Like every other gynosexual man (and, I suspect, most if not all of everyone else) in my culture, when I look at a woman I employ The Male Gaze. This isn’t intentional, I don’t say “hey, look, it’s a woman: I’d better turn her into an object! shoop-da-whoop“, it’s just something I’ve been trained to do by being raised in this culture. On an intuitive level I consider it somewhat harmless (just because I briefly consider having sex with you doesn’t mean I don’t respect you), but rationally it’s rather repulsive.

This New York Times article titled What Do Women Want? has been widely circulated in the blogosphere. The first two-thirds of it are modernist science stuff that you’ve probably already heard: vaginal lubrication does not equal mental arousal, etc. The bottom section, though, summarizes a surprising theory from a Canadian (now teaching at the University of Nevada) social-constructionism psychologist named Marta Meana: women get turned on when they are regarded as sexual objects. In fact, women get turned on by observing other women being sexually objectified or when they themselves have the potential to be sexually objectified.

This says that womens’ eroticism is not primarily in the mind, as is commonly supposed. But it’s not in the body exactly, either. Instead, as the existentialists would say, woman’s erotic identity is in her relation to The Other. And because he is more different, the “best” Other is Man.