I have no time to blog right now, for which I sincerely apologize. Things are totally crazy, but fun. Instead, today, I direct you to an excellent blog post over at Ed Yong’s blog (Not Exactly Rocket Science, Science for Everyone). The topic of the post is a recent paper that shows that (quoting Ed):
Leading a team of Israeli and US psychologists, she has shown that women become more silent if they think that men are focusing on their bodies. They showed that women who were asked to introduce themselves to an anonymous male partner spent far less time talking about themselves if they believed that their bodies were being checked out. Men had no such problem. Nor, for that matter, did women if they thought they were being inspected by another woman.
A very interesting post, go read.
Blue Lab Coats 
Read the post, but don’t read the comments. It stinks of male privilege.
I’m with jc. The comments are so predictable and infuriating.
Yeah, but what we really want to know is what the woman alone in the room would do if she had a trigger ostensibly linked to a trapdoor underneath the chair of the person in the other room supposedly checking her out.
(Assuming, of course, she had been told that she would remain anonymous and that there would be no legal repercussions for feeding the alligators in the basement.)
are there sharks circling below? mwa ha ha *pinky to mouth*
Interesting. I think I probably do this, because I sense that there is no way I’m going to convince a guy to pay attention to what I’m saying once he has demonstrated that he can’t focus on my personality.
Reading the comments over there, I think I’m more offended by the women who said that women who are bothered by it are “whiny” and that we’re somehow responsible for disempowering ourselves?? And the suggestions about whether gay women staring at us would also make us feel objectified (no, because lesbians typically don’t do that the way men do)?
Sigh. It’s SO not about sex and all about power. Although I do wonder about the slightly reversed statistics- that men are actually MORE comfortable with the camera pointed AWAY from their faces (did I read that right?). Is that some of kind of locker room thing, like it’s actually less personal and invasive to look at the body than directly in the face?
I’m also really tired of people who act like men are just “naturally confident” and women just need to buck up and get confident already. It doesn’t really work like that, because it’s all cultural.
I think the saddest thing to me about these studies is the naysayers who get defensive and attack the interpretation instead of admitting that the data show a significant difference that can’t be ignored.