The visual nature of man

Many times, in the course of many relationships, and friendships, though to a lesser extent, the point has been raised of how men are much more visual than women. There is probably a significant body of literature out there on the topic, and it may even have evolutionary roots in terms of mating, hunting, and who knows what else. Or it may not have roots in any of those areas, but simply be a function of male humans having become kind of superficial and perverted. I'm being facetious. Sort of.

But it does seem that women value a variety of traits in a man, many of which are physical, and many of which are not. And visual stimuli often seem to be less important then a variety of other characteristics, like odor, or intellect, or power (either physical or otherwise). Men, on the other hand, seem to value most what it is that we can see with our eyes. Again, I am generalizing, exaggerating, and being a bit silly.

Common wisdom seems to be that fetishes are much more common in men than in women. And this could tie in to the higher importance of visual stimuli for men. I suppose there are fetishes that are non-visual in nature, though I do not know of any. Of course, I am not particularly versed in the field of fetish. I know about lingerie, and high heels, and lipstick, and then there's the whole realm of bondage and masochism. I guess there is a substantial incidence of fetish in women that lie in the realm of bondage. But that is, I would assert, only in small part, a visual fetish. It's much more about touch, and about the psychological position of being submissive. So again, I maintain that men are more visual.

But are they?

I decided I should not be utterly and downright lazy, so I did a Google search. Not that you can necessarily trust Google to tell you the truth any more than you can trust me. I searched for the following "Are men more visual than women?" figuring that might be a good place to start.

One article that immediately piqued my interest, to the contrary, was this one:

New Brain Research Challenges the Myth that Men are more Visual than Women

Seems like a decent one to check out, doesn't it?

To quote a tiny bit of the article:

The study, carried out by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis measured brainwave activity of 264 women as they viewed a series of 55 color slides that contained various scenes from water skiers to snarling dogs to partially-clad couples in sensual poses. The researchers were interested in the speed, strength, and location of brainwave activity of the subjects as they viewed erotic versus non-erotic images.

As they hypothesized, the brainwave activity of participants was markedly different when viewing erotic images versus non-erotic images. But a finding they didn’t expect was that female participant’s response was similar to men.

About the results, one of the researchers commented:

"Usually men subjectively rate erotic material much higher than women," he says. "So based on those data we would expect lower responses in women, but that was not the case. Women have responses as strong as those seen in men."

The problem with this research is that it only showed that there was not a significant difference in brain waves in response to erotic images. It did not explain why it is that men subjectively rate them higher than women, which I would assert is still a core question. Of course, maybe the issue is that women are culturally forbidden to express eroticism in the same ways that men are allowed, for fear of being seen as inappropriate.

There was a critique referenced within that article that talked about how there is much doubt as to whether erotica really represent the types of biologically relevant images that might relate to reproduction or evolution. However, that also did not address, even remotely, the fact that men rate erotic material higher than women do.

So, that chunk of research, while an interesting detour, certainly doesn't convince me, with my fetish, plus my biology background, that my assertion is incorrect.

So, back to Google. Another article, this time from the journal Nature, which tends to hold a little more weight than the previous reference which came from the journal Brain Research (by "weight", I mean that there's typically a much higher peer review burden to make it to publication in that journal).

Men and Women Differ in Amygdala Response to Visual Sexual Stimuli

The abstract from that article stated:

"Men are generally more interested in and responsive to visual sexually arousing stimuli than are women. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to show that the amygdala and hypothalamus are more strongly activated in men than in women when viewing identical sexual stimuli. This was true even when women reported greater arousal. Sex differences were specific to the sexual nature of the stimuli, were restricted primarily to limbic regions, and were larger in the left amygdala than the right amygdala. Men and women showed similar activation patterns across multiple brain regions, including ventral striatal regions involved in reward. Our findings indicate that the amygdala mediates sex differences in responsiveness to appetitive and biologically salient stimuli; the human amygdala may also mediate the reportedly greater role of visual stimuli in male sexual behavior, paralleling prior animal findings.

There. I'm convinced. Nature says it. I say it. We all say it. It must be truth. In fact, it makes sense to me that it would involve the amygdala, since that's involved in a lot of things like emotions, fear, love.

But what is still not explained, at least not yet, is why men are more visual than women, if they are. Another good article, that at least seems to want to discuss the topic from the psychological, rather than biological point of view:

Why Men are More Visual

In that article, they mention what seems to be a reasonable evolutionary explanation:

Men are more visually oriented because given the males best ‘impregnate and leave’ reproductive strategy, the best criteria for selecting genetically desirable females were primarily visually observable physical attributes. For a male who engaged in a typical ‘impregnate and move on‘ strategy only young, strong, fast, and healthy, females had a chance of surviving pregnancy and protecting the offspring without him.

And on the flip side, as to why visual elements are less important to women:

However, because so many males developed a reproduction strategy based on impregnating as many females as possible and moving on, the visible male attributes were not the most important criteria for a woman. It would not matter much that the baby had great physical genes, because if the father did not stick around for long the child would probably not live long enough to benefit from them. This may be the reason why male persistence works as a seduction strategy. It demonstrates ‘the tendency to stick around‘ which is not readily visible but is a male trait that is very important to female reproductive success, and only becomes apparent over time. Hence these visible attributes became less critical.

This is an interesting view. And thus ends my brief tangent on evolutionary neurobiology.