Why men like to gaze on the female form

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1551011/Why-men-like-to-gaze-on-the-female-form.html

By Roger Highfield, Science Editor

Last Updated: 1:49AM BST 10 May 2007

Men consume more pornography than women

Men find photos of the opposite sex much more "rewarding" than women, new research
claims today.
According to the study men take the same pleasure out of looking at an attractive female form
as they do from having a curry or making money whereas women do not take any significant
reward from looking at pictures of men.
The survey published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B said that brain scan
studies show that "reward centres" are triggered in men when they gaze at a woman's face or
body whereas they are not in females. It also shows men are more likely to make an effort to
view pictures of the opposite sex and pay out money.

The findings shed light on why men are much greater consumers of pornography than women
and why sales of Playboy have always exceeded those of Playgirl, according to Dr Benjamin
Hayden at the Centre for Neuroeconomic Studies, Duke University School of Medicine,
Durham, North Carolina.
"One natural inference is that men are more willing to pay to see these images," he told The
Daily Telegraph.
Previous research has identified several core characteristics of rewards. Economists have
shown that people tend to be impulsive, meaning they prefer rewards sooner than later, and
that they are less impulsive when rewards are bigger.
This study shows that photos follow the same principles, and that more attractive photos act
like larger rewards, said Dr Hayden. Rewards also offer incentives to work harder and they
can be traded for other kinds of rewards, which is why men exchange money for pictures of
naked women.
The team gave 20 heterosexual men and 20 women opportunity to view non pornographic
photos of members of the opposite sex and tested if money would offer as much reward, as
well as whether people would work harder on a computer to see a photo they were interested
in.
Men were significantly more patient than women when choosing to view attractive females
than when choosing to view neutral or unattractive females.
"For men, the reward of seeing a woman is strongly influenced by physical attractiveness, but
for women physical attractiveness has little or no impact," said Dr Hayden.

Gender
THE GENDERED GAZE
The study of gendered representations in the cinema began in the early 1970s with Molly
Haskell's From Reverence to Rape: the Treatment of Women in the Movies (1974). Haskell
looks at images of women in movies made from the 1920s to the 1970s (the 1980s are
included in the second edition), mainly—but not exclusively—in Hollywood. The book's
scope is ambitious,
Representations of the feminine (Jennifer Jones and Lillian Gish) in Duel
in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946).

identifying major themes in American cinema such as "The flight from women
and the fight against them in their role as entrappers and civilizers" (p. 61).
Haskell's critical method, which maps genres and stars historically, has been
questioned subsequently by academic film theorists, although some of her ideas,
such as the notion of star images as "two-way mirrors linking the immediate past
with the immediate future" (p. 12), are more sophisticated than her detractors
might suggest.

The study of images of women was crucial to the development of feminist film culture in the
early 1970s but was superseded in the feminist film theory that emerged in the middle of that
decade by textual approaches concerned less with the manifest content of films than with the
ideological predispositions embedded in their syntax and in the apparatus itself. Drawing on
post-structuralism, semiotics, and psychoanalysis, Claire Johnston developed a theory of
cinematic representation based on an understanding of film narrative as a mythic system that
naturalizes conventional gender relations. Within this system, the figure of woman functions
not as a representation of female subjectivity but as the object of male desire. Thus Johnston's
remark that "despite the enormous emphasis placed on woman as spectacle in the cinema,
woman as woman is largely absent" (p. 26). However, rather than calling for the production of
realistic or positive images of women, she argues that the more stylized and unrealistic a
film's iconography, the more it de-naturalizes both itself and the ideology it serves. Unlike
many feminists in the 1970s, Johnston does not reject popular cinema as a "dream machine"
but embraces its contradictory possibilities. In her comments on the films of Dorothy Arzner
(1900–1979), one of a very few female directors in the studio system, Johnston lays claim to a
reflexive and critical strain within Hollywood cinema.
Working within the same feminist framework, in 1975 Laura Mulvey wrote what is perhaps
the most celebrated and contentious essay in the history of film studies, "Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema." Mulvey's essay is also concerned with Hollywood but concentrates on
looking at relations as they are systematized by mainstream conventions. In mainstream
cinema, Mulvey contends, a gendered division of labor allies the male hero with the
movement of the narrative and the female figure with its spectacle. The cinematic apparatus
aligns the gaze of the spectator with that of the camera, and editing conventions subsume the
look of the camera into that of the protagonist. This system of looks assumes narcissistic
identification with the male protagonist of the narrative and voyeuristic enjoyment of the
female object of the gaze. This enjoyment is, however, ambivalent, because of the castration
anxiety engendered by the sight of the woman. The two forms of pleasure associated with the
female image are also defenses against this threat: sadism, which acknowledges sexual
difference and takes pleasure in investigating woman's guilt, and fetishism, which disavows
sexual difference and worships woman (or a particular body part or item of clothing) as
phallic substitute. Mulvey concludes her essay with a radical attack on the pleasures of
mainstream cinema and calls for a cinema of "passionate detachment" in terms that strongly
evoke the materialist avant-garde and the political counter-cinema of the 1970s. This analysis
has been revisited and modified by many theorists and historians, including, on several
occasions, Mulvey herself, and from this debate film studies has developed a complex
understanding of cinema as a social technology of gender.
The initial emphasis on femininity in the study of gender in cinema clearly resulted from the
political impulse to identify and work against gender inequalities. However, as Steve Neale
and a number of other critics have argued, it is also important to analyze cinematic
masculinities in order to better understand not only how these function to reinforce normative
gender relations but also how they may transgress or destabilize them and in what ways they
may be subject to transformation. Neale finds numerous instances in mainstream cinema of
the male body functioning as visually pleasurable spectacle, but he argues that these images
are encoded so as to disavow their eroticism—for instance, in shoot-outs in westerns or in
fight sequences in epics. Rather than disputing Mulvey's account of gendered looking
relations in mainstream cinema, Neale confirms it but points out the high degree of
contradiction within an apparently normative system. Peter Lehman argues more trenchantly
that in the proliferation of critical discourse on sexual representations of the female body and
the relative paucity (until the 1990s) of critical discourse on sexual representations of the male
body, film studies actually replicated the sexual ideology it aimed to deconstruct.
Scholarship on masculinity in films has clustered around a number of themes, including the
idea of a crisis in masculinity during the postwar period and after, the fine line between
homosociality and homosexuality, and the effects on male subjectivity of psychopathologies,
such as hysteria and masochism. The notion of masquerade, initially introduced into feminist
film theory by Claire Johnston and Mary Ann Doane, and developed in relation to Judith
Butler's theorization of gender performativity, has been applied to cinematic masculinities by
film theorists. Male masquerade is a notion with interesting implications, destabilizing
hegemonic masculinity and effectively rendering all gender identities and relationships
relational and contingent. The notion of male masquerade has been taken up most
productively in historical work, such as Gaylyn Studlar's study of male stars of the silent era,
which relates their performances of masculinity to specific cultural manifestations of the
gender ideology of the times, ranging from the idealized masculinity of Douglas Fairbanks
(1883–1939), contextualized in the movement to reform "boy culture" and resist the perceived
threat of feminization, to the transgressive appeal of Lon Chaney (1883–1930), whose
association with the grotesque and the liminal grounded his popularity with male fans.
Unlike the feminist criticism of the 1970s and 1980s, scholarship on masculinity in cinema
has tended to focus on highly specific, often historical, examples rather than on developing a
general theory, partly because of the prevailing fashion for historical rather than theoretical
inquiry in film studies since the early 1990s, but also because it lacks the political impetus
that feminist theory derived from the women's movement. Against the backdrop of declining
feminism and resurgent, retro-styled masculinity in postmodern popular culture, there is a risk
that critical discourses on masculinity in the cinema will lapse, unintentionally or otherwise,
into conservatism and nostalgia. This risk is confronted directly and effectively by Sharon
Willis's work on race and gender in contemporary Hollywood film, especially her essay on
Quentin Tarantino (b. 1963), which uses a psychoanalytic framework to argue that his
admiring imitation of African American masculinity is inflected by the conflict played out in
his films between Oedipal structures (borrowed style, aging male stars) and ferocious
preoedipal impulses (relentless bathroom references, anal rape). Tarantino's postmodern
recycling of popular cultural masculinity, Willis notes, is self-consciously multicultural but
inflected by regressive fantasies: his sense of the past from which he takes his reference points
is nostalgic and private rather than historical and shared. Tarantino's films stand as a salutary
reminder that irony, pastiche, and sexual transgression are not in themselves guarantees of a
progressive or transformative critique of gender identities and relations.