Dress and sex: a review of empirical research involving human participants and published in refereed journals Full Text

Choose a Girl

So she moved to New York at 23, and over the subsequent decades continued to use styling, prosthetics and technology to interrogate female identities and women’s roles in society. She has embodied so many characters that the real Cindy Sherman has become something of an eccentric mystery. In 2012, when MoMA hosted a retrospective of her work, various attenders thought they had seen her there in disguise – one said she was in wire-rimmed spectacles, another believed she had come in a fat suit. It’s a bizarre experience, discussing thirst traps with the woman who pioneered the selfie.

Dress, sex, and objectification

Rather than parents investing their children with gender-specific clothing, sometimes children insist on wearing sex-typed clothing. Using cognitive theories of gender development, Halim et al. (2014) investigated appearance rigidity among young Caucasian children (ages 3–5 years). Appearance rigidity involves insisting on wearing dress items that are closely tied to one sex or avoiding dress items linked to the opposite sex. Few boys demonstrated appearance rigidity, but a majority of girls demonstrated appearance rigidity at least once. Rigidity was linked to children who indicated it was important to them to be a girl or boy (measured using items adapted from adult identity measures). Repeating the study with 4 year old children from ethnically diverse backgrounds, incidents of appearance rigidity were even higher as over half of both the girls and boys demonstrated it.

Police investigating double homicide of woman, girl in northeast Denver neighborhood

• “You know, it was Disney Princesses from [ages] 2 to 5, then Hannah Montana, then ‘High School Musical.’ I thought it was so strange that these were the new trajectories of female childhood.”
• The battle against the sexualization of our children can only be won if we as parents recognize where the battle ground begins.
• “There was a gap of nine years between me and the next child, and 19 years between me and the oldest.
• Next, participants completed measures of state self-objectification, negative mood, body shame, and body dissatisfaction.

The use of objectification theory to explain and predict dress and violence seems to hold promise because sexual violence is a sexually objectifying experience. Evolutionary theory was cited most often by researchers studying dress as a cue to sexual information and the topic could benefit from an overarching theory to move it forward. In one study framed using objectification theory, undergraduate white women from the US Midwest viewed and rated well-known female Olympian athletes appearing in either provocative or sports attire (Gurung and Chrouser 2007). Lower ratings of capability (strength, determined, capable) as a function of the provocative dress manipulation and higher ratings of objectification (attractive, sexually experienced, desirable) traits were interpreted as evidence of sexual objectification. By this definition, provocative attire led to sexual objectification of the women athletes but the sports appropriate clothes did not. In addition, as compared to when wearing sports attire, when wearing provocative dress the athletes were rated less strong, less capable, less determined, less intelligent, less self-respecting, but more feminine.

Recently, actress Geena Davis joined Sen. Kay Hagan (D) of North Carolina and Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D) of Wisconsin to lobby for a bill that would support efforts to improve the image of women and girls in the media. The style, which sees little girls striking sexy poses in low-cut dresses, crop tops and high-waist trousers – scaled down versions of adult women’s clothing – has become trendy among children’s wear e-commerce shops and parenting influencers in China in recent years. Whether it’s her series Color Studies, which shows women in private moments, or Centrefolds, which references erotic images from men’s magazines, her photographs centralise the female body. Because the women in Centerfolds look melancholic, vulnerable or fearful, New York magazine critic Jerry Saltz described them as the “unsexiest sexy pictures ever”, while some feminists condemned them as titillating. For them, overtly sexy dress suggested insincerity, a low social class, and a lack of morals and values. Older women commented that young women dressing sexy were immature and were participating in their own sexual objectification.

An example of how this model can be applied to research on dress as a cue to sexual information is Ben-Zeev and Dennehy’s (2014) research. In this research, a pilot study established that it was more of a gender violation for boys to wear pink than for girls to wear blue. In experiment 1, the cue of baby boys’ clothing color (pink or blue) was varied.

She says that schools that can start focusing on these issues earliest have the best success. “In unprecedented levels, girls are being presented with a very narrow image of girlhood,” Brown says. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the percentage of television shows with sexual content – from characters talking about their sexual exploits to actual intercourse – increased from 54 percent in 1998 to 70 percent in 2005. In television shows, for instance, women are represented in far more diverse roles – they are lawyers, doctors, politicians. A woman might run for high political office, but there is almost always analysis about whether she is sexy, too.

Inferences concerning sexual assault such as date rape in response to women wearing sexy dress are similar to inferences concerning sexual harassment. Cassidy and Hurrell (1995) investigated the effect of a female victim’s clothing (i.e., provocative, conservative, no information) in an experiment with high school students. The students read a date rape scenario and made judgments about the victim’s responsibility, whether the assailant’s behavior was justified, and whether the victim was actually raped. The victim was judged more responsible and the behavior of the assailant rated as more justifiable when she wore provocative dress as compared to the two other photo conditions.

This may be because LGBTQ+ teens report feeling more pressured to sext, or, possibly due to uncomfortability or inability to be “out” and dating in real life, are creating romantic relationships online. BEND, Ore. – Girls and young women who post sexy or revealing photos on social media sites such as Facebook are viewed by their female peers as less physically and socially attractive and less competent to perform tasks, a new study from Oregon State University indicates. Of course it isn’t just one Halloween costume that can cause a problem; it is the accumulation of a strong wave of pressures for girls to be “hot and sexy” at a young age that is of concern. While the American Psychological Association brought widespread attention to this issue in its Task Force Report on the Sexualization of Girls in 2007 and 2010, pressure for young girls to be hot and sexy has only intensified and in many ways has worsened.

The photos were actual high school senior portrait and prom photos of a real young woman who allowed the photos to be used for the experiment. “Kids should not be described using words like ‘spicy’ and ‘sexy’, let alone being dressed in such clothes,” said another person. The design of Chinese children’s wear also moved from a cartoon style to adultified fashion around the same time. The adultification or sexualisation of girls’ clothing is not a China-only problem.

Men were recruited at a UK pub, shown a photo of a woman, given a breath alcohol test, and asked to imagine participating in a sexual assault scenario. In the scenario, the woman stops consenting to the sexual activity and information was provided about her intoxication. The outcome measure was whether or not participants would elect to continue sexual contact. Continued sexual activity was indicated when the woman wore revealing as compared to conservative clothing. There was also an interaction such that a hypothetical sexual assault was more likely when the participants’ blood alcohol level was high and the woman wore revealing clothing. Much remains for future researchers to clarify the various means by which sexual objectification (both self- and other-objectification) is assessed and manifested.