I should have been (much) clearer in my link to that study. What it says, to the extent that I understand it, is that in certain types of representation of women (in bikinis in advertisements, say) both men and women process the images less like the subject in the picture is a human and more like the subject in the picture is a literal object -- say, a bucket, or a tree. All this tells us, I think, is "women in bikinis, unlike men in bikinis, process through our brains as quickly as other objects, and slower more quickly than male bodies and human faces." But it does say there's literally a cognitive difference in processing the picture of the woman compared to processing the picture of the man. What we don't know is what kind of impact that has, whether other kinds of pictures have the same effect, etc. etc.

The bigger point isn't really about objectification (even if I think that the picture of Ashlee looks more like a bucket than a human being on the cover of her album, I don't think that has much influence on anything I've ever heard in or said about her album), but about figuring out which of our mental processes are conscious and which aren't.

And I still think that, here in the conscious world, it's OK for us to say things like, "OK, that happened, but why is it more important than what I'm consciously aware of?" In some cases, unconscious processes may indeed lead us to do something we hadn't consciously thought of, as when we yawn upon seeing someone else yawn. If what we want to understand is "why we yawned," then yes, unconscious processes are important. But to understand what it is about Autobiography I love, I think that "It is possible to see Ashlee as an object with which I can have sex" is pretty low on the list of things I care about -- not because it's not, in some sense, true (though I'm not sure it is), but because even if it were true, it wouldn't really help me understand what's going (in this instance). That's not true of all music, but it's true of that music.