Making Another Into An Object For Sexual Gratification

A new study finds that when you consume media that portrays others as sex objects, then you tend to see the real thing the same way. This is not any ground-breaking study, but it does back up the common sense that this is happening commonly.
More on the study:

Sure, it's nice to have a looker at your side. But it turns out that concentrating on their partners' physical attractiveness may make people less happy in relationships, new research suggests.

The study also saw that magazines and movies that portray people as sex objects can cause you to see your partner in that light, though not yourself.

Self-objectification — when a person is obsessively concerned about he or she looks — has been shown to affect women's self-image, school performance and life happiness. But this quality hasn't been studied much in the context of romantic relationships. Partner-objectification, where that focus is placed on a partner's physical qualities over everything else, hasn't been studied at all in this context.

"If you have these kinds of thoughts and beliefs about your partner, it might be a block that stops you from having that intimacy, which is important in relationships," said study researcher Eileen Zurbriggen of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Studying students

For her study, Zurbriggen polled 159 sophomores at her university. The students were asked to fill out a survey on their romantic relationships (current or previous), their media consumption and their feelings of objectification.
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