We Speak For Earth

ikenbot:

Men and Women Can’t Be “Just Friends”

Side note: This title is actually a bit, no, very misleading. The study does indeed show that men think of romantic or sexually beneficial relationships from friends more often than women, but the conclusions that can be reached in this study could also be a smoking gun showing just how effective our culture is at molding our minds to a gender binary. Which reminds me of the answer I gave someone who had asked about how men should approach women, because my suspicion is that men can be “Just friends” with women, but our culture is so assertive and conditioned to striving for these types of relationships that we easily forget. Plenty of media and outside advertisement subconsciously and most times very obviously altering our behavior to pay more attention to our sexual desires as men and for women to be the “wholesome” weak-links that need us. While women on the other hand are suggested and most times even forced into that image. Sure men will have that natural urge, but these urges alone are not enough to merit this behavior because this urge can be easily controlled, those that can’t control it tend to be those who are more heavily influenced by that gender binary culture and the behavioral patterns that come with it. Just a thought, but read on for the study and make your own conclusions.

Can heterosexual men and women ever be “just friends”? Few other questions have provoked debates as intense, family dinners as awkward, literature as lurid, or movies as memorable. Still, the question remains unanswered. Daily experience suggests that non-romantic friendships between males and females are not only possible, but common—men and women live, work, and play side-by-side, and generally seem to be able to avoid spontaneously sleeping together. However, the possibility remains that this apparently platonic coexistence is merely a façade, an elaborate dance covering up countless sexual impulses bubbling just beneath the surface.

New research suggests that there may be some truth to this possibility—that we may think we’re capable of being “just friends” with members of the opposite sex, but the opportunity (or perceived opportunity) for “romance” is often lurking just around the corner, waiting to pounce at the most inopportune moment.

In order to investigate the viability of truly platonic opposite-sex friendships—a topic that has been explored more on the silver screen than in the science lab—researchers brought 88 pairs of undergraduate opposite-sex friends into…a science lab. Privacy was paramount—for example, imagine the fallout if two friends learned that one—and only one—had unspoken romantic feelings for the other throughout their relationship. In order to ensure honest responses, the researchers not only followed standard protocols regarding anonymity and confidentiality, but also required both friends to agree—verbally, and in front of each other—to refrain from discussing the study, even after they had left the testing facility. These friendship pairs were then separated, and each member of each pair was asked a series of questions related to his or her romantic feelings (or lack thereof) toward the friend with whom they were taking the study.

The results suggest large gender differences in how men and women experience opposite-sex friendships. Men were much more attracted to their female friends than vice versa. Men were also more likely than women to think that their opposite-sex friends were attracted to them—a clearly misguided belief. In fact, men’s estimates of how attractive they were to their female friends had virtually nothing to do with how these women actually felt, and almost everything to do with how the men themselves felt—basically, males assumed that any romantic attraction they experienced was mutual, and were blind to the actual level of romantic interest felt by their female friends. Women, too, were blind to the mindset of their opposite-sex friends; because females generally were not attracted to their male friends, they assumed that this lack of attraction was mutual. As a result, men consistently overestimated the level of attraction felt by their female friends and women consistently underestimated the level of attraction felt by their male friends.

Men were also more willing to act on this mistakenly perceived mutual attraction. Both men and women were equally attracted to romantically involved opposite-sex friends and those who were single; “hot” friends were hot and “not” friends were not, regardless of their relationship status. However, men and women differed in the extent to which they saw attached friends as potential romantic partners. Although men were equally as likely to desire “romantic dates” with “taken” friends as with single ones, women were sensitive to their male friends’ relationship status and uninterested in pursuing those who were already involved with someone else.

I highlighted this part towards the end of the snippet because I wanted to again point out that this may be because of men’s misogynistic mindset that is largely attributed to our traditional culture that has been having trouble with keeping with the times. I believe we [men] are more willing to act because we are given more entitlement and power over women and this gives us an extreme overdose of unnecessary confidence in our sexuality despite how messed up and possessive it is in reality.

Full Article

ikenbot:

Study: Proof That We Sexually Objectify Women

We look at women the same way we look at houses and sandwiches: as composites of attractive parts.

Problem: Few would argue that the objectification of women is a real thing — and a real problem — but as yet there’s been no cognitive explanation for it in a literal sense. Do we really look at women differently than we do men, and are they actually objectified in the eye — and brain — of the beholder?

Methodology: Images of average, fully clothed individuals were quickly flashed before the eyes of participants. After each one, the participants would then be shown two side-by-side images that zoomed in on one, “sexual” aspect of the individual (for example, a woman’s midriff) and asked to identify the version that hadn’t been modified. The experiment was also reversed, so that participants first looked at a specific part and then had to identify it in the context of an entire body. The test was designed to clue researchers in on whether the participants were using global or local cognitive processing while looking at the images — in other words, whether they perceived the individuals as a whole or as an assemblage of their various parts.

Results: Regardless of gender, participants consistently recognized women’s sexual body parts more easily when presented in isolation. Men’s sexual body parts, on the other hand, were more memorable as part of their entire bodies.

Conclusion: The cognitive process behind our perception of objects is the same that we use when looking at women, and both genders are guilty of taking in the parts instead of the whole. When we look at men, we use global processing to see them more fully as people.

The full study,”Seeing women as objects: The sexual body part recognition bias,” is published in the European Journal of Social Psychology.