But women are visual too – right?
Dear Shaunti,
I am irritated by all these generalizations that women should watch how they dress “because men are visual.” Well women are visual, too. There’s a hot guy at my office who works out by running the complex in gym shorts and no shirt during lunchtime, and I sure want to stand and watch. Or I catch myself daydreaming about him. And yet when that happens, I force myself to stop. But why is he out there in no shirt, anyway? I am single, 23 years old, in good shape, and careful to dress professionally. So I resent my boss telling the women in our office that we need to be conservative in what we wear because our male clients might be distracted. Women are visual and get distracted too! Why should men get a free pass, and all the responsibility be laid on women?
– Visual and Vexed
Dear Visual and Vexed –
What responsibility there is on this issue should be equally shared, and men should never get a free pass. Period.
And yes, women are visual, too. But here’s what we women don’t understand, and need to: we are not visual in the same way as men. There is a magnitude of difference.
When a woman tells a man, “but I am visual too” it is like a weekend hiker going up to someone who has summited Everest, K2, and the Eiger and telling them, “I am a hiker, too.” Technically correct, but so far off the mark that the Everest veteran can only politely smile and nod and think “this person has no idea,” while he hides the scars from his nearly-fatal fall into a glacier crevasse, and thinks about his buddy who never made it off K2.
Yes, women are visual in that we thoroughly enjoy the sight of an attractive man. And yes because Hot Guy At The Office is tempting the women staff members to stare and daydream, too, he should have the self-awareness to put on a T-shirt for pete’s sake.
But that is where the similarities end.
When you see Hot Guy running in his little gym shorts, here’s what probably happens in your brain. The cortical, thinking centers at the front of your brain light up like a Christmas tree and you think something like “Woah, he’s hot.” You enjoy looking at him – I mean, how could you not? But it also sounds like you try to be honorable and avoid letting yourself leer at him. You look away. And if you catch yourself daydreaming about what it would be like to hook up with him, you pull that thought down and try to go about your day. Most of this process takes place in the front of your brain, the thinking-related centers.
Now let’s imagine that Hot Girl is also out running in a pair of little gym shorts and a sports bra. Here’s what happens in the brain of Office Guy who sees her as she runs by. His thinking centers don’t immediately light up. Instead, a different center deep in his brain is activated: an area that sends involuntary biological responses to pleasurable signals. This is the same area that lights up when you’ve skipped lunch and are absolutely famished and you suddenly see your favorite food across the room; before there is any thought or action involved, you are instantly overwhelmed by a very primal, gut-level “I want that” sort of feeling. There’s a biological desire to consume that food.
When Office Guy watches Hot Girl running by, the same center in his brain is activated. There’s a biological desire to consume that image. Not a desire for the woman, exactly, but the image. There is zero thought involved; that first millisecond of stimulation is completely involuntary. And also in that first millisecond of stimulation, his brain wants to view it very sexually – for example, to fantasize about what she would look like without the spandex. In this first millisecond, all that temptation arises from the deep pleasure centers of the brain.
But in the next millisecond, his cortical, thinking centers kick in. This is where choice takes place. So if he wants to honor his wife – and that other woman! – in his thought life, he makes the same choice you do. He looks away. He forces himself to think about the spreadsheet on his desk. And very shortly, the encounter is out of his brain and he goes about his day.
Do you see the difference? We as women have literally never experienced that back-of-the-brain, biological-pleasure temptation that men face every day. So we don’t understand that it even exists for them.
Now take it the next step. Imagine that Hot Girl is not running by in spandex shorts but dressed in a suit with a skirt that shows off her backside or a top that shows cleavage. Now imagine that she’s making a presentation at a whiteboard to a team of people that includes men. How much are those men hearing of what she’s saying?
Answer: not enough. Because every time she turns around, that center in their brain is activated and they are desperately thinking look at her face, look at her face, look at her face. Unlike the woman who was jogging by, they can’t just turn away or think about the spreadsheet for a moment until she jogs out of sight.
Do you understand now what the supervisor in your office was trying to explain to your female colleagues, using the wholly inadequate words, “men are visual”? This is awkward, but it is real. And it cannot be ignored. It is one of the reasons Craig Gross and I wrote Through A Man’s Eyes: to help us women “get” the profound difference and understand the implications and what to do about it.
Yes, men absolutely must exercise the discipline not to look, not to stare, not to let their mind run on a sexual track. And yes, someone needs to throw Hot Guy a shirt. But women have a choice to make too: we have to decide whether we are going to help out those men who are trying, as best they can, to be honorable in their thoughts today.
Do you want Shaunti to share life-changing truths – including helping women understand men – at your event, church service or network? Inquire about Shaunti speaking, here.
Shaunti Feldhahn is the best-selling author of eye-opening, research-based books about men, women and relationships, including For Women Only, For Men Only, the groundbreaking The Good News About Marriage, and her newest book, Through a Man’s Eyes. A Harvard-trained social researcher and popular speaker, her findings are regularly featured in media as diverse as The Today Show, Focus on the Family, and the New York Times. Visit www.shaunti.com for more.
How I tire of my gender being smeared as a horde of visual lechers.
This is woefully inaccurate and frustrating to females who have that stronger visual response. Be careful not to reinforce stereotypes simply because you experience life a certain way. Many are left with no help, no one to talk to when we struggle. But we all struggle in different ways.
Hi Anon, How do you respond to images of males you find attractive? Shaunti notes in another source that about 25% of females have a response similar to men.
Thank you! I grew with your standpoint.
Agree. Not grew. This autocorrect is terrible!
Sorry Shaunti,
You may need to speak with some real women and not give your responses, based on what some male researchers or some men in the regular population say. Men cannot tell us, what we want, what we feel, what we are experiencing inside. No man can tell you how you experience life, just because they can study brain lobes.
Honestly Shaunti and ladies who are reading here, men do not, I repeat, do not know how women feel in their minds and bodies. Men don’t know how what state our emotional and visual selves are in at any given time. Men simply do not know us and we need to stop allowing them to tell us what we do and do not want or feel. Men do what they do to us and say what they say to and about women, because we allow it.
Yes, yes and yes!!!
can you provide reviewed journal reference?
i have some questions
“thinking centers” which area you consider as thinking center?
[an area that sends involuntary biological responses to pleasurable signals. This is the same area that lights up when you’ve skipped lunch and are absolutely famished and you suddenly see your favorite food across the room; before there is any thought or action involved, you are instantly overwhelmed by a very primal, gut-level “I want that” sort of feeling. There’s a biological desire to consume that food.]
actually which area is responsible for this task?
Shaunti is traveling and unavailable but all the studies are referenced in the endnotes in the book, so you might want to start there…And thinking centers are the cortical areas at the front of the brain….
Considering the different biological way in which most women respond to images of males, how would you explain the male stripper and “Girls gone wild” responses young ladies have participated/shown in since the late 70s (?). Chippendales claims that 2 million women each year see their show. Are these the result of changing social norms? Can they “rewire” a woman’s brain in ways similar to how porn rewires a male’s brain? Is there any possibility that the data that shows the more sexual partners a woman has before she marries correlates to the likelihood of marital satisfaction is also influenced by this kind of activity?
The newer studies (done in controlled environments, to avoid social stigma) have been confirming the opposite: that both men and women respond to visual stimuli in identical ways. So yes, both men and women are equally as visual exactly in the same way with no difference when scientists tested them in a controlled environment where they won’t be judged by others.
I mean, the way YOU described how you’d act is entirely different as how I’d act. I’d be very “blunt” and shout a very obvious “hey hot stuff!” at the minimum.
This has been debunked tho. Women defintely are visual in the same way, or nearly the same way. I thought only hardcore Religious folks still believe that myth that women cant be heavily aroused by the visual only…… I guess social Stigma around female Sexuality defintely is still there. Some pseudo Experts never bother to actually Research bc their beliefs are deeply Ingrained. ….That doesnt mean both genders shouldnt dress proper of course.
The studies: https://www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/men-not-more-visual-or-easily-aroused-than-women-research-shows/
One reason I choose to stay single is that I often see people say women prefer relationships so much that they aren’t as visually sexually excited as men and that more people find women’s features more attractive. Many women who often feel sexual would rather read about sexual stuff than see a sexually depicted male body. You see women sexualized and pursued much more often than men are by women. Even many heterosexual women prefer to sexualize their gender more than they do males. I don’t know how they don’t hate that the sexualization ratio vastly favors what those attracted to women want to see. I’ve seen many people of either gender say there’s more ways for the female body to look attractive than the male and that curviness on women makes it easier to depict a female body in art, and gives more variety than the male. This difference of expression of sexual desire for one gender is often attributed to testosterone. Since that’s what gives males our uniquely shaped parts, it feels like that automatically makes sexual desire a male quality. I can see no advantage to one gender being sexually desired more often than the other. That leaves more people of one genders desires less satisfied more often. It’s a very discouraging and infuriating thought for me that women don’t feel sexual desire and are aroused just by attractive appearances as often as men. I choose not to believe it, but I’m doubtful enough to want to stay single. Some studies have shown that women often lie about thinking of sexually pleasing things less than they do because of perceived societal pressures making them feel more guilty. I don’t know how so many people could be as happy as they are thinking there’s a great mismatch of that pleasurable a feeling experienced and wanted by both genders. There’s other things that have made it difficult for me to enjoy female beauty as much as I want.