Mainstreaming misogyny: How sexual objectification is shaping the lives of girls and women
By Rachel Samson
Girls are growing up in a world of constant evaluation, algorithmic misogyny, and normalised violence. Naming and understanding this objectification matters, writes clinical pyschologist Rachel Samson.
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The backlash that followed #MeToo. The rise of Andrew Tate, the Manosphere, and increasingly explicit misogyny. The mainstreaming of violent and degrading pornography. The Epstein files. Ongoing debates over abortion and increasing threats to women’s bodily autonomy. Persistently high rates of sexual violence, intimate partner violence, and femicide.
The chronic and pervasive objectification of girls and women in patriarchal societies is a harmful cultural practice linking each of these trends.
The objectification of women
Objectification theory (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997) highlights that in socially constructed systems where men hold primary power, women are positioned less as full human beings and more as objects valued for appearance, sexual availability, and usefulness. In short, objectification refers to treating a person as a thing.
Thus, a person is sexually objectified when their sexual parts or functions are separated from their personhood and treated as if they represent their entire being. We see women targeted with this treatment more often than men, through harassment, sexual commentary, and media that centres the male gaze (Calogero et al., 2011).
From objectification to self-objectification
Objectification gets under the skin. Girls and women learn to see themselves through an external, evaluating gaze (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997). Their attention shifts from embodied lived experience to their external appearance. The body becomes something to monitor - a process referred to as self-surveillance.
As John Berger (1972) observed: men act and women appear. Women watch themselves being looked at. A woman becomes both the observer and the observed.
The psychological costs are well established. Self-objectification is linked to depression, disordered eating, shame, appearance anxiety, and reduced cognitive performance (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997; Tiggemann & Slater, 2014). What is often framed as insecurity or lack of confidence or vanity can be understood as the psychological imprint of a culture that teaches women to live their bodies from the outside in.
Backlash and the mainstreaming of misogyny
#MeToo was supposed to mark a turning point; a public reckoning with the scale of harassment and abuse experienced by women. For a moment, it felt like the culture might shift. But then came the backlash.
As Flood and colleagues (2021) argue, backlash is the defence of privilege. When power is challenged, equality is experienced not as fairness, but as loss. The internet has only accelerated this.
That’s where the Manosphere comes in; a network of online communities organised around grievance and hierarchy. Women are rated, ranked, degraded, traded, and blamed, while male dominance is framed as natural and necessary. Figures like Andrew Tate are shaping how some boys understand power, relationships, and masculinity.
Australian researcher Dr Stephanie Wescott describes this as “misogynist radicalisation”: exposure to these environments shifts attitudes and normalises sexism and harassment (Wescott, 2024). She argues that this is not simply about men wanting to be “manly”, but a broader backlash against the fact that women no longer ask for permission to exist.
This environment is also shaped by pornography, now one of the most pervasive forms of sexual socialisation for boys and young men. Mainstream pornography increasingly centres domination, degradation, and violence; scripts that fuse sex with humiliation (Doidge, 2007). It intersects with social media and dating app cultures that prioritise visual evaluation, reinforcing the reduction of women—and people—to images, and increasingly to parts.
Research shows that exposure to sexualised, appearance-focused content is associated with increased self-objectification and poorer mental health outcomes for women (Papageorgiou et al., 2022; Laemmle-Ruff et al., 2019). Pornography consumption is linked to more objectifying attitudes, reduced empathy, and the normalisation of dominance-based sexual scripts in men (Wright et al., 2016; Flood, 2019).
These cultural conditions shape how girls and women come to see themselves and how boys and men treat them.
The Nurture Gap: why boys are falling behind and women are paying the price
Two clinical pyschologists explain why preventing violence against women starts in childhood and the way parents, caregivers, and educators are socialised to raise boys in our culture.
Violence, control, and dehumanisation
In Australia, 12.6% of women—around 1.3 million—reported sexual harassment in a single year, with 97% reporting a male perpetrator (ABS, 2023). Around one in five women report experiencing sexual violence since the age of 15. On average, one woman is killed every eight to ten days by a current or former intimate partner (AIHW, 2025).
Objectification is not the sole cause of gendered violence. But it helps explain one of its conditions: dehumanisation.
When women are reduced to bodies, they are more easily denied full humanity. They are less likely to be seen as thinking, feeling, suffering beings, and more likely to be blamed when harmed (Loughnan et al., 2010; 2013). When a person is not fully recognised as human, harming them becomes easier to justify.
This logic extends beyond interpersonal violence. Sexual objectification is associated with opposition to women’s abortion access (Moradi et al., 2025). The overturning of Roe v. Wade in the United States was not just a legal shift; it was a reminder that women’s bodies remain politically contested.
In Australia, abortion has been decriminalised in all states, but access remains uneven, shaped by geography, cost, provider shortages, delays, and conscientious or institutional objection. Globally, women’s bodies continue to be regulated, debated, and controlled.
Where this leaves us
Girls are growing up in a world of constant evaluation, algorithmic misogyny, and normalised violence. Boys are growing up in parallel ecosystems that frame dominance as an entitlement and equality as loss. Without a framework to understand objectification, girls’ distress is pathologised and boys’ behaviour is naturalised.
Sexual objectification does not just shape how women are seen. It shapes how they come to see themselves. Over time, the gaze is internalised, and the problem is relocated from the culture that produced it to women themselves.
Naming objectification matters. When girls understand objectification, they are less likely to internalise it. They can locate responsibility for it where it belongs: in the objectifier, not in themselves. But recognising objectification isn’t enough to stop it. As long as women are treated as bodies first and people second, autonomy, safety, and dignity will remain conditional.
About the author
Rachel Samson
Rachel is a Clinical Psychologist, Director of the Australian Association of Psychologists (AAPi), and Panel Family Consultant for the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia, working at the intersection of developmental psychology and family law. She is recognised as a leading expert on relationships, parent-child attachment, and child development. Rachel regularly appears in Australian and international media and is the co-author of Beyond Difficult: An Attachment-Based Guide to Dealing with Challenging People.
References
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This article is spot on. Thank you.
Men are objectified too, but feminism is a supremacist movement that looks at only one side of everything.