“Our brains view women as a bunch of body parts”

Our brains tend to handle an image of a male using “global” cognitive processing, a mental method of seeing something as a whole, she said. A female image undergoes “local” processing, a way of seeing something as an assemblage of its parts.

We can’t just pin this on the men. Women are perceiving women this way, too. It could be related to different motives. Men might be doing it because they’re interested in potential mates, while women may do it as more of a comparison with themselves. But what we do know is that they’re both doing it.”   [via, img ᔥ]

Whether this is the case because of evolution or being constantly inundated by sexual imagery, suppose the good news is we don’t have to be such assholes all the time. The researchers found that this “objectification can be partially counteracted”.  In a second experiment, the participants were preconditioned to view globally and were then more likely to view a women as a whole.