Recently, Bernard, Gervais, Allen, Campomizzi, and Klein (2012) reported that individuals were less able to recognize inverted vs. upright pictures of sexualized men as compared to women. Based on their formulation of the sexualized-body-inversion hypothesis (SBIH) it was concluded that sexualized women as compared to men are perceived in a more object-like manner supporting sexual objectification (SO) of females - independent from observer gender. We challenge this interpretation and hypothesize that the originally reported effect is the result of a methodological artifact due to gender-symmetry and stimuli setup-symmetry confounds in the original stimulus set. We tested this theoretically more parsimonious account in a methodologically stricter and extended conceptual replication of the putative SO-effect. Results from two studies showed that the original stimulus set indeed suffered from symmetry confounds and that these are necessary boundary-conditions in order for the hypothetical SO-effect to occur. It is concluded that the SBIH as postulated by Bernard et al. (2012) is based on a methodological artifact and cannot be related to SO but symmetry detection. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.