The Influence Of Trendy Drama Clips On State Self-objectification Of Middle School Girls:an Exploration Of Sexual Objectification And Ideal Beauty Internalization

Objectification Theory (Fredrickson & Roberts,1997) posits a culture we live in which sexually objectifies the female body makes girls and women get the fact directly or indirectly that how do they look may determine how they are treated. Then they have to acculturate to internalize an observer’s perspective as a primary view of their physical selves by society’s demand. They tend to treat themselves as objects to be looked and evaluated by their physical appearance, which leads to habitual body monitoring. Fredrickson and Roberts called this self-objectification. Self-objectification is treated as a trait, and also a state, which can increase women’s opportunities for body shame and appearance anxiety, reduce opportunities for peak motivational states, and diminish awareness of internal bodily states. Accumulations of such experiences may help account for an array of mental health risks that disproportionately affect women: eating disorders, unipolar depression and sexual dysfunction.Media exposure is an important manifestation of sexual objectification. Mass media propagates an ideal beauty that cannot be reached in real world. This standard of beauty promotes state self-objectification of women, in turn bring a lot of negative emotions and mental risks.There is quantities of studies on self-objectification in Western, most of which focus on the relations of self-objectification and the consequences of it, such as body shame, appearance anxiety, eating disorder, depression, meanwhile, little research on the relation of self-objectification and the procusor of it. The studies about media exposure almost have the print magazine or advertisements as the materials, the White college students as the participants.Based on existed studies, this research focuses on adolescents, getting trendy dramasclips as the experimental materials, distinguishing different manifestations of sexual objectification, linking the level of internalization though the experiment to examine the influence of the idol plays’ clips with different types of sexual objectification and different levels of internalization on girls’state self-objectification of middle school.This research contains two parts:previous survey and formal experiment.Firstly, interviews and questionnaires surveys are leaded. Interviewing 10 middle school girls from cities learned what types of trendy dramas they like and the points they pay attention on. Questionnaires conducted in 425 middle school girls to determine primarily 15 popular trendy dramas as the source of the experimental materials. Then invited 300 girls to watch the clips from the trendy dramas and checked if they can identify the sexual objectification factors. The result of this step is 30 clips from 10 trendy dramas. Each trendy drama has three clips,one focusing on female body or body parts, one describing a man gazing a beautiful woman with a sexual evaluation, one having natual sceneries as a main part.In the present study, participants were 53 female middle school students who completed questionnaire measures in a 3 (types of trendy drama clips:highlighting female figure clips, versus male gazing at women clips versus scenery clips)× 2 (levels of internalization:high versus low internalization) between-subjects design. The independent variables are the types of trendy drama clips and the level of internalization of ideal-beauty. The dependent variable is change of state self-objectification, which is measured by the score difference between pretest and posttest. Trait self-obj ectification is measured and evaluated as a control variable. It was found that:1) Controlling for trait level of self-objectification, participants with high internalization who watch the clips featuring male gazing at female will exhibit higher state self-objectification than participants with high internalization who watch the scenery clips, which is consistent with hypothesis.2) Controlling for trait level of self-objectification, participants with high internalization who watch the clips featuring female body or body parts will exhibit higher state self-objectification than participants with high internalization who watch the scenery clips, which is consistent with hypothesis.3) Controlling for trait level of self-objectification, participants with high internalization who watch the clips featuring male gazing at female will exhibit the same level of state self-objectification as participants with high internalization who watch the clips featuring female body or body parts, which is consistent with hypothesis.4) Participants with low internalization who watch the different types of clips have the significant differences in increasing levels of state self-objectification, which is incompatible with hypothesis.5) The priming effects in participants with high internalization has no significant difference between in participants with low internalization, which is incompatible with hypothesis.The conclusions of present study are:1) The sexual objectifying clips will trigger or increase the level of middle school girls’state self-objectification in China.2) Different types of sexual objectifying clips in trendy dramas have the same influence on middle school girl’s state self-objectification.3) Different levels of internalization of ideal beauty have the same influence on middle school girls’ state self-objectification.