Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Objectification and vision: how images shape our early visual processes

  • Published:
Synthese Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Objectification involves treating someone (a subject) as a thing (an object). The role of images in perpetuating objectification has been discussed by feminist philosophers. However, the precise effect that images have on an individual's visual system is seldom explored. Kathleen Stock’s work is an exception—she describes certain images of women as causing viewers to develop an objectifying ‘gestalt’ which is then projected onto real-life women. However, she doesn’t specify the level of visual processing at which objectification occurs. In this paper, I propose that images can affect a viewer's early visual system. I will argue that if a viewer is exposed to a lot of images that depict women as sexual objects, this will bias their early visual selection mechanisms in a way that can result in an objectifying way of seeing. This is an important contribution to work on objectification as it incorporates empirical studies on vision and findings from philosophy of mind. It also examines some of the epistemic and moral consequences of objectification occurring at this early visual stage.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2

Similar content being viewed by others

Code availability

Not Applicable.

Notes

  1. I will define ‘early visual processes’ as processes that occur in V1 (the primary visual cortex), early in the feed-forward process (which involves projection from lower-level neurons in V1 to higher level neurons). This includes the selection of visual content and other visual processing that is largely automatic and modular. Edge detection is a paradigmatic example of an early visual process.

  2. In this paper I will focus exclusively on images that treat women as sexual objects. However, my account generalises to images that treat other groups in a way that denies their subjectivity, such as racial minorities and people of other genders.

  3. Nussbaum (1995) does not spend much time on images, Papadaki (2010) does not mention images, similarly for Haslanger (2012), Eaton (2012) and Langton (1993). Stock (2018) and Eaton (2012) are exceptions to this.

  4. Mackinnon and Dworkin (1988), and Langton (1993) who follows their definition, define pornography as sexually explicit material. Although the images I am speaking about have sexualised content, they are not sexually explicit. They would not therefore be considered pornography by this definition.

  5. Nussbaum (1995), Vadas (1987) and Bartky (1990) also do not distinguish between visual and linguistic representations.

  6. For the purpose of this paper, I will assume that an image can depict a type (i.e. ‘women’) not just tokens, I will also assume an experiential account of depiction, which explains depiction in terms of the kind of experience an image causes in a viewer (Gombrich 1960; Wollheim 1987; Newall 2011).

  7. Eaton (2012) speaks about the foregrounding of erogenous zones as characteristic of the female nude in canonical art. These features are also often seen in contemporary advertisements.

  8. Such as seeing women-as-animals and other metaphorical perceptions.

  9. Based on data collected from a sample of local Chicago TV news between 1993 and 1994, news stories related to crime involving black people were also four times more likely to include mug shots than news stories related to crime involving white people (Entman and Rojecki 2000).

  10. There are other interesting features of images that I have left out, such as the context in which the image portrays the subject/object, its size and brightness, and the mood the image evokes, all of which will probably have some impact on what I am speaking about here. However, that is a topic for another paper.

  11. Plakoyiannaki et al. (2008) collected data on female role stereotypes in online advertising. They took a sample of online adverts and classified them into eight different categories, some of which were gender-biased and others neutral. The two most frequent categories were women concerned with physical attractiveness and women as sex objects.

  12. Another possibility that would make priors more likely to come into play is if viewing conditions are not ideal—e.g. if the woman’s face is poorly lit, or partially occluded.

  13. These implications about correction and responsibility are only relevant to the form of objectification that I am discussing (i.e. objectifying-input selection). Objectification can occur in many ways and through many vectors, such via cognitive processing. These different forms of objectification will have different implications about correction and responsibility. For instance, objectification that is more on the cognitive side will (most likely) have greater scope for correction and attribute greater moral responsibility or blameworthiness to the objectifier. I take no position on whether the implications for correction and responsibility given by objectifying-input selection affect those same implications for other forms of objectification.

References

  • Bartky, S. L. (1990). Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression. New York: Routledge.

  • Blake, R., et al. (2006). Strength of early visual adaptation depends on visual awareness. In: Proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the United States of America (vol. 103 12, pp. 4783–4788). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0509634103.

  • Block, N. (2014). Seeing-as in light of vision science. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 89(3), 560–572.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Butler, A., Oruc, I., Fox, C. J., & Barton, J. J. (2008). Factors contributing to the adaptation aftereffects of facial expression. Brain Research, 1191, 116–126. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2007.10.101.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Correll, J., Crawford, M., Wittenbrink, B., & Sadler, M. (2015). Stereotypic vision: How stereotypes disambiguate visual stimuli. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 108(2), 219–233.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Correll, J., Park, B., Judd, C. M., & Wittenbringk, B. (2007). The influence of stereotypes on decision to shoot. European Journal of Social Psychology, 37, 1102–1117.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Davenport, J. L., & Potter, M. C. (2004). Scene consistency in object and background perception. Psychological Science, 15, 559–564.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • de Jong, M. C., Brascamp, J. W., Kemner, C., van Ee, R., & Verstraten, F. A. J. (2014). Implicit perceptual memory modulates early visual processing of ambiguous images. Journal of Neuroscience, 34(30), 9970–9981. https://doi.org/10.1523/jneurosci.2413-13.2014.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dosso, J. A., & Kingstone, A. (2018). Social modulation of object-directed but not image-directed actions. PLoS ONE. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0205830.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dworkin, A., Mackinnon, C. A. (1988). Pornography and Civil Rights: a new day for women's equality. Minneapolis: Organising Against Pornography.

  • Eaton, A. (2012). What’s wrong with the female nude? In H. Maes & J. Levinson (Eds.), Art and pornography: Philosophical essays (pp. 287–291). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Entman, R. M., & Rojecki, A. (2000). The black image in the white mind: Media and race in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gendler, T. S. (2011). On the epistemic costs of implicit bias. Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, 156(1), 33–63.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gombrich, E. H. (1960). Art and illusion. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gregory, R. (1970). The intelligent eye. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gregory, R. L. (1980). Perceptions as hypotheses. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 290(1038), 181–197.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grill-Spector, K., Kourtzi, Z., & Kanwisher, N. (2001). The lateral occipital complex and its role in object recognition. Vision Research, 41, 1409–1422.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Haslanger, S. (2012). On being objective and being objectified. In Resisting reality (pp. 36–82). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  • Hochberg, J. (1981). On cognition in perception: Perceptual coupling and unconscious inference. Cognition, 10(1–3), 127–134.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hopkins, R. (1998). Picture, image and experience: A philosophical inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hyman, J. (2006). The objective eye: Color, form, and reality in the theory of art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Langton, R. (1993). Speech acts and unspeakable acts. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 22(4), 293–330.

    Google Scholar 

  • MacKinnon, C. (1993). Only words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mandelbaum, E. (2017). Seeing and conceptualizing: Modularity and the shallow contents of perception. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12368.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Munton, J. (2017). Perceptual skill and social structure. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12478.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Munton, J. (forthcoming). Bias in a biased system. In N. Ballentyne, & D. Dunning (eds.) Bias, reason and enquiry: New perspectives from the crossroads of epistemology and psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  • Murdoch, I. (2001). The sovereignty of good. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Newall, M. (2011). What is a picture? Depiction, realism, abstraction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

  • Nussbaum, M. C. (1995). Objectification. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 24(4), 249–291.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Papadaki, L. (2010). What is objectification? Journal of Moral Philosophy, 7, 16–36.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Plakoyiannaki, E., Mathioudaki, K., Dimitratos, P., et al. (2008). Images of women in online advertisements of global products: Does sexism exist? Journal of Business Ethics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-007-9651-6.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Potter, M., Wyble, B., Hagmann, C., & McCourt, E. (2014). Detecting meaning in RSVP at 13 ms per picture. Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, 76(2), 270–279.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rosch, E., et al. (1976). Basic objects in natural categories. Cognitive Psychology, 8, 382–439.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Siegel, S. (2017). The rationality of perception. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Sosa, E. (1999). How to defeat opposition to moore. Noûs, 33(s13), 141–153. https://doi.org/10.1111/0029-4624.33.s13.7.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stock, K. (2018). Sexual objectification, objectifying images, and mind-insensitive seeing-as. In Evaluative perception. Oxford: OUP.

  • Story, L. (2007). Anywhere the eye can see, it’s likely to see an ad. New York Times. Quoting statistics from Yankelovitch ‘Market Receptivity. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/business/media/15everywhere.html.

  • Vadas, M. (1987). Could pornography be the subordination of women? The Journal of Philosophy, 84(9), 487–511.

    Google Scholar 

  • Von Helmholtz, H. (1867). Treatise on Physiological Optic III. Rochester: The Optical Society of America.

    Google Scholar 

  • Waldron, J. (2012). The harm in hate speech. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Wollheim, R. (1987). Painting as an art. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Woodman, G. F., Carlisle, N. B., & Reinhart, R. M. (2013). Where do we store the memory representations that guide attention? Journal of Vision, 13(3).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Young, I. M., Nussbaum, M. (2011). Responsibility for Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Funding

Not applicable.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Philosophy, City University of New York Graduate Centre, New York, USA

    Alice Roberts

Authors
  1. Alice Roberts
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alice Roberts.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

All the authors decares that they have no conflict of interest.

Availability of data and material

All data available.

Additional information

Publisher's note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

This paper is based on my MPhil thesis, which I am very grateful to Rae Langton for supervising and providing me with invaluable feedback and ideas. I am also grateful to Eric Mandelbaum, Oliver Holdsworth, and three anonymous reviewers for their written comments.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Roberts, A. Objectification and vision: how images shape our early visual processes. Synthese 199, 4543–4560 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02990-9

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02990-9

Keywords

Search

Navigation