Men accused of a wandering eye might make their excuses, but now there is no denying it – science has proved they really do ogle women’s bodies. Eye-tracking technology showed men spend less time looking women in the eye or at their faces than they do at their waists and chests. But researchers also found women looked at other women’s bodies more than their facial features. Scientists attached a device to the faces of 36 men which measured in milliseconds how long they looked at something. The participants were monitored as they were shown pictures of ten women with three body shapes: curvy, thin or medium build. The results showed that the men spent more time looking at women’s bodies than their faces – and those with larger breasts, narrower waists and bigger hips held their gaze for longer. The team from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the US said the trait could have evolved as a way of males inspecting potential mates for childbearing. But lead author and social psychologist Professor Sarah Gervais added that their findings could have a more modern - and depressing - explanation. She said: ‘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 said until now there has been little scientific evidence to back up what women had long suspected about the way men look at them. ‘We have women’s self-reports, but this is some of the first work to document that people actually engage in this,’ she said. The same experiment was carried out on 29 women too and came up with similar conclusions - women looked at other women’s breasts and hips more than their faces. Professor Gervais said that women may be checking out the competition so looked other females up and down to see what they were up against. Source
I cannot help but feel that the way that both men and women look at an image is going to be vastly different to the way that we look at an actual person. I'm not sure this research provides an accurate representation of the way we look at those around us. I would be interested to see the study repeated with live subjects in conversation rather than a static image.
