The Effect Of Female Character Exposure And Humanization In Games On Male Players’ Sexual Objectification Behaviour

The concept of sexual objectification refers to the fact that a woman’s body,body part or sexual function is separated from herself,reduced to a pure tool or regarded as a substitute for herself.That is,women’s social value is determined by their appearance rather than their ability(Fredrickson&Roberts,1997;Sun Qingqing,Zheng Lijun&Zheng Yong,2013).In this sense,this term links body,appearance,sex and other words.Women are not only deprived of human attributes,but also regarded as an object,an object that can be played with at will.According to the theory of objectification and the existence of many sexy female roles in the current video games,this paper examines the influence of the exposure of female roles in the video games on the sexual objectification of male college students and the influence of controlling the degree of humanization of sexy female roles in the video games on the sexual objectification of male college students through three studies.In study 1,32 male college students were used as effective subjects to investigate the degree of sexual objectification of male college students to female roles with high or low clothing exposure using the sexualized body inversion paradigm.The results show that the female roles with high or low clothing exposure have no body inversion effect,and both are objectified by sex.In study 2,60 male college students were used as subjects,and the sexualized body inversion paradigm was used to investigate the degree of sexual objectification of male college students to live female photos after playing video games containing female characters with high or low clothing exposure.The results show that the body inversion phenomenon appears in the real female photos,which has nothing to do with the exposure of female role clothing.On the basis of study 2,study 3 used 91 male college students as effective subjects to investigate the degree of sexual objectification of male college students to real female photos after playing video games with sexy female roles of different levels of humanization using the sexualized body inversion paradigm.The results show that the positive humanized information makes male college students have no difference in the correct rate of upright and inverted recognition of real female photos,and reduces the correct rate of recognition.Negative humanized information has improved the correct rate of male college students’ upright and inverted recognition of real female photos,and there is no difference.In a word,the research on male college students’ sexual objectification of the opposite sex found that there is no sexual body inversion in female roles,whether sexy or not,in video games.However,playing video games containing sexy female characters will not affect real women.And negatively humanising sexy female characters can increase this trend towards sexual objectification.