from the smaller and non-random sample:


Self-objectification theory posits and past research has found that Caucasian women’s body image is negatively affected by a stigma of obesity and sociocultural norm of thinness that leads women to self-focus from a critical external perspective. However, research in this area is limited by its methodology and the restricted demographic composition of its study participants. The current study tested 176 men and 224 women of Caucasian, African American, Hispanic, and Asian American descent in a situation that induced a state of self-objectification (e.g., wearing a one-piece Speedo bathing suit) or that served as a control condition (e.g., wearing a sweater). Contrary to previous research, when put in a self-objectifying situation, men and women of every ethnicity experienced negative outcomes (e.g., lower math performance) that parallel those previously found for Caucasian women.

This is how these two studies are discussed in the APA report:


No differences were found for young men. In
other words, thinking about the body and comparing it to
sexualized cultural ideals disrupted mental capacity. Recent
research has shown that this impairment occurs among
African American, Latina, and Asian American young
women (Hebl, King, & Lin, 2004) and extends beyond
mathematics to other cognitive domains including logical
reasoning and spatial skills (Gapinski, Brownell, &
LaFrance, 2003).


The Hebl et al result is NOT confirmation of the Fredrickson et al result. It rather overturns that result, showing that the previous result of sex differences is likely an artifact of the Fredrickson paper's bizarre sample selection method. (The paragraph also reads as if the Gapinski et al paper supports sex differences in other domains, but that paper's sample only includes women.)

This sort of dishonest, biased review of the literature should give us pause. Skimming, it appears most of the other studies report on correlations from observational data, which don't tell us anything about causality. The effects the report claims are strong and pervasive may exist, but the evidence mustered here is not very compelling, and it's not presented in a neutral manner.

I think it is worth pointing out in passing that all seven of the authors are women and 25 of the 26 people thanked for offering suggestions are women. Sex bias, indeed.

[Rimbo]

Thanks for pointing that out, skedastic. The paper read to me a lot more like a political opinion than an actual abstract or summary of research, but I didn't know enough about the topic to respect my own gut feeling about it.

[Ephraim]

Yep, good catch. I didn't dig into the original sources, so I didn't realize that their review was so heavily slanted.

I stand corrected.