Sexualized Avatars Lead to Women’s Self-Objectification and Acceptance of Rape Myths

Research has indicated that many video games and virtual worlds are populated by unrealistic, hypersexualized representations of women, but the effects of using these representations remain understudied. Objectification theory suggests that women’s exposure to sexualized media representations leads to self-objectification. Further, we anticipated this process would lead to increases in rape myth acceptance (RMA). Two experiments (Study 1, N =...