New research debunks myth of male gaze
Men Aren't 'More Visual' Or More Easily Turned On Than Women Are, Study Finds
You know that ol' myth that men are "more visual" and get turned on more easily than women do?
Well, a large new meta-analysis of dozens of studies on the theory just called BS.
https://www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/men-not-more-visual-or-easily-aroused-than-women-research-shows
Male gaze is actually a different concept.It refers to the tendency for visual media to put the viewer in the position of a straight male (by filming things presumed to be attractive to straight men)
That must be why there as so many handsome men working in TV and movies.
Maybe in that context but also used from the perspective of how men view certain things as eroticMale gaze is actually a different concept.It refers to the tendency for visual media to put the viewer in the position of a straight male (by filming things presumed to be attractive to straight men)
Trying not to be a skeptic here as to the veracity of this study's conclusions, but by drawing information from 61 different studies which included only 1,850 participants, that averages just over thirty people tested in each study, making for a very small statistical framework. And to call this a new study, the article was written nearly four years ago - that's fairly old data, and makes conclusions using studies which date back decades - the oldest from 1975 - at the beginning of the use of magnetic resonance imaging. This is not a complaint about the conclusions because this is real science, it is just that the meta study involved very few subjects and studies spread out over forty years. Not much has happened to our sexual habits or the availability of sexual stimuli in the last four decades, has it?? We are only scratching the surface of understanding the complexities of what the ceaseless barrage of sexually-engaging images and innuendo in media is doing to our animal brains.
I am glad that someone is doing this sort of research, even though it seems kind of frivolous given the cost of MRI time. It undoubtedly beats rats in a maze with rat pornography on the walls.
One thing is that the subjects of the study were already subjected to an erotic context, with the understanding that they were being measured for their reaction to that content. That's not what the "male gaze" means to most people, in my understanding of the term.
I've heard women refer to the "male gaze" as their interpretation of a man looking at them primarily as sexual objects, undressing them in their minds and lingering their gaze on female bodies, looking at them in a way that a straight woman wouldn't look at them. It's the type of behavior that's discouraged in nudist resorts, where anything more than a few seconds of a lingering gaze is considered to be impolite. The offenders are almost always men who are new to nudism, not surprisingly.
The article dismisses self-reported arousal, and looks only at studies of brain activity. The studies surveyed, collectively, certainly show that the machinery for paying particular attention to sexual imagery is in there, for both sexes. But we did not evolve to look at pictures, which are an artifact of our own making: that machinery is there by way of response to the sight of actual sexual arousal, activity, availability, or threat. And of course those things are going to matter, a lot, to a woman who encounters them.
But the presence of the machinery doesn't really say anything about what it means to the individual to see the image. For that, you have to ask them, and the analysis excluded studies that did that. And you have to look at concrete responses - what people actually do - which are easy to dismiss as socially conditioned, but patterns of response can also be biologically influenced.
An analogy: All adult humans have the machinery in their bodies to give milk. But a scientist who suggested that men's failure to nurse their babies was socially conditioned neglect would be laughed out of the room.
At a church camp in my youth, we were told that men were stimulated by sight and women by touch. This was used to justify modesty in women's attire and avoiding physical contact between men and women. As a male, I respond to both visual and physical stimuli and I doubt I'm alone in that. Some people are more visual in that being shown/demonstrated something leads to greater comprehension than just learning theory. I very much doubt this is delineated along gender lines. Is the male gaze a myth? Who cares really. More scientific research will be done and more conflicting opinions will emerge over time but what does it ultimately achieve?
Ausfarmlad raises a great point. I'm another male that responds to both visual and physical stimuli. I also find live events/people much more stimulating that images, which is what the study covered. To counteract this study, I've heard the truism that women dress for other women rather than men (who are less likely to follow the details of fashion and cosmetics). This of course is also a generalization which like most things can be interpreted as sexist. However, it indicates that the female gaze (perhaps related to women's brain stimulation for competition/aggression if not arousal) is stronger than for clueless men.
I've heard the truism that women dress for other women rather than men (who are less likely to follow the details of fashion and cosmetics).
This sort of explains how they dress rather than why they dress.
If you compare men who are used to being around naked women with men who are not, I think that you'll find that the type of stimulation is very different. I can look at a naked woman at a resort or beach and see the beauty of the feminine form, in all its variation, without being sexually aroused, because I have some life experience there. OTOH, a man who seldom sees a naked woman, and then only in a sexual context (either personally or in the media) will understandably have an erotic reaction to the sight. That's when they have to fight to suppress what women call "the male gaze."
I'd like to hear from women about this subject. Do women who see naked men all the time have a different reaction to the sight of a male body than women who only see naked men in a sexual context?
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