Cover girls: Women Feature More in ‘sexualised’ images

The findings may be cause for concern, the researchers say, because previous research has found sexualised images of women to have far-reaching negative consequences for both men and women.

The study will be published in the September issue of the journal Sexuality & Culture.

“We chose Rolling Stone,” explains study co-author Erin Hatton, assistant professor of sociology at the University at Buffalo, “because it is a well-established, pop-culture media outlet.

It is not explicitly about sex or relationships; foremost it is about music. But it also covers politics, film, television, and current events, and so offers a useful window into how women and men are portrayed generally in popular culture.”


After analysing more than 1,000 images of men and women on Rolling Stone covers over the course of 43 years, the authors came to several conclusions. First, representations of both women and men have indeed become more sexualised over time; and, second, women continue to be more frequently sexualised than men.

Their most striking finding, however, was the change in how intensely sexualised images of women—but not men—have become.

To measure the intensity of sexualized representations men and women, the authors developed their own “scale of sexualisation.” An image was given “points” for being sexualised if, for example, the subject’s lips were parted or his/her tongue was showing, the subject was only partially clad or naked, or the text describing the subject used explicitly sexual language.

Based on this scale, the authors identified three categories of images: a) those that were, for the most part, not sexualised (i.e., scoring 0-4 points on the scale), b) those that were sexualised (5-10 points), and c) those that were so intensely sexualised that the authors labeled them “hypersexualised” (11-23 points).

In the 1960s they found that 11 percent of men and 44 percent of women on the covers of Rolling Stone were sexualised. In the 2000s, 17 percent of men were sexualised (an increase of 55 percent from the 1960s), and 83 percent of women were sexualised (an increase of 89 percent). Among those images that were sexualised, 2 percent of men and 61 percent of women were hypersexualised.

“In the 2000s,” Hatton says, “there were ten times more hypersexualised images of women than men, and 11 times more non-sexualised images of men than of women.”

“What we conclude from this is that popular media outlets such as Rolling Stone are not depicting women as sexy musicians or actors; they are depicting women musicians and actors as ready and available for sex. This is problematic,” Hatton says, “because it indicates a decisive narrowing of media representations of women.

“We don’t necessarily think it’s problematic for women to be portrayed as ‘sexy.’ But we do think it is problematic when nearly all images of women depict them not simply as ‘sexy women’ but as passive objects for someone else’s sexual pleasure.”

These findings are important, the authors say, because a plethora of research has found such images to have a range of negative consequences:

“Sexualised portrayals of women have been found to legitimise or exacerbate violence against women and girls, as well as sexual harassment and anti-women attitudes among men and boys,” Hatton says.

“Such images also have been shown to increase rates of body dissatisfaction and/or eating disorders among men, women and girls; and they have even been shown to decrease sexual satisfaction among both men and women.”

“For these reasons,” says Hatton, “we find the frequency of sexualised images of women in popular media, combined with the extreme intensity of their sexualisation, to be cause for concern.”

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