Enjoyment of Sexualization in Men and Women: Relationships with Ambivalent Sexism and Body Image Coping Strategies

Enjoyment of sexualization (EoS) occurs when people find appearance-based sexual attention from others to be positive and rewarding. Scholars have not consistently established if enjoyment of being sexualized may be a form of sexual empowerment, promoting positive body acceptance, control, and self-care, or instead an endorsement of sexist ideologies, based on the idea that being sexually appealing to men is a component of the feminine gender role. In order to shed light on this, the present study aimed to analyze whether enjoyment of sexualization may foster adaptive or maladaptive coping strategies in case of threat to a positive body image. We also considered the role of ambivalent sexism in EoS processes, as well as that of self-esteem in body coping strategies. Considering the increasing sexualization of men in Western societies, the same relationships were tested in both men and women adults by means of a multigroup moderation analysis. Participants were 513 subjects (32.3% men, M = 25.97 years old) recruited from the Italian general population. Results showed that enjoyment of sexualization was positively related to both adaptive (i.e., positive rational acceptance) and maladaptive strategies (i.e., appearance fixing). Hostile sexism was positively linked to EoS in both men and women, whereas benevolent sexism was positively linked to EoS in the case of women and negatively in the case of men. Implications about the ambivalent nature of enjoyment of sexualization are discussed.