Yesterday I came across this piece in Jezebel, which lead me to this story in USA Today. Both of these news sources got it very badly wrong, running stories entitled “Men Look More At Your Body Than Your Face” and “Yes, men really do ogle women’s bodies” respectively. In fact, men and women both look at faces most of all, and men no less than women.
Here are the gaze times from the actual research in the so-called “appearance condition,” wherein undergrads were asked by researchers to look at women and rate them on their appearance:
As you can see, even when asked directly to “objectify” women by judging their appearance from photographs, people tend to linger much more on their faces rather than their sexy bits, and women are at least as likely to visually assess non-facial appearances as men, possibly more so.
According to lead author Sarah Gervais of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, “We live in a culture in which we constantly see women objectified in interactions on television and in the media. When you turn your own lens on everyday, ordinary women, we focus on those parts, too.” She doesn’t state outright which direction the causality arrow is pointing here, but I get the sense that she wants to further the feminist narrative that the media are somehow creating a desire to “objectify” women rather than simply providing people with what they would like to see.
UPDATE (10/30 12:00pm) – I’ve reproduced the source data table here for those who cannot access the journal article itself. Everything below is quoted directly from the paper.
Table 2 Dwell time means (standard errors) as a function of body part and appearance-focus
Means for women and men did not significantly differ. Means within columns (i.e., comparing faces, chests, and waists) and within rows (i.e., comparing appearance-focus and personality-focus) with different subscripts are significantly different, ps<.004. All values are milliseconds and higher scores. Appear appearance-focus condition. Person personality-focus condition.
