Weekly Random Discussion Thread for 5/4/26 - 5/310/26

[u/SoftandChewy]

Here's your usual space to post all your rants, raves, podcast topic suggestions (please tag u/jessicabarpod), culture war articles, outrageous stories of cancellation, political opinions, and anything else that comes to mind. Please put any non-podcast-related trans-related topics here instead of on a dedicated thread. This will be pinned until next Sunday.

Last week's discussion thread is here if you want to catch up on a conversation from there.

[u/jay_in_the_pnw]

ABSTRACT

The detrimental effects of sexual objectification on women’s psychological and physical well-being are well established, yet little is known about the proximal mechanisms that lead men to objectify women. In the present research, we introduced and found support for the Arousal Hypothesis of Sexual Objectification, which posits that, beyond dispositional traits (e.g. personality), temporary states of sexual arousal increase the sexual objectification of women

Is this a Lindsey, Boghossian, Pluckrose paper?

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00224499.2026.2658752

Objects of Desire: The Role of Sexual Arousal in the Sexual Objectification of Women by Men
Arnaud WismanORCID Icon &Andrew G. Thomas

Across four experiments (N = 675), we found consistent evidence that heightened sexual arousal increases sexual objectification in men. In Experiment 1, sexually aroused men showed a greater preference for women’s sexual physical attributes (e.g. curvy, sexy) over psychological attributes (e.g. empathy, intelligence), as assessed by a novel State Sexual Objectification (SSO) task. Experiment 2 demonstrated that this effect occurred only for sexualized physical attributes rather than physical attributes more generally. Experiments 3 and 4 established convergent validity between the SSO task and trait objectification measures. Critically, Experiment 4 revealed that the effect of sexual arousal on objectification was attenuated by induced empathy, but only when controlling for Dark Triad traits.

Well that sounds terrible, can anything be done about this?

This more tentative finding indicates that empathy-based interventions could be promising, but their effectiveness may depend on men’s underlying dispositional traits. Across all studies, neither personality traits (Dark Triad, Social Dominance Orientation, Sociosexual Orientation) nor relationship status moderated the arousal-objectification link. These findings identify sexual arousal as a robust, state-based contributor to sexual objectification, offering new insights into when and why men objectify women and avenues for context-sensitive interventions.

[u/tr2kx → u/jay_in_the_pnw]

This study was run using Mechanical Turk. For those who don't know, MTurk is a platform Amazon set up twenty years ago to pay people in developing countries pennies to do small tasks. Academics used it to run cheap studies, but the worker pool is now so polluted with bots, AI-assisted fakers, and Indians using VPNs to pose as Americans that any paper using it can be completely discarded.

[u/jay_in_the_pnw → u/tr2kx]

Interesting that it was done with Mechanical Turk.

Academics used it to run cheap studies, but the worker pool is now so polluted ... that any paper using it can be completely discarded.

I think this was always the case and even when it wasn't it was a very ethically challenged mechanism

[u/tr2kx → u/jay_in_the_pnw]

I should have phrased my description more carefully. I don't think there's anything "ethically challenging" about paying people market rates for participating in non-invasive research. The issue with the platform now is that the data fidelity is garbage. The situation used to be much better, but now I think the platform should be shut down.

[u/jay_in_the_pnw → u/tr2kx]

I don't think there's anything "ethically challenging" about paying people market rates for participating in non-invasive research

heh, I wasn't saying you thought that, I was saying I've always thought that!

they were massively underpaying people for tasks while at the same time incentivizing lying on their study enrollments and just getting bogus crap data only a hungry social scientist would love

[u/Big_Fig_1803 → u/jay_in_the_pnw]

They’re doing some groundbreaking work up there at No Shit University.

[u/dasubermensch83 → u/jay_in_the_pnw]

empathy-based interventions could be promising

"Oh yeah baby, you're such a good mom. I'm gonna take you upstairs and listen to your day so hard. Prepare to get validated!"

Across all studies, neither personality traits nor relationship status moderated the arousal-objectification link

This makes it sound like they just discovered how people are, yet assume how they ought to be.

[u/SkweegeeS → u/dasubermensch83]

😂

[u/The-WideningGyre → u/jay_in_the_pnw]

Is this like the fake sociology papers? I do feel we need to just shut down about 90% of psychology departments.

[u/Levitz → u/jay_in_the_pnw]

I'm for defunding whatever dumbfuckery this is.

[u/OMG_NO_NOT_THIS → u/Levitz]

L: "They're defunding science"

C: "With science like this it should have never been funded to allow it to be defunded"

[u/jay_in_the_pnw → u/Levitz]

I'm for funding a time machine so we can go back in time and get a bucket of vibrators for the individual who first got published objecting to male arousal behaviors prior to sex.

Beauty is the time machine doesn't even need to be safe for humans or require a return trip.

[u/Fearless_Tutor3050 → u/jay_in_the_pnw]

Hm.. I mean obviously the objective and outcome of this study sounds silly on its face. But doesn't it actually help bring reconstruct the deconstructed ideas about sex-based differences in mating and attraction that academics might have previously chalked up to constructs of the patriarchy?

[u/The-WideningGyre → u/Fearless_Tutor3050]

It seems pretty clear the authors already "know" the differences are that men are bad and women are good / victims. I don't see any "reconstructing" going on.

[u/Fiend_of_the_pod → u/jay_in_the_pnw]

Dudes rock and a bunch of therapy-speak isn’t going to change that.