Men find photographs of the opposite sex much more ‘rewarding’ than women, according to a study published yesterday.
Researchers found that they associate the pleasure they derive from looking at images of women with the enjoyment they get from eating a curry or earning money.
This means that not only are men the most patient sex when it comes to finding attractive photos of women, say on the internet, but they will actually work twice as hard as women to find them.
The results, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, go some way to explaining why Playboy outsells Playgirl, and why men are the dominant users of pornography.
By contrast, physical attractiveness was found to have little or no reward for women eyeing images of men, and overall they only “slightly valued” the opportunity to ogle the opposite sex.
However, when shown photos of an ‘unattractive’ member of the opposite sex, women were more likely than men to feel turned off.
For both sexes however, the prospect of viewing an attractive person of the opposite sex acts like a reward, meaning the greater the appeal of the person, the greater the reward.
The study was carried out by placing 20 heterosexual men and 20 women in front of a database of images, which contained non pornographic photos, typically headshots, of the opposite sex.
May 10, 2007
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