Treating Women as Sexual Objects

The present study was designed to test the hypothesis that exposure to nonviolent pornography would prime a heterosexuality subschema in gender schematic males and thus lead these males to view and treat a woman as a sexual object. In a 2 × 2 design, 60 male subjects, half gender schematic and half gender aschematic, watched either a pornographic or a control video prior to being interviewed by a female research assistant. Although she was blind to condition, the female experimenter found the gender schematic males who had viewed the pornographic video to be significantly more sexually motivated than subjects in the three other conditions. Further, in the first minute of a free recall task given after the interview, 72% of the information recalled by this group of males concerned the physical features of the female experimenter, as compared with 49% for the males in the other conditions. The implications of these findings for real-world settings are discussed.