From the Guardian, a report of a study on photos that objectify women.
Men are more likely to think of women as objects if they have looked at sexy pictures of females beforehand, psychologists said yesterday.
Researchers used brain scans to show that when straight men looked at pictures of women in bikinis, areas of the brain that normally light up in anticipation of using tools, like spanners and screwdrivers, were activated.
Scans of some of the men found that a part of the brain associated with empathy for other peoples’ emotions and wishes shut down after looking at the pictures.
Susan Fiske, a psychologist at Princeton University in New Jersey, said the changes in brain activity suggest sexy images can shift the way men perceive women, turning them from people to interact with, to objects to act upon.
(Thanks, Cindy.)
This is a big duh. Women have been saying this for ages. At least now there’s some data to back up our practical knowledge. Just as there is now data (it cost $5 million to assemble, if I recall correctly) proving that toast always falls on the floor butter-side down.
Tell me you didn’t think I was going to use a picture of a scantily-clad model for this post…
Nicola Griffith 
So does this mean we should cover up? I wish men would just grow up.
I see naked toast!
Nah, I search over at Kelley’s blog when I want to see naked people.How much toast did that guy drop on the floor to make him notice a statistical trend for which way it landed and wonder why? Remarkable how little we really know about gravity.
Yes, well, modern science is so wonderful.How much of our immediate reactions are due to evolutionary traits is obviously interesting. But although I’ll freely admit that my screwdriver brain areas may well light up when I see women in advanced stages of undress (I’m bi, if that’s of any concern to anyone), this by no means that I automatically rape someone. I once learned that humans have no instinctive behavior, only inborn urges; the difference, I also learned, being that instincts provide an automatic response to stimuli, whereas urges tell us what we want but leave the providing of it up to conscious thought and action. Which I believe to be true (what I have to some extent come to doubt is the extent to which at least higher animals, like cats or the insidiously clever magpies living on my garage roof, are actually acting on instinct); consequently I see no earthly reason for males either to objectify women or to behave differently to them than to any other humans, regardless of the state of their dress. (No, I didn’t expect you to use a picture of a scantily-dressed model, or any model, for that matter.)
<>barbara<>, I’m not going to change how I behave–there again, living in Seattle I rarely wear skimpy clothes. (If it’s that hot I don’t wear any *g*.) I wonder if the same results obtain from looking at real people, as opposed to pictures.<>steadycat<>, yep, and the toast that most often falls has jam on it, sigh.<>jennifer<>, we know a lot about gravity, which is why it blows me away that someone felt the need to test the toast thing. It’s so bloody obvious.<>john-henri<>, one of the beauties of being grownups is that we’ve learnt for that split second to think, hang on a minute, before doing something prompted by our hormones or neurons or whatever. Much of our tendencies towards foolishness (racism, misogyny, etc.) can be countered by our rational brains–as long as we’re aware of and admit to our tendencies. Pretending we don’t have them invites disaster.
Well sure, we know that what goes up must come down, we have Newton’s Laws, and Einstein’s GR, and gravitons, and now there’s String Theory. But it’s theory — we don’t <>know<> <>why<> < HREF="http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/070810_gm_gravity.html" REL="nofollow">gravity exists<>. We don’t know how gravity waves are transmitted or how to block them. And it turns out < HREF="http://www.astronomy.com/asy/default.aspx?c=a&id=7875" REL="nofollow">we may not know<> as much as we thought. Some of our < HREF="http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/080229-spacecraft-anomaly.html" REL="nofollow">spacecraft trajectories<> are not turning out as projected.And I agree the toast thing does seem ridiculously obvious. But I’m in favor of more research on gravity. Because I want anti-gravity boots!