Looking at the But-Her-Face

It doesn’t take a scientist or a research study to tell us that men and women are different. From the moment we’re born the doctor quickly announces our gender by a basic, physical distinction. So if we are physically distinguishable from one another, why would anyone assume that every other part of us will function in exactly the same manner. It is well known that women, in general, have to feel emotionally intimate with a member of the opposite sex before they are able to be physically intimate, and the opposite is true for men. So how do we bridge the gap?

Compacting our differences, women have long been the object to be looked at, but are never allowed to invert that process and become the gazer. As Kenneth Dutton explains in his book, The Perfectible Body: The Western Ideal of Male Physical Development, women have been denied the role as spectators or observers. A “sign of sexual equality for women” equally places “men in the subservient or submissive category of object of the gaze,” tending “to restore the politics of sexual interaction to a position of balance” (Dutton, 330). When women can take on the role long-held by men, they can focus on the physical. Susan Bordo even goes so far as to argue that “women have had little practice” in their role as the gazer, and therefore are not used to the sexual desires they may feel when being the observer (Bordo, 170). But I wonder if women actually even have the potential for such a similar response. Dutton asks “whether the concept of ‘Men for Women’ can ever re-establish a balance or equality in the perception of gender roles or the power relations between the sexes,” but I wonder if women and men even have to be defined by the same standards of sexuality (Dutton, 335). Do we, as women, have to gaze at men in the same manner at which we are gazed? Does the physical beauty have to be most erotic?


Image format presented to research participants

A recent study conducted by the University of Texas at Austin explored the delicate differences in male and female gaze. Researchers presented heterosexual college students with a series of photographs either of bodies or faces and then had the participants respond to which images to which they were most attracted. Interestingly, when men were told to look for a short-term relationship, they were more concerned with the woman’s body. Her physical, bodily appearance was far more important than her face. But when asked who they would find more attractive for a long-term relationship, male respondents were much more focused on the facial characteristics. The face is able to convey emotions, while the body conveys a purely physical, biological connection. Female participants, on the other hand, rated both facial and physical features evenly. Short- or long-term relationships did not change how a woman was attracted to a man. The study reveals that the female gaze is certainly not the same as the male gaze.

So we, as women, may find a man’s body attractive, but it is not the same way that a man finds a woman’s body sexually appealing. Bordo may argue that women and men can be equal in this physicality, but in the end, we are wired differently. Women are not stimulated by porn as men are. And it may not be as cultural as experts argue. Men are driven to spread their seed, women are driven to protect and nurture their family.

Works Cited:
Bordo, Susan. The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. 168 – 225.

Confer, Jaime C., Carin Perilloux, and David M. Buss. "More than just a pretty face: men's priority shifts toward bodily attractiveness in short-term versus long-term mating contexts." Evolution and Human Behavior. 31. (2010): 348-353.

Dutton, Kenneth B. The Perfectible Body: The Western Ideal of Male Physical Development. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1995. 321-355.