Women’s Bodies and the Moral Lens

Monday, February 17, 2025.

So, this just in: People still have a weird, sanctimonious obsession with women’s bodies.

Shocking, I know.

A team of researchers—undoubtedly fueled by caffeine and the existential dread of living in a society—published a study in the European Journal of Social Psychology confirming what women have been muttering under their breath for centuries: their bodies are judged through a moral lens way more than men’s.

It’s as if, upon birth, women receive an invisible tag that reads: “Public Property: Subject to Societal Scrutiny.” The study suggests that when it comes to bodily autonomy—decisions about appearance, health, or simply existing in a body—people are much more likely to cast these choices as moral quandaries if the body in question belongs to a woman.

Men, on the other hand, apparently get a free pass to make all kinds of bodily decisions without a chorus of disapproving murmurs. Lucky them.

For those keeping score at home, this pattern isn’t new. Women’s bodies have been micromanaged since the dawn of civilization.

The rules are endless. No short skirts.

No visible cleavage. No body hair, unless it's on the head, and even then, not too much of it.

Want access to reproductive healthcare? That’s a debate.

Meanwhile, men saunter around, nipples to the wind, making all kinds of reckless choices about their bodies with nary a societal wag of the finger.

Enter Thekla Morgenroth, a social psychologist at Purdue University and, presumably, a person who has had enough of this nonsense. “I was interested in why this was happening,” Morgenroth said, “where these restrictions are coming from.” A fair question. A maddeningly overdue question.

To get some answers, the researchers set up two studies in the United States. First, they rounded up 335 participants online and had them rate various behaviors—some bodily, like getting a tattoo or going topless in public, others more pedestrian, like littering or showing up late to work.

Each behavior was randomly assigned to either a hypothetical man or woman. The goal? To see if people would clutch their pearls harder when the body in question belonged to a woman.

They did.

Tats

Behaviors related to the body were overwhelmingly moralized when performed by a woman, as opposed to a man.

Tattoos? A statement about a man’s personality.

A tattoo on a woman? A crisis of moral fiber. Being topless? On a man, it’s a Tuesday. On a woman, it’s The Fall of Rome.

And just in case anyone wanted to argue that this was just about social norms, the researchers controlled for that.

Even after accounting for how “unusual” these behaviors were perceived to be for each gender, the moral policing of women’s bodies held steady. Turns out, people don’t just enforce rules on women’s bodies—they see those rules as morally justified.

Tits

Then came round two: a study focusing on toplessness, the great human scandal. Researchers recruited 470 participants and asked them how inappropriate they found public toplessness in various scenarios. Then, they asked participants to explain their discomfort. The results were a masterclass in cognitive dissonance.

People weren’t just uncomfortable with women being topless. They were philosophically distressed.

They invoked concepts like purity, harm, tradition, and even loyalty—as if women’s chests were somehow tied to the sacred fabric of society. When discussing men’s toplessness, however, these moral acrobatics disappeared.

Things got even juicier when the researchers measured the participants' levels of sexism, specifically “benevolent sexism” (the kind that puts women on a pedestal, then chains them to it) and the Madonna-Whore Dichotomy (the age-old myth that women must be either pure and saintly or fallen and shameful, with no space for human complexity in between).

Turns out, the more someone subscribed to these ideas, the more likely they were to clutch their pearls over women’s toplessness. Quelle surprise!

Power & Control

In essence, this moralization isn’t just about norms—it’s about power. It’s about control. And it’s propped up by deeply ingrained, often unconscious beliefs that insist women’s bodies exist for public judgment, while men’s bodies simply exist.

Of course, like all good research, this study comes with limitations.

It was conducted in the United States, a country with a particularly enthusiastic and epic penchant for moral panic.

The findings might look different in societies with different cultural expectations.

And while the study establishes a clear link between moralization and bodily restrictions, it doesn’t fully answer the chicken-or-egg question: Do people impose rules on women’s bodies because they see them as moral battlegrounds, or do they justify their restrictions by retroactively assigning moral weight?

Either way, the implications are clear. Women’s bodies remain battlegrounds for society’s anxieties, while men continue to frolic, blissfully unburdened by moral scrutiny.

Morgenroth and her team plan to keep digging, hoping to uncover even more ways in which the moralization of women’s bodies affects all genders. But in the meantime, one thing remains certain: If you’re a woman in possession of a body, society is watching. And judging. And writing up new rules.

Because of course they are.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Morgenroth, T., Ryan, M. K., Arnold, M. F., & Faber, N. S. (2023). The moralization of women’s bodies. European Journal of Social Psychology.