Are men really jerks?

Lately I have been reading a lot of articles lately that had to do with women's rights and how many people view them. I found a particular article titled, So Men Really Are Jerks? Study Shows That Men Really Do View Women as Objects. Susan Fiske, a Princeton University psychologist, has assumed for quite some time now, that women in bikinis and other revealing attire tend to be viewed by men as objects. Most men will admit that seeing a woman in a bikini or revealing attire can have a temporary tranquil effect on the male heterosexual brain. Thanks the MRI scanner, a Magnetic Resonance Imaging Scan, Dr. Fiske has managed to actually prove this theory.

Dr. Fiske showed photos of women in bathing suits and women wearing rather revealing clothing, along with control photos of fully-dressed men and women and men that were dresses revealingly to 21 heterosexual males apart of the test. This was happening while they underwent MRI scans. Fiske found that the premotor cortex, the region of the brain we use when manipulating tools, lit up like CRAZY when the photos of the partially dressed women were shown to the male participants.

What was even more disturbing, was the fact that Dr. Fiske found that the region of the brain responsible for social cognition failed to activate. Social cognition is the process by which we evaluate the feelings and intentions of others. It is also the study of how people process social information, especially its encoding, storage, retrieval, and application to social situations.

Without any activity in this area, the men were effectively looking at objects (one they wanted to manipulate like a tool) rather than another person when viewing the photos of partially dressed women (Clark 1). Seeming as tough Fiske's findings could not make men in general look any worse, when they were given a memory test of the photos they had just been exposed to in the MRI, the majority of the men remembered the photos of headless women in bikinis the best.

These findings should not be surprising to any woman at all. Men view women as objects on a daily basis. I see it everywhere I go. If there happen to be two women walking next to eachother down the road, one is "prettier" than the other, men's attention is drawn to them immediately. This shows that they are thinking with something other than their brains.

I am very interested in more studies like this one and will continue to do more research on this topic.

Clark, Josh. "So men really are jerks? Study shows men really do view women as objects." How Stuff Work. Word Press VIP, 23 Feb. 2009. Web. 25 Sept. 2009. http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/2009/02/23/so-men-really-are-jerks/.