An electric jolt to make men see women as people

We live surrounded by endless images in adverts, films and social media that reduce women to their bodies, or to parts of them, as if they were objects of pleasure rather than whole human beings. Research links this objectification to tolerance of sexual harassment, to sex discrimination, and to body shame, anxiety and depression in women. Psychologists say it changes, without our noticing, the way the brain sees the image. When we look at a person, the brain processes the face or body as one whole. That is why we recognise faces and upright bodies much faster and more accurately than upside-down ones, a difference called the "inversion effect". Objects such as tables, chairs and cars are analysed as separate parts, so it makes no difference whether we see them upright or upside down. Earlier studies found that the inversion effect weakens when people look at sexualised images of women, but stays strong for images of men. In other words, the brain handles sexualised images of women the way it handles tools and objects. A new study set out to change this by stimulating the brain itself with an electric current.

The study was led by Professor Civile at the University of Exeter and published on 1 October 2026 in the journal Social Neuroscience. It involved 76 university students, 54 women and 22 men, who were split at random into two groups. Neither the participants nor the researchers running the test knew who was getting the real stimulation. Participants were asked to memorise photos of male and female models posing in underwear in sexualised positions. The photos were shown upright and upside down, and participants then had to pick them out from among new, distracting photos. During this task, half of them received transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). This needs no surgery and nothing is put inside the body: a very weak current passes between two electrodes on the scalp, and the only sensation is a slight tingling. One electrode was placed on the left side of the forehead (at position Fp3) and the other above the right eyebrow. The stimulation lasted 10 minutes at 1.5 milliamps. The other half received sham stimulation for just 30 seconds at the same strength, which caused the same light tingling on the scalp without stimulating the brain for long.

Participants who got the sham stimulation recognised upside-down photos of men more slowly than upright ones, but recognised upside-down photos of women much faster. In those who got the real stimulation, the inversion effect grew larger than in the sham group, and they became slower at recognising upside-down photos of both men and women in the same way.

The researchers say the change lies in how the brain processes the images, not in the images themselves, because both groups saw exactly the same photos. The results are early evidence that the brain's tendency to treat a woman's body as an object can be changed by electrical stimulation. Until now, every proposed solution has been psychological; this study made a direct physical change.

The researchers did not measure whether behaviour changed, or whether the effect reached harassment or sex discrimination. Still, it is amusing to imagine ending street harassment of women by giving men an electric shock.