In this day and age, the influence of the media is inescapable: between magazines, music, movies, videogames, and television, the portrayal of women has intensified, but not always in a positive way.

The objectification of women has been a recurring problem that is increasingly getting worse. The media has been able to fill the gap and provide more equal opportunities for women to showcase their talents — but is it really worth it?

Through the assistance of media, society has created a false image of women. Basically, objectification means that women are viewed as “things,” and are looked at in pieces rather than a whole.

Every day, advertisements in society are exploiting women in order to sell merchandise, making it seem that it is okay for women to be seen in parts, consequently making women feel materialized and insecure.

“I definitely think girls feel pressured to live up to the ideal image that media is capitalizing upon because society thinks the only way to be pretty is to look like a model,” junior Olivia Geraghty said.

Despite the negative views of women in society, psychologists have developed new research that states that men and women are biologically wired to view women in parts rather than as a whole, therefore making them more susceptible to degradation, while the human brain views men as a whole.

Researchers at the University of Nebraska conducted an experiment to illustrate that more women are being objectified than men. When viewing images of women, the participants recognized individual parts more easily than when they were viewing pictures of men zoomed in. However, it was the opposite when the picture was zoomed out: the participants noticed men more holistically, but had a harder time detecting the women when they were not zoomed in.

“People were better at discerning women’s individual body parts than they were at men’s individual body parts, further confirming the local processing, or objectification, that was happening,” Sarah Gervais, study author and psychologist at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, said.

Nonetheless, the results remain the same. The media is worsening the problem, and girls are feeling extremely threatened by being viewed by their physical appearance rather than their minds.