Conservative clothes won’t stop some men harassing women: study

The toxic male gaze cannot be avoided – no matter how much skin women show.

A new study published in Psychoneuroendocrinology found that women who dress conservatively are no more safe from some men than those who dress sexily, especially if he has high testosterone.

It’s a well-known cultural assumption that scantily clad women are less intelligent and more promiscuous than those who dress modestly — making them common targets for harassment, according to the study’s authors who asked whether a man’s testosterone levels had anything to do with it.

“Given these harmful outcomes, it is important to understand the mechanisms that lead to the dehumanization of women. We were interested in contributing to this effort by investigating whether physiological factors, such as increased testosterone levels, play a role in the dehumanization of sexualized and non-sexualized women by men,” said study author Francesca Luberti of Nipissing University. in a statement to PsyPost.

Previous research has shown that testosterone levels in men are linked to social behaviors—for better or worse—including sexual aggression and impulsivity, both of which stem from a dehumanization of the other. To dehumanize someone, as the study’s authors describe, is to ignore a person’s capacity for human qualities, such as the ability to feel sad, afraid, or behave morally.

Researchers recruited 20 men between the ages of 18 and 38 with healthy testosterone levels to take part in two experiments, during which volunteers were given extra doses of the hormone or a placebo. Next, they watched a video showing a woman dressed conservatively or provocatively but behaving the same way. Finally, the men completed a series of tasks to demonstrate their impulse toward dehumanizing women.

Test results showed that men who took extra testosterone were more likely to dehumanize even conservatively dressed women compared to men who didn’t take the hormones.

However, testosterone levels had no significant effect on a man’s view of a woman in revealing clothing and were just as likely to dehumanize her regardless of hormones, confirming earlier assumptions about society’s negative view of female sexuality.

“We were definitely surprised to find that testosterone did not further increase emotion-based dehumanization of a sexualized woman, as we had predicted, but instead led to emotion-based dehumanization of a non-sexualized woman,” said Luberti.

“Based on these results, the main message is that sexualization leads to emotion-based dehumanization of a female target, but high testosterone levels can cause this type of dehumanization even in the absence of sexual cues,” she concluded.

Testosterone is only one factor in how men treat women, the researchers reiterated in their statement, calling for more research into the intersection of human physiology and social conditions.