Perceptions

abbyanna0.tripod.com 

I was perusing through the newsfeeds the other day and found an article where scientists discovered that women see things differently than men.

Well, duh.

Any male who has been in a relationship with a female (and even those who haven't) have known about this since men have noticed women.

These scientists found that when pictures of couples were shown, both men and women looked at the female in the picture first and for the longest time. Men focused on the eyes the most (so there, ladies!) and women looked lower on the face and body. The boffins surmise that men look at the eyes to identify threats and the women look lower to prevent any threat encounter.

On this I disagree. Men look at the eyes to identify threats, sure, but we also instinctively know that if we look lower, either the man with the subject woman will become a threat, or the lady we're with at the moment will become the threat. We're smart that way.

Women may seem to be avoiding threats by looking lower, but they really are identifying all the threats the lady in the picture is presenting. Does the makeup match the hair? Are the earrings and necklaces appropriate to the outfit? Is she showing too much cleavage or not enough? Trust me, these are the threat matrices women are cataloguing.

The results that show that women don't look at the men in the pictures as long as they do the women just reinforce my theory. They need to make sure they have all the info on the women first. Then when they look at the man in the photo, it will only take 0.32 nanoseconds to form an opinion of him. Good or bad, it's that fast, isn't fellas?

When my kids were born, it didn't seem to be that way at all. We treated them the same and didn't segregate the toys when the twins were playing. Equal access to toy trucks, stuffies, dolls and such. Everything my boy grabbed somehow turned into a vehicle of some sort, complete with the engine sounds and running it along the floor. Didn't matter if it was a stuffed dog or a blue building block.

My daughter would hug the dolls and stuffies all the time. If you gave her anything else, she would take a look at it for less than a second, throw it over her shoulder out of sight and demand another item to peruse. Who knew it started so early.

Those scientists had to know that women see things differently, even if it's only about colours. Men see red, brown, black, yellow, blue, purple and orange. That pretty much covers it for us.

Women see magenta, chartreuse, burnt umber or burnt asparagus and a million more colours of the spectrum. They also see dust bunnies behind or underneath sofas and can identify the brand of toothpaste from a fleck on the mirror.

I'm not sure why those scientists thought they needed to run an experiment to find all this out. They should have just asked their girlfriends or wives, or for that matter, any women on the street outside the lab.

Then they would get the full effect of a "look" and wouldn't have had to do the experiment in the first place.