The toxic male gaze can’t be averted — no matter how much skin women show.
A new study published in Psychoneuroendocrinology revealed that conservatively dressed women are no safer from some men than those who dress sexy, particularly if he has high testosterone.
It’s a well-known cultural assumption that scantily clad women are less intelligent and more promiscuous than those who dress modestly — thus making them common targets of harassment, according to study authors who wondered whether a man’s testosterone levels had anything to do with it.
“Given these harmful outcomes, it’s important to understand the mechanisms that lead to the dehumanization of women. We were interested in contributing to this effort by investigating whether physiological factors, such as increases in testosterone levels, play a role in men’s dehumanization of sexualized and non-sexualized women,” said study author Francesca Luberti of Nipissing University in a statement for PsyPost.
Previous research has shown that testosterone levels in men are linked to social behaviors — for better or worse — including sexual aggression and impulsivity, both of which stem from a dehumanization of another. To dehumanize someone, as the study authors describe, is to ignore a person’s capacity for human qualities, such as the ability to feel sad, scared or behave morally.
Researchers enlisted 20 men between the ages of 18 and 38 with healthy testosterone levels to participate in two experiments, during which volunteers were given supplemental doses of the hormone or a placebo. Then, they watched a video featuring a woman dressed conservatively or provocatively but behaved all the same. Finally, the men completed a series of tasks to demonstrate their impulse toward the dehumanization of women.
Test results showed that men who took extra testosterone were more likely to dehumanize even conservatively dressed women when compared to men who did not receive hormones.
However, testosterone levels had no significant effect on a man’s view of a woman in revealing clothing and were just as likely to dehumanize her regardless of hormones, confirming previous assumptions of society’s negative view of female sexuality.
“We were definitely surprised to find that testosterone did not further increase emotion-based dehumanization toward a sexualized woman, as we had predicted, but instead led to the emotion-based dehumanization of a non-sexualized woman,” Luberti said.
“Based on these results, the takeaway message is that sexualization leads to emotion-based dehumanization toward a target woman, but heightened testosterone levels can trigger this type of dehumanization even in the absence of sexualization cues,” she concluded.
Testosterone is just one factor in how men treat women, researchers reiterated in their statement, calling for more research into the intersection of human physiology and social conditioning.
