ORIGINAL ARTICLE The Drawback of Sexual Empowerment: Perceiving Women as Emancipated but Still as Sexual Objects Matthias De Wilde 1 & Antonin Carrier 2 & Annalisa Casini 1 & Stéphanie Demoulin 1 Accepted: 8 September 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract The belief that sexualization might be used as a source of power for women in Western societies is spreading (Anderson 2014; Erchull and Liss 2013). The present research aims at evaluating the interpersonal consequences for women endorsing this belief. In three experimental studies with Belgian and French participants (100 college men in Study 1; 135 men in Study 2; 203 women in Study 3), we examine how women who intentionally self-sexualize (i.e., endorse a sex-is-power belief; SIPB) are perceived on four facets of social judgment (i.e., agency, morality, competence, warmth). Furthermore, we compare the perception of women endorsing SIPB to the perception of those who enact body surveillance (BSV), a behavior commonly associated with passive self-objectification, and we explore the expected and actual objectifying behaviors these targets elicit. Results indicate that women engaged in BSV were negatively evaluated on the four facets of social judgment, were perceived as more likely to experience daily objectification, and were more objectified by men than women who do not. The same pattern of results emerges for women endorsing (vs. not) SIPB, except that their agency is acknowledged. We discuss the societal consequences of intentional self-sexualization, whether empowering or not. Keywords Objectification . Empowerment . Self-sexualization . Social perception . Gender stereotype There has been a significant shift in advertising repre- sentations of women in recent years, such that rather than being presented as passive objects of the [male] gaze, young women in adverts are now frequently depicted as active, independent and sexually powerful. – Gill (2008, p. 35) Self-sexualization refers to actions taken by an individual who intentionally highlights one’s sexualized features (Allen and Gervais 2012; for an extensive definition of this concept see Choi and DeLong 2019). Over the last few decades, the idea that women’s self-sexualization is a powerful means by which they can gain power over heterosexual men has become more popularized than ever (Bue and Harrison 2019; Gill 2008; Murray and Ouellette 2008; Fetterolf and Rudman 2017). Whether self-sexualization is to be considered as a real or as an illusory source of power is the subject of ongoing theoret- ical debates, notably among feminist scholars (Aubrey et al. 2017; Calogero and Siegel 2019; Gill and Donaghue 2013; Lamb 2010; Lamb and Peterson 2012; Lerum and Dworkin 2009). Stepping back from this debate, researchers have re- cently started to investigate the concrete consequences that the belief that sex-is-power (SIPB) has for women. For instance, SIPB has been shown to be positively related to benevolent sexism (Erchull and Liss 2013), self-objectification, and neg- ative eating attitudes, but also to enhanced sexual body-es- teem, sense of entitlement to sexual pleasure from self and from partner, self-efficacy in achieving sexual pleasure, sexual self-reflection (i.e., sexual subjectivity), and sexual satisfac- tion (De Wilde et al. 2019; Erchull and Liss 2014). Despite these initial results, research on the consequences of the belief that self-sexualization is a source of power can Data are available at: https://osf.io/ugxsq/?view_only= 5524d82e772b436384966c1d0315410a Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-020-01192-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Matthias De Wilde matthias.dewilde@uclouvain.be 1 Psychological Sciences Research Institute, Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain), Place Cardinal Mercier, 10, L3.05.01, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium 2 Laboratory of Psychology, University of Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France Sex Roles https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-020-01192-4