Sexual objectification in education: how do teachers perceive and evaluate students?

Sexual objectification can be defined as an imprecise cognitive process which produces inaccurate evaluations according to gender. Moreover, sexual objectification restricts evaluation to a single aspect of people: appearance (Langton in Future Philos 285-303, 2004; Langton in Sexual solipsism: philosophical essays on pornography and objectification, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009). So far, no studies have assessed the impact of sexual objectification on teachers' perceptions and evaluations of students. The present study was aimed at investigating the impact of gender and sexual objectification in the domain of education. Specifically, we examined whether gender and objectification changed how teachers perceived and evaluated students. The sample comprised 164 female teachers ages 32-70 years (mean 48.3 +/- 7.5) from randomly selected middle schools in Sardinia, Italy. Statistical analysis revealed that teachers ascribed more behaviours that precluded learning to students who were sexually objectified than students who were not sexually objectified. This effect was not dependent on students' gender. Teachers should acknowledge the important role of sexual objectification in student assessment and be informed of best practices to reduce the negative outcomes of sexual objectification and self-objectification in adolescents

Do Personal Factors Make Women and Men more Susceptible to Self-Objectification and the Development of Dysfunctional Eating Attitudes?

Personality factors can make individuals more susceptible to society’s beauty ideals and can explain the differences between people who do and do not develop eating disorders and concerns about their body shape. This study has two main aims. First, we investigated the degree to which self-objectification mediated the associations between trait anxiety, self-esteem, and eating attitudes in a sample of 698 undergraduate students (375 women, 323 men). Second, we evaluated whether these associations showed analogous patterns across the genders. Our results demonstrated that self-esteem and trait anxiety might contribute to the internalization processes of societal beauty ideals, which may, in turn, lead to dysfunctional eating attitudes in both women and men. The findings suggested the importance of identifying the roles personality factors play in self-objectification for practitioners seeking to improve intervention and prevention strategies. These results are valuable in social contexts where women and men can learn functional and dysfunctional models of culture and behavior. Additionally, the results are useful in a clinical context for a more complete understanding of the etiological factors and outcomes associated with eating disorders