Abstract

Women often are valued in terms of sexual and physical attractiveness. Such objectifying content is pervasive in social media. Being objectified may lead individuals to “self-objectify”, meaning they treat themselves as objects. This study aimed to investigate whether there are significant relationships between self-objectification in social media, system justification, and social engagement of women. Study 1 (N=76) tested the question whether self-objectification is associated with gender specific system justification and social engagement. According to the results, higher tendency of self-objectification was negatively correlated with social engagement of female students. In Study 2 (N=74), female students had to write an essay while portraying themselves wearing a swimming suit to others on social network sites to induce the state of self-objectification in the two experimental condition (audience: online audience vs. no audience). According to the results, the scores of self-objectification and system justification were higher in the experimental condition than those in the control condition. In addition, there was less engagement in gender-based social activism in the experimental condition than in the control condition. These findings implicated that women’s online self-portrayal may lead to increasing self-objectification and system-justifying behavior that disrupts women’s gender-based social activity.