Carnal Knowledge | In making a match, must men really try harder?
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
In an article titled, "Why Women Aren't Funny" in this month's Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens writes, "The chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the opposite sex. ... Women have no corresponding need to appeal to men in this way. They already appeal to men. ..."
It doesn't quite ring true. Perhaps he's considering only beautiful women - effortlessly beautiful women.
Hitchens' visual system may not even be equipped to detect average-looking or frumpy women. But despite the insincerity, his argument brings up an interesting scientific question: Do males really have to work harder?
Yes, says Richard Bribiescas, a Yale anthropologist and author of the book Men, Evolutionary and Life History.
"The tendency to compete over females is not just universal across cultures but pretty universal across all mammalian species," he says.
That doesn't necessarily mean men are funnier - though Hitchens cites a Stanford study showing men respond to cartoons differently from women. But we do know men are more driven to do what Bribiescas calls "coalescing resources," whether they come in the form of cattle or sheep or yachts.
Such a striking sex difference probably stems from sexual selection - in which males and females compete with their own sex for access to the opposite sex.
Males generally produce many more sperm than females produce eggs. That means males are more likely than females to become evolutionary dead ends, but those that do procreate can potentially leave behind a surprising number of offspring.
In his book Sex Wars, biologist Michael Majerus lays out various reproduction records for female and male animals: In red deer, it's 14 for does to 24 for bucks. He cites the Guinness Book of World Records in reporting that the female reproduction record is 69 children. For men, it's 888 kids.
The male record is attributed to an Emperor of Morocco known as Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty.
Some male animals still show a curious lack of competitive drive. Darwin himself wondered why some creatures show almost no sex differences, says Don Levitan, a biologist from Florida State University.
Levitan studies sea urchins, a cousin of the starfish. Sea urchins come in many species and across the board males aren't any prettier than the females. They aren't any bigger, and they don't do any special courtship behaviors.
And sea urchins are not, as far as anyone can tell, funny.
How do they get away with it?
The key to the puzzle is in the way the sea urchins have sex, says Levitan. Biologists have a pretty broad definition of sex, so they consider sea urchins to be sexual creatures even though all they do is cast their sperm and eggs out into the water - a system called broadcast spawning.
That means they can delegate the burden of finding and competing for mates to their sperm and eggs.
In crowded urchin tide pools, the males make short-lived but fast sperm that compete by sprinting. But for more rare sea urchins, sperm have to live a long time and swim long distances to find eggs of their own species.
If humans engaged in broadcast spawning, men's sperm would have to be hilarious.
Broadcast spawning was probably an ancestral form of sex, says Levitan. Many other sea creatures, including a number of fish, do it this way. But then eventually animals started pairing up - swimming together as they released sperm and eggs.
And others started going all the way.
Copulation, says Levitan, probably evolved independently many times - in vertebrates, in different lines of insects, in squids and their kin. So no one really gets full credit for inventing it.
There's new evidence that human sperm are still evolved to compete thanks to a long evolutionary history of women mating with more than one man in the same couple of fertile days.
But sperm can only do so much of the hard work. A man's sperm won't get to the playing field unless he gets off the couch and advocates for them one way or another. It's the price the male of our species has to pay for not bearing children while enjoying a more intimate and interesting sex life than the sea urchin.
posted by LeBlues @ 2:11 PM,
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Willful Ignorance
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
If we want to change the toxic sexual culture on our nations’ college campuses, we need to start looking at the sex education our high-schoolers receive.
My friend Jen was squashed into a packed lecture hall at the University of Colorado in Boulder, scribbling notes as her sociology professor elucidated the power dynamics underlying rape, when all of a sudden her stomach and pen dropped simultaneously.
Her mind flashed back to a night over a year earlier: moonlight coming through her dorm window fell across the shoulders of a guy she barely knew, on top of her. Drunk and exhausted, Jen told him that she wasn’t up for it. He persisted. She remembers saying no a few more times, then eventually giving up, staring at the dark ceiling, waiting for it to be over.
Jen had woken up the next morning hung-over and angry at herself. Though the word “regret” was heavy on her mind, the word “rape” never once crossed it. But now, sitting in a sea of undergrads, some of whom had probably experienced similar sexual encounters fraught with alcohol and disconnection, the word rang true. Jen left class in a hurry, went home, and sobbed.
Experiences like Jen’s are unfortunately not rare. Every two and half minutes someone is sexually assaulted in America. Many of these assaults take place on college campuses; 80 percent of rape victims are under age 30. Two-thirds of all rapes are committed by someone who is known to the victim, not a stranger in a dark alley. (Though rape statistics are notoriously inaccurate, we can assume that these, from the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) are at least close to the truth, as they are derived from a survey of multiple studies, including the National Crime Victimization Survey from 2005.)
The lack of public, comprehensive, and complex sex education in this country contributes to this toxic sexual culture on most college campuses. The abstinence-only sex education that most young men and women receive does not teach them how to articulate their own sexual needs and respect those articulated by their partners. Teens who are merely told "Just don’t do it" are lacking more than an anatomy lesson or information on contraceptive choices. They are also missing out on essential communication skills and life-saving knowledge about sex and power. Which is bad news for teenagers in our paradoxically hyper-sexual and hyper-conservative contemporary America who are in desperate need of wise mentorship.
Like Jen, many of us understand far too late that sexuality doesn’t operate by switch -- on or off -- but rather is a wide-ranging spectrum. That alcohol doesn’t just limit inhibitions, it also hampers communication. That articulating one’s desires and needs is essential for safe, consensual and, well, good sex. And, of course, that listening to your partner -- whether they’re a partner for just a night or for a lifetime -- is a matter of basic dignity and respect.
These are conversations that are conspicuously absent from all but the most progressive high schools in this country. As a result, a flood of hormonal, insecure, and unequipped 18-year-olds show up at colleges across the nation each fall with little more than a sensationalistic idea of rape, shaped by shows like Law and Order: SVU rather than by conversation with knowledgeable adults. Add almost-ubiquitous binge drinking into the mix, and you’ve got a chemistry equation that equals combustion. One study found that 75 percent of the males and 50 percent of the females involved in college campus acquaintance rapes had been drinking when the incident occurred.
Both women like Jen and young men who drunkenly don’t listen when their dates say "no" can end up scarred from the experience. All parties involved can be hurt by a failure to properly delineate and stick to boundaries. As Jen’s sociology professor noted that day, there are complex power dynamics at play here. We live in a society that raises many boys to be repressed men, raises many girls to be self-hating women, glorifies violence, shames victims, and hides histories of incest and molestation. Many of these dynamics feel too big to tackle, too personal to control. But sex education is concrete, fundamental, and totally public. It is something that we can change. Knowledge and dialogue can’t always prevent rape, to be sure, but they can be powerful tools toward that end.
By giving teenagers opportunities to dialogue about sexuality and practice communicating about their desires and needs, we could prepare them for a college scene fraught with experimentation, alcohol, and difficult social negotiations. The field of emotional intelligence provides us with sound evidence that behaviors must be practiced habitually if we want them to emerge in stressful situations. In a sex ed context, this means that we could be having essential conversations in schools -- about having fun while still setting limits -- to prepare students for the college culture of limitless drinking.
Teens could be reflecting on their own authentic boundaries, sexual and otherwise, before they are in a situation where those boundaries are in danger of being crossed. Sure, hokey role-playing activities are the last thing a bunch of too-cool-for-school teenagers want to do, but teachers could still provide them with the language that might make recognizing those boundaries easier. If that teacher is a relatable and savvy adult, all the better.
Instead, we have spent over a billion dollars on abstinence-only messages for teens, at least half of whom have already had sex before they even leave high school, and three-fourths of whom don’t believe in waiting until marriage, according a recent study in the Review of General Psychology. Most of these inadequate curricula are taught by perhaps well-intentioned but certainly not the most approachable adults in the school system. Teenagers deserve sex education from teachers who are comfortable and experienced talking about sex, not just a randomly assigned wrestling coach (the standard-bearer of sex-ed excellence at Jen and my suburban public high school in Colorado Springs).
The sorry state of sex ed was documented in the 2005 film The Education of Shelby Knox, by Marion Lipschutz and Rose Rosenblatt. In it, the 15-year-old Knox, a self-described “good Southern Baptist girl,” starts to question the logic of abstinence-only sex ed when she finds out that her high school in Lubbock has some of the highest teen pregnancy and STD rates in the state. In one of the most poignant scenes in the film, an older female teacher repeats her mandated response to Knox’s questions like a doll with a broken string: “Abstinence is the only way to prevent STDs and teen pregnancy. Abstinence is the only way to prevent STDs and teen pregnancy. Abstinence is the only way to prevent STDs and teen pregnancy.”
This restricted dialogue about sex is neglectful to the point of absurdity. How can policy-makers, parents, and educators possibly advocate a philosophy that not only proves to be ineffective at preventing STDs or teen pregnancy, but also hazardous to the health of young women and men forced to deal with the realities of our volatile sexual culture? It is inexcusably lazy to let Hollywood and prime-time television stand in for an accurate education about sex and sexual assault. "Just saying no" isn’t a realistic defense in a world that hypes "yes, yes, yes" at every turn, nor is it fair answer for young people trying to compose real identities.
Today Jen isn’t sure whether to call her experience rape. The label is no longer important to her. What is critical, to her mind, is spreading the word to both young women and men that sexuality is complex and requires the utmost in honesty, self-awareness, respect, and education. Today Jen is applying to go back to school, this time to study how to become a sexual educator herself. She wants to become the mentor she never had.
posted by LeBlues @ 2:44 PM,
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Prince is out but not down
Wednesday, January 3, 2007
In India, where being gay is a crime, a royal son was shunned when he told his secret. Now he fights to change the law and public mind-set.
Vadodara, India — AS a maharajah's son, Manvendra Singh Gohil grew up in a bubble of prestige and privilege, surrounded by hangers-on who treated him so reverentially that he was 15 before he crossed a street by himself.So the public snubs and rejection of the last nine months have been a new experience. Yet the mild-mannered Gohil couldn't be more content.At last, he says, he is living an honest life — albeit one that has touched off a scandal in the royal house of Rajpipla, one of India's former princely states. Last March, he revealed a lifelong secret to a local newspaper, which promptly splashed it on the front page."The headline was: 'The Prince of Rajpipla Declares That He's a Homosexual,' " Gohil said with a rueful chuckle. "The newspaper sold like hotcakes."In the uproar that followed, disgusted residents in Gohil's hometown flung his photograph onto a bonfire.His parents publicly disowned their only son, printing notices in the press that he was cut off as heir because of his involvement in "activities unacceptable to society."
Gohil's mother has threatened contempt proceedings against anyone who refers to him as her son.For scandal-mongers, the tale of India's gay prince is an irresistibly juicy affair full of details worthy of a tabloid tell-all: his teenage affair with a servant boy, a sexless marriage to a minor princess, a nervous breakdown.For Gohil, his very public unmasking has brought him a bully pulpit from which to speak out against a law that makes him not just a pariah of noble birth but also a common criminal.Here in the world's largest democracy, home to 1.1 billion people, sex between two people of the same gender remains a punishable offense.
Decades after India threw off the yoke of British rule, the country still clings to a Victorian-era statute established by its colonial masters nearly 150 years ago, which demands up to life in prison for anyone committing "carnal intercourse against the order of nature."In practice, few prosecutions are brought to court. But reports abound of police using the law to harass and blackmail gay men and lesbians.Human rights advocates, lawyers groups and the government's AIDS coordinator are lobbying for repeal or revision of the law. In September, dozens of Indian luminaries, including Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen and author Vikram Seth, added their voices to the campaign.
Activists are guardedly hopeful about the chances of a legal challenge now pending before the Delhi High Court. A hearing is scheduled for this month.But even should they succeed, changing attitudes will prove a far harder task.Despite India's high-tech wizardry and its rising affluence, this remains a highly conservative and conformist society where most young people undergo arranged marriages, the pressure to produce children is enormous and no gay role models or TV shows like "Will & Grace" exist to offer a hint of an alternative.Those who feel different learn to keep it to themselves — and to feel guilt-stricken about it."It's not uncommon among the young people we work with to ask, 'Is there a medicine that can make me stop feeling this way?' " said Anjali Gopalan of the Naz Foundation, an AIDS organization that has taken a leading role in the fight to decriminalize
homosexuality.
"The law compounds all of this. It creates an environment for people to feel like this."The criminalization of homosexuality makes it difficult to set up social venues where gays can meet. Even in the nation's capital, New Delhi, a thriving metropolis of 15 million people, there are only two bars that host furtive, word-of-mouth gay nights just once a week, usually under the protective guise of a "private party" for some fictitious person. Those nights are packed.*GOHIL, 41, would seem an unlikely spokesman for bucking the system, one from which he has benefited handsomely.Although India's royal families were stripped of formal political power after the nation's independence in 1947, many retain enormous wealth and influence in their former fiefdoms, as smiling ribbon-cutters and patrons of the arts, education and charitable work.Gohil's parents, the maharajah and maharani of Rajpipla, a predominantly agricultural town of about 70,000 people in the western state of Gujarat, are the community's biggest landowners and have several palaces to their name, including a majestic, salmon-pink creation, complete with columns and balconies, that was Gohil's home when he was a toddler. (It's now a hotel owned by the family.)
He lived a cocooned existence there and at the family residence in Mumbai, spending his childhood absorbing the finer points of royal protocol and etiquette, attending the finest schools and being waited on hand and foot."It was so luxurious that even a glass of water I didn't have to go and get for myself," he said.By age 12, Gohil had already been invited to be guest of honor at a local school event.
Around the same time, he began sensing that something besides his aristocratic background set him apart from his peers."Somewhere inside me I felt I was different than others," he said in an interview at his office here in Vadodara, about 1 1/2 hours from Rajpipla.
"When I came to the age where you develop sexual attraction to the opposite sex, I had the feeling that I'm not attracted to the opposite sex but the same sex.
"In India, talk of such intimate matters is taboo. At school, sex education for Gohil consisted of an embarrassed teacher telling her students about the sexual development of animals as a stand-in for human sexuality.Gohil's first clue to his own identity came from a classmate when he was 14."A boy from my class, out of observation or what, one day came and asked me, 'Are you a homo?' I had not heard this word before. I said, 'What? I don't know,' " Gohil recalled.
"I went home and looked it up in the dictionary, and it wasn't there."He didn't have the words to describe his impulses, but as a young teen he found a way to act on them at home with a servant boy his own age, an orphan whom Gohil's grandmother had taken under her wing. The two boys maintained a secret relationship until they were about 18, Gohil said.
AFTER his graduation from university, the pressure on Gohil to marry mounted as his parents expected their only son to carry on the Rajpipla line and assume his duties as custodian of the family's royal heritage, which stretches back 600 years.
A suitable wife could manage the household, making sure that the heirlooms, the china and the sumptuous royal costumes were kept up to snuff. Gohil's father, the maharajah, and his mother, from a royal family in Rajasthan, scouted out potential mates, settling on a princess from the state of Madhya Pradesh.Gohil, then 25, agreed to the match, which quickly turned out to be a disaster. He felt no physical attraction for his wife and could not consummate their marriage.Her efforts to seduce him ended in tears.
She even dragged Gohil to a doctor, but after 15 humiliating months of their being together yet not together, divorce became the only way out.As she left, his ex-wife gave Gohil one piece of advice: Never do this to another woman.But it took years for Gohil to summon the nerve to contact a well-known gay activist in Mumbai, formerly Bombay. Slowly, the young royal began tiptoeing out of the closet, deepening his involvement in the gay community and becoming an HIV counselor to other homosexual men. "My parents thought I was in yoga school, but I would be out distributing condoms," he said.
Nonetheless, the increasing strain of pretending took its toll. His parents were on the hunt for a second wife, and residents in Rajpipla constantly asked Gohil whether he came bearing "good news" whenever he visited from Mumbai, unaware of the activities and friendships he was pursuing.In 2002, Gohil suffered a nervous breakdown, spending 15 days in the hospital. At the end of it, his sympathetic psychiatrist arranged for his parents, his sister and her husband to come for a family meeting during which, at Gohil's request, the doctor informed the family of his sexual orientation."It was very, very emotional, very disturbing," he said. "They were all crying.
They were still not willing to believe that this thing was true."Since then, Gohil has thrown himself into HIV/AIDS work through the Lakshya Trust, an organization he founded in 2000. It was partly to raise the profile of the group that Gohil decided to come out publicly.
His straight friends were shocked to find out he was gay. His gay friends were shocked to find out he'd been married.For his parents, it was the last straw. He is no longer on speaking terms with his mother. His father, despite disinheriting him, has softened slightly, declaring in a newspaper interview that he had felt pressured by friends and relatives into taking such a drastic step and describing Gohil as "a gifted individual" and "a good son." The two men still speak occasionally, but their conversations are awkward.Gohil believes that his parents cannot legally prevent ancestral possessions from passing into his hands.
Geeta Luthra, a leading civil lawyer in New Delhi, agrees."If it's ancestral property, then in India … nobody can disinherit you," she said. "Custom is a part of the law in India, and the custom among princely families is the principle of primogeniture. So you can't deprive him" of his inheritance.Despite the controversy surrounding his coming-out, Gohil has continued to receive invitations to attend functions in his royal capacity. During the recent interview, Gohil happily showed off a photo of himself in traditional regalia: an elegant ivory suit on his slender frame, a large red turban complete with ostrich feather on his head, a double strand of pearls around his neck and a broad smile on his face, though whether it was out of the general Indian love of pageantry or a personal sense of fabulousness is hard to tell.
AN introvert by nature, Gohil enjoys nothing more than quiet time on his farm on the outskirts of Rajpipla, where he cultivates a passion for organic farming — his primary source of income — and practices the harmonium. He says he has "no regrets at all" over his decisions or the very public consequences that followed.Rather, he has finally been able to put on a little weight, offers for dates have started coming in and the Lakshya Trust just won an award from the United Nations.
Representatives of the media keep calling, and a cheerful, newly liberated Gohil appears to enjoy telling his story.To those in Rajpipla who might still harbor reservations about their patron-in-waiting, he waves an indifferent hand."They cannot get a prince on hire. I am the prince, and whether I am gay or not gay is hardly the issue," Gohil said.
"I'm the only son — there are no cousins or brothers they can go to. They have to come back to me."
posted by LeBlues @ 3:11 PM,
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Second Thoughts on Gays in the Military
Tuesday, January 2, 2007
TWO weeks ago, President Bush called for a long-term plan to increase the size of the armed forces. As our leaders consider various options for carrying out Mr. Bush’s vision, one issue likely to generate fierce debate is “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the policy that bars openly gay service members from the military. Indeed, leaders in the new Congress are planning to re-introduce a bill to repeal the policy next year.
As was the case in 1993 — the last time the American people thoroughly debated the question of whether openly gay men and lesbians should serve in the military — the issue will give rise to passionate feelings on both sides. The debate must be conducted with sensitivity, but it must also consider the evidence that has emerged over the last 14 years.
When I was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I supported the current policy because I believed that implementing a change in the rules at that time would have been too burdensome for our troops and commanders. I still believe that to have been true. The concern among many in the military was that given the longstanding view that homosexuality was incompatible with service, letting people who were openly gay serve would lower morale, harm recruitment and undermine unit cohesion.
In the early 1990s, large numbers of military personnel were opposed to letting openly gay men and lesbians serve. President Bill Clinton, who promised to lift the ban during his campaign, was overwhelmed by the strength of the opposition, which threatened to overturn any executive action he might take. The compromise that came to be known as “don’t ask, don’t tell” was thus a useful speed bump that allowed temperatures to cool for a period of time while the culture continued to evolve.
The question before us now is whether enough time has gone by to give this policy serious reconsideration. Much evidence suggests that it has.
Last year I held a number of meetings with gay soldiers and marines, including some with combat experience in Iraq, and an openly gay senior sailor who was serving effectively as a member of a nuclear submarine crew. These conversations showed me just how much the military has changed, and that gays and lesbians can be accepted by their peers.
This perception is supported by a new Zogby poll of more than 500 service members returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, three quarters of whom said they were comfortable interacting with gay people. And 24 foreign nations, including Israel, Britain and other allies in the fight against terrorism, let gays serve openly, with none reporting morale or recruitment problems.
I now believe that if gay men and lesbians served openly in the United States military, they would not undermine the efficacy of the armed forces. Our military has been stretched thin by our deployments in the Middle East, and we must welcome the service of any American who is willing and able to do the job.
But if America is ready for a military policy of nondiscrimination based on sexual orientation, the timing of the change should be carefully considered. As the 110th Congress opens for business, some of its most urgent priorities, like developing a more effective strategy in Iraq, share widespread support that spans political affiliations. Addressing such issues could help heal the divisions that cleave our country. Fighting early in this Congress to lift the ban on openly gay service members is not likely to add to that healing, and it risks alienating people whose support is needed to get this country on the right track.
By taking a measured, prudent approach to change, political and military leaders can focus on solving the nation’s most pressing problems while remaining genuinely open to the eventual and inevitable lifting of the ban. When that day comes, gay men and lesbians will no longer have to conceal who they are, and the military will no longer need to sacrifice those whose service it cannot afford to lose.
posted by LeBlues @ 12:02 PM,
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What You Don’t Know You Know
Even if you don’t know it, your brain clocks things like naked ladies and muggers at breakneck speed.
Made you look! A naked body, flashed for an instant over on the left side of the screen, pulled your attention over there, didn’t it?
OK, actually there was no image over there. But if this website had the technological prowess that a recent psychology study did, we could have flashed erotic photos before your eyes. And you would’ve tended to look toward or away from these pictures of men and women in the buff, depending on which sex you’re attracted to. You wouldn’t have even noticed the transgression because the trick works even if you aren’t conscious of seeing the images.
This type of research raises vexing questions about how our minds work. Such as how much of our surroundings do we take in and process without us being aware? We might glom onto sexy images, shy away from scenes of death and destruction, or suffer pangs of fear from harmless photos of snakes. And if our minds and brains can make decisions unconsciously—like, “Look over there! Hottie at 9 o’clock!"—are we just drones, pushed and pulled by deep-seated wants and fears?
It makes sense that we could have evolved to make snap decisions to look one way or another, says Sheng He, a neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota and leader of the subconscious naughty pics study. “You want to direct your attention to interesting or dangerous targets in your visual field,” He says. “If your brain can do that even before you become aware of it, that would certainly make it more advantageous.”
But showing that we actually do this is quite a task. Sheng and his colleagues used a special technique to keep people from becoming conscious of the naked pictures in their study, which appeared recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The images were flashed before people for just under one second, long enough for a person to normally be aware of them. But in the experiment, they presented them to only one eye, while the other eye saw a jumble of patches of bright colors. When the eyes feed these two images into the brain, the brain cells try to assemble a consistent picture of the surroundings—but they can’t, so they duke it out in a process called “binocular rivalry.” In He’s experiment, the noisy patches won, and the naked pics escaped notice.
Asking people what they saw revealed nothing. But the researchers could see where people’s attention was by giving them a quick test soon after each naked pictures flashed on screen. The test was simple: to say whether a pattern of lines was oriented up-and-down, or tilted off kilter. How quickly people respond to the test shows whether their attention happened to be on the spot where the pattern of lines appeared, or off somewhere else.
Straight men’s attention followed whichever side on which the naked lady appeared. Same was true for gay men with pictures of naked men. And vice versa for the ladies (although the results didn’t come out so clean for homosexual and bisexual women. He’s not sure why). Having some sort of response to the naked picture is probably unavoidable; “That part must be hardwired,” He says. But what kind of response a person has is probably influenced by society, he adds. In cultures with strong taboos against showing some skin, for example, naked photos of either sex may be repulsive to some—or especially captivating to others. Experiments like He’s reveal how much work our minds are doing below the surface. “What’s really elegant about the study and his colleagues is they show that this happens even if you’re not even aware—especially if you’re not even aware—of what it is that’s grabbing your attention,” says psychologist Steven Most of the University of Delaware, who also studies how fleeting images influence our minds. “These influences over attention and perception happen at a preconscious level, which is extraordinary.”
Erotic images aren’t the only ones that grab attention so strongly. “Mutilated bodies and spiders also rated very high,” He says. It’s just those kinds of disturbing images that Most used in a recent study to show an effect he calls “attentional rubbernecking.” Just like when you’re driving down a highway and you can’t help but take your eyes off the road to stare at an accident on the shoulder.
In Most’s study, which appeared last year in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, people watched a rapid-fire mix of images, and they had to look out for certain type of images - say, pictures of buildings. Subjects were aware of the various images they saw, and throwing in a disturbing image, like a mutilated body, made their attention hiccup, so that if an image of a building appears soon afterward, they miss it. The trick worked again when Most inserted photos of naked people. Subjects just couldn’t resist the lure of sexy pictures even with a performance-based reward of up to $90. So it seems that images we see, even fleetingly, play a game of subconscious tug-of-war on our attention that our willpower is largely helpless against.
But whether we find the curve of a breast or a man’s butt either entrancing or repulsive, Most’s studies suggest it will mess with our attention either way. If we’re all rubberneckers under the surface, maybe laws should take this into account. Sexy images on roadside billboards could be a traffic hazard; should we should ban them? On the other hand, Most’s studies found that people with highly anxious personalities were less likely to rein in their attention and avoid the affects of distracting images. If we can train ourselves to be less distractable, maybe it is not the billboard’s fault, but the nervous driver’s. Another hoop to jump on your driving test, maybe? No matter the legal consequences, this reserach reveals how underlying drives and motivations influence how we see the world. “We have this intuition that to see something, all we have to do is turn our eyes toward it and we’ll see what’s there,” Most says. But studies like He’s and Most’s show that this naive sense of how we perceive the world underestimates how much is going on before we become aware of what we see—or even things we never consiously notice at all.
posted by LeBlues @ 11:56 AM,
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