Reflections, Reflections

(HealthDay News) -- Turns out men don't have to be living on Mars and women on Venus for communication problems to muck up dealings between the sexes.

Even when they're seated across a table from each other in a first-time, five-minute conversation, a man tends to sexualize a woman and incorrectly assume sexual interest on her part, new research finds.

"We initially got started on this research thinking if we could identify men who tended to over-sexualize women, we could then interview them [to learn why] and stop sexual harassment on the job and date rape," said lead researcher Maurice J. Levesque, an associate professor of psychology at Elon University, in North Carolina.

"We wanted to see if basically the macho-type guy was the only one who did this," said Levesque, adding the study showed that wasn't the case. "That variable -- the socialization to be 'macho' -- doesn't make a difference," he said.

Reporting in the new issue of Psychology of Women Quarterly, the researchers said that when a man meets a woman for the first time and they converse briefly, he's much likelier than she is to rate himself -- and her -- higher on sexual traits such as flirtatiousness. And he's more likely to think she's interested in him sexually, when she may not be.

Although this is nothing new, it's good that it is being documented in "research" format. The bad part of it is they excluded putting homosexuals and bisexuals in the study. I know exactly what the result would be, they have a tendency to sexualize more too.

"In the study, 43 college men and 43 college women, ages 18 to 22, were paired with a member of the opposite sex they'd never met."

Why the restriction to heterosexuals? Are they all heterosexuals? How does the researcher know if they are not bisexuals not admitting their bisexuality, as so many studies have confirmed is a frequent problem with bisexuals?

"Levesque doesn't know why all the men in the study seemed to over-sexualize women, but he speculated that "it's got to be something about socialization, that men are being taught in some way to view women as sexual objects."

At least he's not as stupid as the following quoted research-a-idiot:

"The study findings are no surprise to Charles Hill, a professor of psychology at Whittier College, in California. He said the two chemical routes to sexual arousal help explain the study findings."

The majority of people today still hate to look at how dysfunctional modern culture is. Blame it in the genes always and get another wasteful research grant to do it on top of it - it is the complete cheapening of science...