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Objectification theory posits that living in a culture that relentlessly sexualizes the female body results in an increased risk for women to become sexually objectified, such that women become valued for their physical bodies and sexual features (e.g., breasts) more so than the qualities that define them as a person (e.g., mind and personality) (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997; Nussbaum, 1995). Moreover, objectification has implications for how we view women, as research shows that when participants focus on the appearance of a sexualized woman, they ascribe to her fewer human attributes (e.g., warmth, competence, and morality) and less human nature than a non-sexualized woman (Heflick & Goldenberg, 2009; Heflick et al., 2011). As such, sexually objectified women become viewed as less than fully human. Research has extensively examined this question as it relates to sexualized and non-sexualized female targets (Heflick et al., 2011) and found continuous support for it (Bernard et al., 2018). Further, this link has been expanded upon to show that when sexualized women are seen as less than human, this then gives way to a myriad of negative consequences or unfair treatment directed toward them (Loughnan et al., 2013; Rudman et al., 1975; Saez et al., 2022). This body of research however has largely overlooked one group of women: pregnant women. Women’s pregnant bodies have been found to be threatening on account of their creatureliness (Morris et al., 2014; Goldenberg et al., 2007), and this concern has been found to play a role in the objectification of women’s bodies (Morris et al., 2014; Roberts et al., 2002). Given the recent increase in the sexualization of pregnant women in western media (Jolly, 2019) and the repeated documentation of the unfair treatment of pregnant women (Vedam et al., 2019) the current study has been established to investigate how the sexualization of a woman gives way to unfair treatment directed toward her through her dehumanization and how this relationship may vary as a function of her pregnancy status.

Social media has become a predominant platform for posting images of the self, and these images often portray self-sexualization (Ramsey & Horan, 2018). While previous research has documented that sexualization promotes the dehumanization of women (Morris et al., 2018), to our knowledge no research has examined the implications for harassment of women on social media, which is a pressing issue. One third of women report experiencing sexual harassment online, and over half of women have received an unwanted explicit message on social media (Anderson & Vogels, 2020), which we hypothesize is an outcome of dehumanization. In the current study, we present undergraduate students with 27 Instagram images of the same woman depicted as sexualized or not. We then measure humanness, tolerance of harassment toward the woman in the images, and engagement in harassment by participants toward the woman in the images. We predict that a sexualized target will be perceived as less human than a non-sexualized target, and this will increase tolerance of harassment and engagement of actual harassment towards her.