Malala Yousafzai left the hospital on Jan. 4, just weeks after members of the Taliban shot her in the head for speaking out about a woman’s right to education in Pakistan. She’s 15. A 23-year-old woman died on Dec. 29 after being kidnapped and gang-raped in India. She died from the injuries sustained during the attack, including being thrown off the bus upon which she was abducted. Another Indian woman was gang-raped on a bus Sunday. She is 29. All of these attacks have led to a call for stronger rape laws and better treatment of women, not only in India or the Middle East, but globally.

We live in a time where sensationalism in the media dictates our national identities and policies, where we discuss gun control after 14 mass shootings in a single year not because there were 14 mass shootings in a single year, but because 20 children died in the last one covered heavily by the media. Where it costs the life of a 23-year-old and almost the life of a 15-year-old to initiate discussions for women’s rights. Where an entire professional soccer team has to walk off the pitch to remind us that racism still persists. Our discourse and therefore our lives are shaped by how we are shown what we are shown and how we understand those images and statistics.

According to the 2011 documentary “Miss Representation,” American teenagers consumed an average of 10 hours and 45 minutes of media each day. We can get media content on a variety of platforms and in a variety of genres. Don’t feel like opening a magazine? Pull up YouTube and have someone read it to you. Don’t want to read a newspaper? Turn the live radio on your iPhone up.

The access to all of these platforms means more media content needs to be created, and it needs to be created to turn a profit. To fill hundreds of channels for hundreds of hours, advertisers and content-makers fall back on what they know works: sex and sensationalism.

Women shown in the media — be they in entertainment, in politics, in business — are scrutinized for how they look rather than who they are. Women are more likely to be described in emotional terms, and they are more likely to have their bodies and their relationships put under a microscope. All of these contribute to a society that cannot see women as leaders or even as individuals, but instead sees them as objects to be used to sell products, to look nice, to insult, to have sex with.

A study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology found that the brain processes images of women as separate parts, not a complete individual. This is not the case for men.

The study showed that when participants viewed female images, they were better at recognizing individual parts rather than whole-body photographs. The opposite was true for men: people could more easily recognize the man as a whole.

The objectification of women is not a new phenomenon. It’s not even a new idea. But with the structure of today’s world, it is more damaging than ever before. By turning women into sexual objects, we not only perpetrate the myth that women are good for only one thing, but we make it easier to take away their purpose, their power and their potential.

John Douglas, former agent of the FBI and former head of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, helped develop the technique known as profiling: looking at habits and traits of various criminals to predict their behavior to better catch, interrogate and prosecute them. His work showed that objectification, seeing an individual as an object rather than as a human, made it easier to perpetrate and carry out violence against that individual.

And it shows. About 1 in 6 American women has been the victim of rape or attempted rape. About 1 in 4 women has experienced domestic abuse.

When we permit our media culture to dictate our societal norms and only allow tales of extreme violence to puncture our collective misrepresentation of women globally, we institute a system in which no one wins.

Women are forced to aspire to impossible ideals — if they can aspire to anything at all.

Sarah is a senior in LAS. She can be reached at [email protected].