Up in Smoke: Checking Out the Competition

We’re not trying to blow your minds or anything with this fact, but it seems that women like looking at boobs as much as men do. We’re considering that we may have been scientists in a past life, because we’re pretty sure with a few girlfriends we could’ve proved this ourselves. We wouldn’t have needed much, either, just a few stacks of Playboys and a couple of glasses of wine. There is a downside to all of this, though; it seems that both males and females register the female body as a “collection of parts,” which can prove a little upsetting for those who are self-conscious.

"We can't just pin this on the men. Women are perceiving women this way, too," explained the study’s lead author Sarah Gervais to Science Daily. "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."

While it is true that women do go into Terminator mode at times when we see and think about each other, we didn’t think it went any farther than that. "Local processing underlies the way we think about objects: houses, cars and so on. But global processing should prevent us from that when it comes to people," Gervais told Science Daily. "We don't break people down to their parts — except when it comes to women, which is really striking. Women were perceived in the same ways that objects are viewed."

Wait, does this mean you guys aren’t reading Playboy.com for the articles?