The Object of Desire

Every now and then, scientists come up with an insight so staggering, so unexpected, that our worldview shifts, and nothing is ever the same again.

But not this time.

There is another category of research, the kind wherein considerable amounts of time, effort and money are spent proving something so blatantly obvious, so intuitively known, that you can't believe that the project was ever green-lighted.

This was the type of research presented in an article that I saw on CNN today. It said, in effect, that science has proven that men look at women in bikinis as objects, not people.

Really. Who would have guessed?

The research, which was done at Princeton University, was presented this week at the American Association for the Advancement of Really Unnecessary but Fun Science.

OK, I made that name up.

The participants in the study were 21 heterosexual male undergraduates at Princeton, and the research was performed on the beach at Daytona, Florida during Spring Break Week. All of the participants had to be holding a beer at all times, and were scored based on the number of times they said the phrase "Dude, she's hot" during the week.

OK, I made that part up too.

The research actually involved the 21 heterosexual male undergraduates, but they filled out the usual questionnaires, and, of course, saw pictures of women in bikinis (something tells me that there was a long line of applicants for this study). The results showed that when men were shown pictures of young ladies in tiny bathing suits, the areas of their brains that lit up were the same as when guys get out their tools, intending to go fix that broken drawer in the kitchen. Hence, women as objects, viewed by men with a mission.

One of the ideas behind the study was to prove that "men of a certain age view sex as a highly desirable goal."

No kidding.

Clearly the researchers had been raised in a cloister and had never been in the company of men between the ages of fourteen and, well, there really is no upper limit.

Apparently, this area of research has been fruitful before. A previous study showed that, while subjects showed signs of avoidance when confronted with homeless people or drug addicts, the opposite was true when confronted by scantily clad women.

You just can't make this stuff up.

I'll bet that somewhere, Einstein is kicking himself for wasting time pursuing that "theory of relativity" stuff, when he could have been studying the effect of hot babes on the brain.

It is interesting to see that something that one has always suspected is, in fact, verifiable by science. Kind of depressing, though.

It all has to do with that ol' devil evolution, and the desire for nacent homo sapiens to find fertile females with whom to propagate the species. So, the objectification of women is somewhat uncontrollable, say the researchers.

They also talked about the possibility of the same study being done with pictures of wives and girlfriends in bathing suits. Can't wait for the results of that one to come out.

Coming up - a study proving that men show signs of avoidance when asked to clean the gutters.