Abstract: Can beautification empower women to act assertively? Some women report that beautification is an agentic and assertive act, whereas others find beautification to be oppressive and disempowering. To disentangle these effects, in the context of romantic attraction we conducted the first experimental tests of beautification—on psychological and behavioral assertiveness. Experiment 1 (N = 145) utilized a between-subjects design in which women used their own clothing, make-up, and accessories to adjust their appearance as they normally would for a “hot date” (beautification condition) or a casual day at home with friends (control condition). We measured implicit, explicit, and behavioral assertiveness, as well as positive affect and sexual motivation. Experiment 2 (N = 40) sought to conceptually replicate Experiment 1 using a within-subject design and different measures of assertiveness. Women completed measures of explicit assertiveness and assertive behavioral intentions in three domains, in whatever clothing they were wearing that day then again after extensively beautifying their appearance. In Experiment 1, we found that women demonstrated higher psychological assertiveness after beautifying their appearance, and that high sexual motivation mediated the effect of beautification on assertive behavior. All effects were independent of positive affect. Experiment 2 partially replicated Experiment 1. These experiments provide novel insight into the effects of women’s appearance-enhancing behaviors on assertiveness by providing evidence that beautification may positively affect assertiveness in women under some circumstances.
Discussion
Using a within-subjects design, we found that beautification increased explicit assertiveness to the extent that beautification increased women’s sexual motivation. For assertive consumer behavioral intentions, findings were mixed. Beautification had a direct effect on increasing willingness to endorse public consumer assertiveness, but the effect did not reach conventional levels of statistical significance. Beautification also elevated endorsement of private consumer assertiveness, but the effect was moderated by trait self-objectification. The more women tended to self-objectify, the more they reported willingness to engage in private consumer assertiveness after beautification. This effect was also moderated by sexual motivation, showing the same pattern. We found no effect of beautification, self-objectification, or sexual motivation on consumer assertiveness unrelated to appearance.General discussion
Research derived from objectification theory has emphasized the negative consequences of beautification and related practices, highlighting that they harm women and are derived from a cultural context that disempowers them [1,5–7,24]. An alternative perspective, derived from sociometer theory, holds that beautification can benefit women by raising their self-esteem in important domains [8,11,12]. We added clarity to this research area by experimentally manipulating beautification through within- and between-subject designs, and subsequently measuring multiple indicators of assertiveness, as well as positive mood, sexual motivation, and self-objectification. Our results suggest that beautification can increase assertiveness in women, but that the effect may be domain-specific. These findings shed light on a key tension in female psychology by challenging the notion that beautification and related appearance-enhancing phenomena are necessarily disempowering.Many of our effects were dependent on beautification increasing sexual motivation, with beautification elevating assertiveness only when it also elevated sexual motivation. This finding is consistent with previous research [30], and suggests that the effect of beautification on assertiveness depends upon the degree to which beautification increases the subjective feeling of sexual attractiveness. By including measures of behavioral assertiveness (Experiment 1) and assertive behavioral intentions in three domains (Experiment 2), we intended to distinguish whether beautification-induced assertiveness was domain-specific or domain-general. Unfortunately, results were inconclusive: We did not find a significant effect for beautification in our appearance-unrelated consumer assertiveness vignette, however, we did find that beautification increased assertive behavior in the mock job interview in Experiment 1 (to the extent that it also increased sexual motivation). Future work teasing out these effects would help to clarify the conditions under which beautification can increase assertiveness, and whether that increase is specific to the appearance domain, or whether effects might transfer to unrelated domains.
Beautification interacted with sexual motivation to increase explicit assertiveness in women, regardless of trait self-objectification. Surprisingly, trait self-objectification was positively associated with a beautification-induced willingness to act assertively in one of our vignettes. This finding is supportive of parallel work showing that self-objectification and its antecedents can raise women’s self-esteem in particular contexts [11,12]. Though these effects warrant replication, they suggest that conceiving of self-objectification as an entirely deleterious phenomenon may mischaracterize its psychological effects. The degree to which self-objectification may translate into enhanced female empowerment in some conditions is perplexing, yet it is also a worthwhile topic for future research.
Implications for understanding self-objectification
These results provide further insight into understanding women’s motivation for appearance- modifying behaviors, including self-objectification and self-sexualization. Many of these phenomena are motivated by desires to elevate attractiveness to new or existing romantic partners [38,39]. However, our findings suggest that women may also engage in these behaviors to increase assertiveness as well as mood. Thus, a desire for feeling empowered may partially account for women’s beautification practices and consumption of appearance-enhancing products. This conception offers a unique perspective on why women are more beauty-focused when the economy declines (the lipstick effect; [40]). Beautification may provide an affordable way to elevate the subjective experience of empowerment in ecological conditions that often constrain agentic action [41].The negative effects of self-objectification—including usurping women’s attentional and cognitive resources and increasing the likelihood of mental health problems—usually result from intermediary processes, such as elevated body shame and body surveillance [3]. Our findings raise the possibility that beautification may not always elicit these intermediary processes, and our work suggests that beautification can elicit sexual motivation as well. A defining difference between whether beautification and related phenomena empower or disempower women, then, may depend upon which intermediary processes are elicited. For example, if beautification elicits appearance anxiety or body shame, it may reduce assertiveness; If beautification elicits sexual motivation or high self-esteem, it may heighten assertiveness. Future investigation into the intermediary processes induced by appearance-relevant behaviors on positive and negative psychological outcomes would be a welcome contribution to future work.
Contextual effects—such as the person a beautified woman believes is judging her [42]—are also likely to be important. We focused on beautification in one situation only, and it is unclear whether mandatory beautification in other contexts (e.g., stipulated by an employer for an important meeting) would show similar effects. Women often become targets of backlash when they act assertively, especially in domains that are stereotype-inconsistent [43], and attractive women may be especially likely to be targeted. Women who engage in beautification and appearance-enhancing phenomena can also become targets of aggression by others, men and women like [33,44–47]. Thus, although increases in beautification may engender benefits to women, in certain contexts it may also engender costs. The contexts under which women may express assertiveness and beautify without suffering backlash effects, or the contexts under which women experience beautification as especially disempowering are important future research topics.
The paradox of sexualized beautification and female agency
Although the current work provides evidence for a conditional effects of beautification on female assertiveness, our findings appear to be inconsistent with work showing that men and women perceive that women in attractive, revealing clothing lack agency [33,48,49]. Why is it that people perceive that women in such clothing lack agency, whereas the women themselves may potentially feel and behave in a more assertive manner? Compelling evidence demonstrates that people derogate those who act counter to the status quo [50]. Perceptions that women who engage in beautification lack agency may thus function to penalize women who threaten notions of demure and passive femininity through asserting sexual power [43,51]. Perceiving that these women lack agency may also support male dominance by discrediting the agency that some women demonstrate via beautification.Equating beautification or self- sexualization with low agency may also reflect the cultural suppression of female sexuality, an ever-present albeit culturally variable phenomenon that sanctions women’s sexual self-expression more heavily than men’s. Although the drivers of the cultural suppression of female sexuality remain controversial [52–54], evidence supports the idea that competition between women can encourage them to suppress the sexuality and attractiveness-enhancing efforts of other women. Derogating such women as cultural dupes, who misunderstand female agency and how they are perceived by others, may thus function to reduce the occurrence of competition amongst women by elevating anxiety in potential competitors. Ultimately, such a process may function to diminish the threat of another woman’s physical and sexual attractiveness.
Perceptions that sexualized women lack agency may also function to motivate sexual approach in men. Evidence suggests that some men find cues of sexual vulnerability and low agency in women to be alluring [55]. From a functional perspective, perceiving low agency in such women may be attractive to men because it reduces the threat of rejection, female infidelity, and paternity uncertainty associated with female sexual agency. It is also plausible that low agency women are perceived as less likely to rebuff sexual advances and easier to monopolize [30]. For these reasons, men’s perceptions of low agency in women may be a cognitive bias that engenders sexual approach, akin to the robust bias men show to over-estimating women’s sexual intent [56,57]. Future work investigating these notions would provide valuable insight into the constancy of patriarchal culture over time and provide. Research could also clarify the paradoxical nature of men’s views of women’s agency, and women’s view of their own agency.
Limitations and future directions
We aimed to provide a rigorous test of the effects of beautification on assertiveness by employing explicit, implicit, and behavioral indicators of assertiveness, ecologically valid designs, and by testing the importance of theoretically relevant mechanisms and confounds (i.e., sexual motivation, positive affect). That being said, our findings are limited in several ways. Although patterns of variation in Experiment 2 were generally consistent with Experiment 1, two effects from Experiment 2 did not reach conventional levels of statistical significance. Likewise, in Experiment 2, we failed to replicate the direct effect of beautification on explicit assertiveness, finding instead that the effect was dependent on beautification eliciting sexual motivation. This latter finding highlights the importance of sexual motivation to the beautification–assertiveness link, but it weakens our ability to draw conclusions about the overall relationship between the two phenomena. Likewise, whether assertiveness effects are domain-general, or specific to appearance-relevant domains only, was unresolved by the current work. Based on sociometer theory, we speculate that beautification-induced assertiveness may be strongest in appearance-related domains, and weaker, albeit present in other domains.A further limitation is that the instructions in the beautification condition were multi-faceted. The instructions informed women to dress for a night out where they might meet someone they were romantically interested in, a hot date, and a party. We emphasized “hot date” in the verbal instructions most frequently both before and during the experimental sessions, and parties are locations where young people commonly meet romantic partners. We did so because the aim of our study was to focus on beautification in the context of romantic relationships, and attractiveness in the domain of romantic relationships is a domain where women are especially likely to derive self-esteem [8,11]. The multi-faceted nature of these instructions; however, may have introduced unnecessary noise in our experimental manipulation, weakening our ability to detect effects.
Another limitation is that design differences between Experiments 1 and 2 may account for some variability in our findings. Experiment 1 occurred in the laboratory, meaning that participants were seen by the experimenter after they changed their clothing and makeup. In contrast, Experiment 2 occurred online, and participants completed the experimental session in their home. We utilized this design difference so participants in Experiment 2 had the choice of their entire wardrobe and all of their own beauty products at their disposal. Unfortunately, this distinction between public and private may have weakened findings in Experiment 2. It is possible that the element of being seen in public after one enhances their sexual appearance strengthens the effect of beautification on female assertiveness, resulting in stronger effects in public versus private settings. Such an interpretation would account for weaker effects in Experiment 2 compared to Experiment 1.
A final limitation is that we only controlled for one individual difference in our analyses. Although trait self-objectification was highly relevant, many other individual differences affect women’s willingness to beautify, self-objectify, and self-sexualize. For example, recent work indicates that ideological components related to higher order personal values are especially relevant [58]. Testing whether findings reported here are sensitive to these differences, and the individual differences predictive of beautification, would strengthen our conclusions.
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