gender

Pappas, Stephanie. “Our Brains See Men as Whole and Women as Parts. Evolution Might Underlie the Different Processing of Female versus Male Bodies. Both Genders Do It.”

Donya Ishaq

Pappas, Stephanie. “Our Brains See Men as Whole and Women as Parts. Evolution Might Underlie the Different Processing of Female versus Male Bodies. Both Genders Do It.” LiveScience, 25 July 2012, www.livescience.com/21902-women-objectified-brain.html.

In this article which is published in Scientific American, a publication that covers scientific research in news, it highlights research showing that the brain processes images of men as whole beings, while images of women are processed as individual body parts. This phenomenon is referred to as “objectification,” which contributes to the sexualization of women. This will be useful to my thesis because it provides scientific evidence that men tend to sexualize women and dressing modestly can be used to avoid being objectified. 

  • “When viewing female images, participants were better at recognizing individual parts than they were matching whole-body photographs to the originals. The opposite was true for male images: People were better at recognizing a guy as a whole than they were his individual parts.”(Pappas)
  • “People were also 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.” (Pappas)

Daniels, E.A., and H. Wartena. “Athlete or Sex Symbol: What Boys Think of Media Representations of Female Athletes.”

Donya Ishaq

Daniels, E.A., and H. Wartena. “Athlete or Sex Symbol: What Boys Think of Media Representations of Female Athletes.” Sex Roles, vol. 65, no. 7-8, 2011, pp. 566-579. doi: 10.1007/s11199-011-9959-7.

This article by Daniels and Wertena explorers the impact of media representations of female athletes on boys’ attitudes towards women. It was published in the peer-reviewed academic journal, Sex Roles, which is a well-known journal in the field of gender studies. Also, the authors of the article, Elizabeth A. Daniels and Heather Wartena, are both well-respected scholars in the field of gender studies. Daniels is a professor of psychology at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, and has published extensively on topics related to gender and media. Wartena is a research analyst at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, and has also published several articles on gender and media.  In this specific article, the authors conducted a study with 113 highschool boys, asking them to evaluate images of female athletes and models. The study found that boys had more positive attitudes towards female athletes who were depicted in athletic contexts rather than sexualized ones. The authors argue that the sexualization of female athletes in Western media is a pervasive problem that reinforces gender stereotypes and undermines the achievements of women in sports. This would support my thesis that the female notion of modesty in Islam promotes full control over their bodies and how the Western notion of female liberation is flawed. Specifically, the article highlights the way that Western media sexualizes and objectifies women in the sports industry, reducing them to mere objects of desire and perpetuating harmful gender stereotypes. In contrast, the Islamic concept of modesty promotes a holistic view of women as individuals worthy of respect, rather than as sexual objects to be consumed by others.

  • “Boys’ responses suggest that they perceive female athletes as caught between two conflicting cultural demands – to be strong, competitive athletes on the one hand, and to conform to traditional feminine standards of beauty and sexual appeal on the other” 
  • ( 577) 
  • “When female athletes are reduced to sexualized objects, their athletic abilities and achievements are often overlooked or undervalued, which can have negative consequences for their self-esteem and their prospects in the sports industry” (576) 

 School-Related Stressors and the Intensity of Perceived Stress Experienced by Adolescents in Poland by Maria Kaczmarek and Sylwia Trambacz-oleszak

Hena Ahmed

Kaczmarek, Maria, and Sylwia Trambacz-Oleszak. “School-related Stressors and the Intensity of Perceived Stress Experienced by Adolescents in Poland.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. U.S. National Library of Medicine, 10 Nov. 2021.

Maria Kaczmarek is a research scientist and program supervisor at EcoHealth Alliance with expertise in evolutionary biology and virology. Sylwia Trambacz-Oleszak works in Institute of Human Biology and Evolution, Faculty of Biology at Adam Mickiewicz University. They examine the relationship between school-related stressors and the degree of perceived stress that young people in Poland experience. 1846 adolescents between the ages of 13 and 18 were used as a sample and given questionaries. It is to be that girls are more likely than boys to experience higher amounts of perceived stress.  School environments are a big element in predicting high levels of perceived stress. This information is useful because it can create interventions for each gender and manage the stress they are given.

  1. “Moreover, girls appeared to be more vulnerable than boys to school-related stressors and weight status, while boys to stressors that can arise from interpersonal relationships.”
  2. “Gender was found to be a significant predictor of high perceived stress; therefore, in the next step, gender-stratified adjusted analyses were performed using multiple logistic regression analysis (MLRA)”“Gender was found to be a significant predictor of high perceived stress; therefore, in the next step, gender-stratified adjusted analyses were performed using multiple logistic regression analysis (MLRA)”