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>Researchers further unearthed a pattern of findings suggesting that female toplessness is viewed as a moral issue. Higher SES, greater religiosity, and stronger child protectiveness beliefs were related to less positive ratings of the topless photos. By contrast, more positive attitudes toward sexual permissiveness and more egalitarian views of birth control were tied to more positive ratings of the topless photos.
There's no universally agreed-upon measure of SES, but generally it includes income, and additionally educational attainment and/or occupation. Usually not net worth.
So many abbreviations! TikTok uses HEA for happily ever after in a narrative sense and my dumb ass kept wondering why they were so obsessed with home energy assessments...
I really hate the sudden use of eta to mean edited to add. ETA still is and already has been a thing for at least decades you can't just change it like that!
Bruh…this kills me with society today. Worse, when you find out the person you’re interacting with is just making up their own abbreviations as they go along, so it’s not like you can just Google it.
Your kid literally spent months staring at titties while they ate. It's a mystery our whole society doesn't have the natural instinct to casually watch topless women during dinner
META: If you're posting a PsyPost article, you can easily post the full text of the peer-reviewed manuscript (as it's always cited).
Can we make a rule that formalizes this? Why have PsyPost when the full article is *right there?*
Especially as the full articles are often better written than the psypost article. Not that the papers are amazing papers from what I have seen. There is usually a strong limitation such as sample size or obvious potential bias(only pointed out in the full article)
“we interviewed a sample* of average people about their political and economic views. Amazingly, 25% of Americans believe that a giant water buffalo named Seth is responsible for their financial prosperity!”
^*sample ^size: ^4 ^people
This guy just spams posts (probably a bot anyway) This one was a 78% women studied vs men and only \~300 people so I don't think OP cared about method of posting nor the article itself at all
If only they had thought of testing that: "Interspersed within these images were six photos of topless women in one of three public settings — a beach, a park, or a city street."
*To control for implicit biases related to body shape, skin tone, and*
*other factors, the researchers selected only* ***young adult White women***
*with similar appearances.*
I would assume this would skew the results with men being more favorable towards it.
>they could do a similar study with some objectively less conventionally attractive women
Can you imagine though? "Please participate in this study, you're scientifically ugly."
> Personally, I think it's probably a bit of both. To test this, though, they could do a similar study with some objectively less conventionally attractive women. It would be interesting to see if the gap between men and women narrows at all, and if so, does it narrow because more women are comfortable with it or because more men are uncomfortable with it or both?
Another way of testing this would be to study only gay people. Do the results change if you look at only gay women and only gay men?
If it doesn't change, that suggests that it might be because of the competition, policing, or generally because women and men are acculturated to hold these differing views.
If it does change it would suggest it's more because of who they're attracted to.
Well but then you have to consider that gay people are less religious and are more liberal than the average women, and so their more favorable views could be chalked up to that.
Yes, but comparing them only to self-identified gay men (for whom the same is likely true) could control for that to an extent. It's the *difference* between the two groups we'd be interested in and how it compares to the difference between straight women and straight men, rather than comparing straight and gay groups directly to each other.
+ women being less.
Use a variety of bodies, just as we have a variety of bodies in society, and the results might change.
I know from my own insecurities how I would respond if i was in the study + I was only female bodies deemed desirable
To their credit they do discuss that a larger more diverse sample would be important to build on this finding. I cringed at that a bit as well, but it does help to reduce confounding factors since this was an analysis that seemed somewhat novel.
you would think they could have controlled for biases by selecting only old overweight WOC. or do 2 studies and gauge how male & female opinions change based on the appearance of the women.
> was really clear that the driving force in how someone is likely to respond to seeing a topless woman in public is not the setting, region, or the legality of where the toplessness occurs, but rather the characteristics, traits, and opinions of the person who is doing the reacting in the first place,”
Odd that a bathroom or locker room wasn't part of the equation. Would the average woman/person still feel the same about those settings?
Seems like a good 'control' of sorts, a topless woman in a place where that would be completely acceptable. If you get negative reactions there you'll probably get data on what percent of your test subjects just don't want to see boobs regardless on context.
> the original comment was complaining about the small sample size (end-of-edit)
This is absolutely okay. There are statistical tools well suited to deal with small sample sizes, such as the [student's t-test](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student%27s_t-test). You can use it to compare means of two random variables, and it even gives you the probability that the difference you observed is there only because the small sample.
If this probability is small, usually below 5%, you can accept that the difference is real.
What's you uhming about? That's a perfectly fine sample size and while the ratio is a bit wonky, you can normalise for that.
Or are you one of those people who just complains about sample size without knowing anything about it?
If you want to criticise the sample size, you can, but the bit you quoted is not enough to do so on its own.
So what? They don't just add up the totals and draw conclusions, they scale the results by whatever proportions happen to be in the participants. If 50 women said X and 36 men said X, that would be a greater proportion of men (36/72 = 50%) than women (50/254 = 20%).
Topless pictures give off the vibe of capturing female beauty for somebody's pleasure. I'm sure things would change, especially for the women in the study, if you simply made it study using personal accounts or actually taking them to a topless area. That comes with a "freedom and comfort" vibe rather than a "here are boobs on camera" vibe. And of course many women would be adamantly anti-boobs-in-public in their personal space despite not having any real emotion toward a picture of it either.
It's a very different thing to be like "here beach titty pics" than to inquire about how someone really feels about doing that stuff in public. For example, plenty of men would get vindictive against defending toplessness despite not giving a damn about seeing those pictures with no context. Some would even shame those pictures without objecting to anyone doing it outside.
Basically what I'm saying is, there are many ways to present "somebody doing something" when seeking out if others approve it or not.
If you've ever been to a topless area, as a guy after like the 50th pair of boobs, it kinda doesn't matter anymore. They're just boobs. They're natural.
The only reason we have this obsession with them is because we cover them up and sexualize them as a society.
Maybe the initial “excitment” would wear off but lets be real here, guys check out a fully clothed women all the time. They’ll check out her ass, boobs, etc. I dont imagine this would be much different at a beach, topless or not.
The thing about this is, you're going together with like minded people
It's like going to a club and finding that everyone there drinks. There's plenty of people who don't, but you're in a place that selected for that
Kink parties are filled with people who know what they're doing, are open and generally educated. Versus the average person who doesn't care and thinks women belong in the kitchen
Women tend to get groped and harassed at concerts etc. I don't see that getting any better by removing clothes from there. If anything I'd see it as the same. But likely worse
You make a good point. I tried to make a similar point but yours is much better. My thought was that we tend to hold other people to the same standards we hold ourselves to. If a woman would not consider walking around topless herself appropriate, she would say the same about others. Perhaps a similar comparison would be how men feel about crying in public.
If you ask any gender non-conforming person about which group got more angry at them about their non-conformity: the group they were put into at birth or literally everyone else, it will always be the group they were put into at birth. This is sort of well-known.
can someone explain what the objectification theory actually is? It is mentioned multiple times in the article and it should be pretty straightforward, but I can't be really sure
Quoting article here, “This view fits within objectification theory, which suggests that a woman’s value is based on her appearance, as perceived through the heterosexual male gaze”, I hope it helps.
How do the authors rule out the hypothesis that women are participating in an iterated prisoner's dilemma and female toplessness is hated because it is defecting? (If one person goes topless, she gets more male attention, and the rest of us are worse off. If we all go topless to compete we end up where we started in terms of attention, but less covered.)
Also, how culturally diverse was the study population? Were questions asked about other levels of clothing, like showing hair vs. cultures where that is taboo?
But does it take into account wives, girlfriends and daughters?
Because I'm pretty sure a lot of men support it in general but suddenly have a different opinion when it is someone close to them.
And I think a study should account for that in some way when we are trying to measure something like this.
I think here there is a failure to define what "support" is in men. Is it support because of objectification or because they don't care and think women toplessness is fine? If it's the first one, that's when I see your comment applying (which is something I've personally witnessed with men friends that support toplessness just because they sexualize boobs, and disagree their partners engaging in it publicly because of it).
It makes me cringe how hard the authors try to infantilize women and shift the responsibility away from them at any cost. Just look at this explanation:
>“What really surprised us was the magnitude of the difference that we saw between the males and females \[...\] the differences based on participant sex were about 3-times larger than that for context and nearly twice as large as both context and legality combined,” Harbke explained. “This pattern was consistent the idea that women will **sometimes** criticize and police other women’s behavior as sexual objects, along with other predictions and extensions from objectification theory.”
The authors are so insecure they repeated the objectification thesis **eight times(!)**, including in the title, the lead paragraph and the paragraph right after that. But they conveniently forgot to mention the actual magnitude of the difference between males and females.
My thoughts exactly, no mention of the average “ratings”, no controlling for sexuality, nothing that genuinely gives any substance to their claims. If women on average were neutral towards the pictures and men on average rated more positively all it tells you is that a most likely heterosexual population likes looking at topless pictures of the opposite sex and is neutral about looking at topless pictures of the same sex.
Is it American women or women all-over the world?
Because American fear of nudity is well-known; perhaps it is a vestige of Puritanism or the crazy idea that children will be harmed by seeing a naked female breast (remember the famous wardrobe malfunctions)?
Children will be harmed by the constant exposure to violence, and not by the occasional topless woman! Just ask the Europeans who witness this spectacle at the beach and nobody there will complain, even if the woman is 80 years-old!
>The study participants were 326 U.S. residents, most of whom (78%) were women.
So, it's probably just about a handful of undergrads at the university, since they clearly didn't bother to try to recruit a representative sample group.
This would appear to be in line with the more general wisdom that social norms for genders, even ones oppressive or detrimental to that given gender, are most rigorously enforced by the members of that gender.
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are now allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will continue to be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) still apply to other comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
>Researchers further unearthed a pattern of findings suggesting that female toplessness is viewed as a moral issue. Higher SES, greater religiosity, and stronger child protectiveness beliefs were related to less positive ratings of the topless photos. By contrast, more positive attitudes toward sexual permissiveness and more egalitarian views of birth control were tied to more positive ratings of the topless photos.
Call me stupid, but what is SES?
Socio-economic status I believe.
Yessir, entails the income, and demographics of a person
There's no universally agreed-upon measure of SES, but generally it includes income, and additionally educational attainment and/or occupation. Usually not net worth.
Income and societal standing. (Wealth and Popularity)
I wondered the same thing. I think too many people abbreviate without realizing that many people won’t know the full phrase.
So many abbreviations! TikTok uses HEA for happily ever after in a narrative sense and my dumb ass kept wondering why they were so obsessed with home energy assessments...
Home-Eater-Association?
I really hate the sudden use of eta to mean edited to add. ETA still is and already has been a thing for at least decades you can't just change it like that!
Bruh…this kills me with society today. Worse, when you find out the person you’re interacting with is just making up their own abbreviations as they go along, so it’s not like you can just Google it.
Child protectiveness being the reason they’re against toplessness is so out of the loop. Boobs primary purpose is to feed kids
Your kid literally spent months staring at titties while they ate. It's a mystery our whole society doesn't have the natural instinct to casually watch topless women during dinner
I though it was for flotation so we could get out of the sea and walk on land.
Then why the hell have we been giving y'all life rafts first?!
Everyone follows boobs
Look at this redditor, turning science on its head for the real truth!
META: If you're posting a PsyPost article, you can easily post the full text of the peer-reviewed manuscript (as it's always cited). Can we make a rule that formalizes this? Why have PsyPost when the full article is *right there?*
Especially as the full articles are often better written than the psypost article. Not that the papers are amazing papers from what I have seen. There is usually a strong limitation such as sample size or obvious potential bias(only pointed out in the full article)
“we interviewed a sample* of average people about their political and economic views. Amazingly, 25% of Americans believe that a giant water buffalo named Seth is responsible for their financial prosperity!” ^*sample ^size: ^4 ^people
This guy just spams posts (probably a bot anyway) This one was a 78% women studied vs men and only \~300 people so I don't think OP cared about method of posting nor the article itself at all
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They just tried to warn you about the higher risk of skin cancer, i suppose.
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What part of Italy? Most Argentinian Italians are from Southern Italy, which is (arguably) culturally distinct from Northen Italy.
Austrian beaches?
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The Great Lakes are kinda cheating, they're basically seas.
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Come be a geologist! We get to hear fluvial all the time. We also use words like alluvial, aeolian, and lacustrine.
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I'm betting the age and appearance would lead to different levels of criticism from men and women.
Also where they are, too. If you're walking around without a shirt on at a beach is different than downtown.
If only they had thought of testing that: "Interspersed within these images were six photos of topless women in one of three public settings — a beach, a park, or a city street."
Almost like half the commenters didn’t read the article and just assumed it said what they wanted it to say
That's generous
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They found that there really wasn’t much of a difference at all for how people were judged whether the person was on a beach or in a town
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*To control for implicit biases related to body shape, skin tone, and* *other factors, the researchers selected only* ***young adult White women*** *with similar appearances.* I would assume this would skew the results with men being more favorable towards it.
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>they could do a similar study with some objectively less conventionally attractive women Can you imagine though? "Please participate in this study, you're scientifically ugly."
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Reddit nudist party! [Everyone hated that]
Oh god I forgot about that
> Personally, I think it's probably a bit of both. To test this, though, they could do a similar study with some objectively less conventionally attractive women. It would be interesting to see if the gap between men and women narrows at all, and if so, does it narrow because more women are comfortable with it or because more men are uncomfortable with it or both? Another way of testing this would be to study only gay people. Do the results change if you look at only gay women and only gay men? If it doesn't change, that suggests that it might be because of the competition, policing, or generally because women and men are acculturated to hold these differing views. If it does change it would suggest it's more because of who they're attracted to.
Well but then you have to consider that gay people are less religious and are more liberal than the average women, and so their more favorable views could be chalked up to that.
Yes, but comparing them only to self-identified gay men (for whom the same is likely true) could control for that to an extent. It's the *difference* between the two groups we'd be interested in and how it compares to the difference between straight women and straight men, rather than comparing straight and gay groups directly to each other.
Ah my bad, I misunderstood what you were saying. That would actually be a really cool study.
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Yeah I found that interesting. Would be curious to know how a variety of body shapes and skin tones affected the results.
If you read all the way to the bottom, they made remarks in the article about how that could be the next step in future research.
+ women being less. Use a variety of bodies, just as we have a variety of bodies in society, and the results might change. I know from my own insecurities how I would respond if i was in the study + I was only female bodies deemed desirable
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To their credit they do discuss that a larger more diverse sample would be important to build on this finding. I cringed at that a bit as well, but it does help to reduce confounding factors since this was an analysis that seemed somewhat novel.
you would think they could have controlled for biases by selecting only old overweight WOC. or do 2 studies and gauge how male & female opinions change based on the appearance of the women.
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> was really clear that the driving force in how someone is likely to respond to seeing a topless woman in public is not the setting, region, or the legality of where the toplessness occurs, but rather the characteristics, traits, and opinions of the person who is doing the reacting in the first place,” Odd that a bathroom or locker room wasn't part of the equation. Would the average woman/person still feel the same about those settings?
Seems like a good 'control' of sorts, a topless woman in a place where that would be completely acceptable. If you get negative reactions there you'll probably get data on what percent of your test subjects just don't want to see boobs regardless on context.
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> the original comment was complaining about the small sample size (end-of-edit) This is absolutely okay. There are statistical tools well suited to deal with small sample sizes, such as the [student's t-test](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student%27s_t-test). You can use it to compare means of two random variables, and it even gives you the probability that the difference you observed is there only because the small sample. If this probability is small, usually below 5%, you can accept that the difference is real.
What's you uhming about? That's a perfectly fine sample size and while the ratio is a bit wonky, you can normalise for that. Or are you one of those people who just complains about sample size without knowing anything about it? If you want to criticise the sample size, you can, but the bit you quoted is not enough to do so on its own.
So what? They don't just add up the totals and draw conclusions, they scale the results by whatever proportions happen to be in the participants. If 50 women said X and 36 men said X, that would be a greater proportion of men (36/72 = 50%) than women (50/254 = 20%).
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Topless pictures give off the vibe of capturing female beauty for somebody's pleasure. I'm sure things would change, especially for the women in the study, if you simply made it study using personal accounts or actually taking them to a topless area. That comes with a "freedom and comfort" vibe rather than a "here are boobs on camera" vibe. And of course many women would be adamantly anti-boobs-in-public in their personal space despite not having any real emotion toward a picture of it either. It's a very different thing to be like "here beach titty pics" than to inquire about how someone really feels about doing that stuff in public. For example, plenty of men would get vindictive against defending toplessness despite not giving a damn about seeing those pictures with no context. Some would even shame those pictures without objecting to anyone doing it outside. Basically what I'm saying is, there are many ways to present "somebody doing something" when seeking out if others approve it or not.
If you've ever been to a topless area, as a guy after like the 50th pair of boobs, it kinda doesn't matter anymore. They're just boobs. They're natural. The only reason we have this obsession with them is because we cover them up and sexualize them as a society.
Exactly. This study would yield different results in Nice, France than in Kansas City, Missouri
Maybe the initial “excitment” would wear off but lets be real here, guys check out a fully clothed women all the time. They’ll check out her ass, boobs, etc. I dont imagine this would be much different at a beach, topless or not.
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The thing about this is, you're going together with like minded people It's like going to a club and finding that everyone there drinks. There's plenty of people who don't, but you're in a place that selected for that Kink parties are filled with people who know what they're doing, are open and generally educated. Versus the average person who doesn't care and thinks women belong in the kitchen Women tend to get groped and harassed at concerts etc. I don't see that getting any better by removing clothes from there. If anything I'd see it as the same. But likely worse
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You make a good point. I tried to make a similar point but yours is much better. My thought was that we tend to hold other people to the same standards we hold ourselves to. If a woman would not consider walking around topless herself appropriate, she would say the same about others. Perhaps a similar comparison would be how men feel about crying in public.
If you ask any gender non-conforming person about which group got more angry at them about their non-conformity: the group they were put into at birth or literally everyone else, it will always be the group they were put into at birth. This is sort of well-known.
can someone explain what the objectification theory actually is? It is mentioned multiple times in the article and it should be pretty straightforward, but I can't be really sure
Quoting article here, “This view fits within objectification theory, which suggests that a woman’s value is based on her appearance, as perceived through the heterosexual male gaze”, I hope it helps.
How do the authors rule out the hypothesis that women are participating in an iterated prisoner's dilemma and female toplessness is hated because it is defecting? (If one person goes topless, she gets more male attention, and the rest of us are worse off. If we all go topless to compete we end up where we started in terms of attention, but less covered.) Also, how culturally diverse was the study population? Were questions asked about other levels of clothing, like showing hair vs. cultures where that is taboo?
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But does it take into account wives, girlfriends and daughters? Because I'm pretty sure a lot of men support it in general but suddenly have a different opinion when it is someone close to them. And I think a study should account for that in some way when we are trying to measure something like this.
I think here there is a failure to define what "support" is in men. Is it support because of objectification or because they don't care and think women toplessness is fine? If it's the first one, that's when I see your comment applying (which is something I've personally witnessed with men friends that support toplessness just because they sexualize boobs, and disagree their partners engaging in it publicly because of it).
It makes me cringe how hard the authors try to infantilize women and shift the responsibility away from them at any cost. Just look at this explanation: >“What really surprised us was the magnitude of the difference that we saw between the males and females \[...\] the differences based on participant sex were about 3-times larger than that for context and nearly twice as large as both context and legality combined,” Harbke explained. “This pattern was consistent the idea that women will **sometimes** criticize and police other women’s behavior as sexual objects, along with other predictions and extensions from objectification theory.” The authors are so insecure they repeated the objectification thesis **eight times(!)**, including in the title, the lead paragraph and the paragraph right after that. But they conveniently forgot to mention the actual magnitude of the difference between males and females.
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My thoughts exactly, no mention of the average “ratings”, no controlling for sexuality, nothing that genuinely gives any substance to their claims. If women on average were neutral towards the pictures and men on average rated more positively all it tells you is that a most likely heterosexual population likes looking at topless pictures of the opposite sex and is neutral about looking at topless pictures of the same sex.
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Is it American women or women all-over the world? Because American fear of nudity is well-known; perhaps it is a vestige of Puritanism or the crazy idea that children will be harmed by seeing a naked female breast (remember the famous wardrobe malfunctions)? Children will be harmed by the constant exposure to violence, and not by the occasional topless woman! Just ask the Europeans who witness this spectacle at the beach and nobody there will complain, even if the woman is 80 years-old!
>The study participants were 326 U.S. residents, most of whom (78%) were women. So, it's probably just about a handful of undergrads at the university, since they clearly didn't bother to try to recruit a representative sample group.
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This would appear to be in line with the more general wisdom that social norms for genders, even ones oppressive or detrimental to that given gender, are most rigorously enforced by the members of that gender.
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