If you have opened your social media yesterday morning to see what was going on while you’re sipping your morning coffee, you must had come across the angry athletes who were ranting about the latest Sydney Sweeney ad. I must admit it took me about a millisecond to be dragged in this rage about the ad in which a very attractive popular American actress shows her naked body to promote… what exactly? Novig? What is that? Never heard of it. Even after visiting their instagram page, I still don’t get exactly what they sell and what does it have to do with sports. But one thing I know- what they are doing is called trolling.
So, lets make up a word for this: marketing trolling. What will soon become a trendy phenomenon, is something we’ve actually been seeing for a while. The scenario is always the same: unknown brand provokes – angry audience hooks – brand becomes famous. Viral anger thrown at them actually gives them free publicity. “There is no such thing as bad publicity”, some would say. Oh are they wrong. But this post is not about bad pubicity, this post is about brands purposely trolling the audience because their main target group simply does not care about the values that they are attacking. In this case, Novig’s target group surely does not care about sexualizing women’s body and downsizing a woman athlete’s from a complex human being down to her overly exposed body parts like naked breasts, naked bottom and sexy lips.
The objectification of women body is not a problem for the target group, but what about the rest of us? We know that empathy for women is not something to expect from the target group of this ad, but what exact science is behind this?
When neuroscientists talk about dehumanization and reduced empathy from sexualization, they are referring to a measurable shift in how the brain visually processes and socially evaluates human beings. Instead of registering a whole person, intense sexualization triggers perceptual mechanisms typically reserved for inanimate objects.
The Neurological Breakdown: Brain Scans and Perception
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalogram (EEG) studies show that the human brain processes fully clothed or non-sexualized people differently than it processes tools, furniture, or sexualized imagery. In other words: naked women are perceived as armchair, a simple lifeless object with a specific purpose and use.
Neuroimaging maps neural regions responsible for empathy and social processing. Source: ResearchGate
This is called the cognitive shift, which makes a huge difference between two types of processing:
First-Person Processing: When looking at a person, the brain normally uses configural processing—it recognizes the body and face as a single integrated whole. This visual route activates neural networks associated with social cognition (recognizing minds, intentions, and emotions).
Object-Like Processing: When presented with highly sexualized imagery (e.g., imagery focusing strictly on body parts, breasts, or buttocks while obscuring faces), the brain shifts to analytic/local processing. It analyzes the body piece-by-piece, in the exact same way it processes inanimate objects like a chair or a car.
Additionally, when looking at non-sexualized individuals, areas of the brain such as the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) light up. The mPFC is responsible for sub-conscious questions that raise inside our heads: “What is this person thinking? How do they feel?”. Neuroimaging studies (such as landmark research led by Susan Fiske and Mina Cikara) reveal that when participants view sexualized images of women, activation in the mPFC significantly decreases. In the same time, regions associated with tool manipulation and object processing show increased activity.
So, what is this turning us into?
In psychological experiments where participants observe individuals experiencing physical pain or emotional distress, participants report feeling significantly less empathy and demonstrate weaker empathy toward sexualized targets compared to fully clothed targets. People automatically attribute less intelligence, willpower, moral agency, and competence to sexualized individuals. They are viewed as targets to be acted upon rather than living beings who act. Reducing a person to an object lowers the internal psychological barrier to abuse, harassment, or dismissal. In other words, objectifications can be dangerous. And this does not stand only for men looking at naked women. Even though the vice versa experiment was never done (women observing over sexualized men), authors suggest that it might come out with similar results:
” Furthermore, we do not believe these findings are unique to men. The current findings suggest that sexualization, along with sexist attitudes, fundamentally alters the course of social cognition.”, study authors conclude. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3801174/
Now let’s get back to marketing trolling. Objectifying a female body and downsizing a women athlete down to its naked parts is dangerous, but the backlash and anger sometime bring out voices that yell important shifts into how we perceive realities. Like in this example, I have seen numerous videos of women running marathons, lifting heavy weights and doing their high jumps asking Sydney Sweeney WTF was that. So now, instead of seeing the problematic ad of the over sexualized actress, we see empowered women doing their sport on our Instagram feeds and that is what matters at the end.
However, if we were to vote would it be better if the ad was never ever run at all, sure thing. But counting on empathy, dignity and high morals is still a wishful thinking for some in advertising industry. Up until the money starts following these values (I believe it did), we’ll still be seeing occasional naked Sydney Sweenes on our screens trolling us for free clicks, views and shares.