Are women visually oriented?

What we usually hear in the church is that God made men to be visual (the Every Man’s Battle authors say that God made men to receive sexual gratification through the eyes).

Women, on the other hand, just aren’t. We aren’t visual at all. We don’t care about appearance.

But are either of these claims true? Or rather, is the dichotomy true–that men care about women’s appearance but women don’t care about men’s?

Last week on the Bare Marriage podcast we talked about mental load and sex–how women bore the weight of having to keep up their appearance in order to be sexually attractive to their husbands, but men don’t even need to properly groom, at least according to the emphasis in our evangelical best-sellers. And I want to challenge this assumption and look at the implications of it.

What do evangelical books say about appearance?

When we wrote our book The Great Sex Rescue, we read 15 of evangelicalism’s best-sellers on marriage and sex, and scored them on a 12-point rubric (it’s free and you can download it here!). One of those points was whether the book put equal emphasis on both people’s appearance, or whether they only stressed that she had to keep up her appearance (we also looked at whether they talked about men’s hygiene).

Across all the books, the average score was 1.92/5–so that’s pretty bad. Love & Respect, Power of a Praying Wife, Every Man’s Battle, His Needs Her Needs, The Act of Marriage, and Intended for Pleasure did especially badly. They emphasized the woman’s need to stay attractive for her husband, without even saying that men needed to do the bare minimum (brush their teeth and pay attention to hygiene).

His Needs, Her Needs even said that one of the 5 emotional needs of a man in marriage was to have an attractive spouse. And they called a man married to a woman who had gained weight “enduring a prison sentence” in his marriage. Gaining weight after marriage is apparently not allowed.

Yet as much as these books say that a woman must keep up her appearance, they also don’t say much about men. Apparently women don’t care if men gain a ton of weight, or if they come to bed dressed in clothes with holes in them or wear ratty underwear. It doesn’t matter to women, you see!

In the podcast, we played the clip of the rather rotund Missouri pastor saying from the pulpit that women needed to be trophy wives, and talking about how a friend of his had a “divorce weight”, where if his wife got passed that he could divorce her. That clip went viral. But the juxtaposition of what he looked like while lecturing women on how they had to look like Melania Trump was wild.

What does research say about appearance?

So many studies have been done about how men and women judge a mate’s appearance, and it’s quite nuanced. But in general, we know this: people of similar attractiveness tend to marry each other. It’s not that beautiful women marry men who are unattractive. Women, though, tend to be more attracted to guys with “average” looks than stunning men with chiselled jaws, for instance, because they’re less likely to cheat (so the theory goes). And women tend to value things like emotional availability and stability. So women care about more than appearance, but appearance does matter (and grooming and clothing choices often matter more than simple physical looks).

There are too many studies to link here, but maybe one day Rebecca and I will do a podcast about it! But the idea that women absolutely don’t care about looks is simply and categorically untrue. 

There’s a difference between choosing a mate and stoking sexual flames once married

Most research on appearance focuses on how people choose a mate (either short-term or long-term). But that’s not what Christian books tend to be talking about. They’re talking about keeping a mate’s sexual interest, and on this the assumption is that men need their interest kept, but women don’t.

This is a rather strange assumption, because we know that evangelical men have much higher desire levels for sex than women. If anyone’s sexual interest needs to be fostered, it’s hers, not his! Yet the advice given is that it’s women who need to cater to the men (and His Needs, Her Needs even frames this that if they don’t, he is vulnerable to an affair).

Yet whenever I talk about the importance of a man’s hygiene when it comes to sex, my comment floodgates open. So many women report that they hate sex because of their husband’s BO or his poor oral hygiene. He has horrible breath, or he stinks, and she doesn’t know what to do about it (just tell him that you won’t have sex with him until he cleans up! It’s not rude; he’s the one being rude to you!).

Often men aren’t doing the bare minimum, yet women are expected to stay beauty queens.

And let’s face it–it’s a lot more important for sex for people to be showered and to have brushed their teeth than for the wife to have lost 10 pounds. And even when it comes to the physical act of sex, his excess weight actually makes intercourse much more difficult than her excess weight does. It’s his weight that makes sex almost impossible, while her weight can often be compensated for much more easily. The double standard here is immense.

Why do evangelical books and pastors put such demands on women and not on men?

Here’s something that I want all of us to understand: when you’re trying to figure out why a group of people promote something that is simply not true, it’s best to ask “who benefits from this?”

We know that it’s women’s fires that need to be stoked, not men’s. We know that women are about appearance too. We know that men’s lack of hygiene is currently playing a big role in many women’s low libido, and we know that men’s excess weight has an outsized effect (pardon the pun) on the physical aspects of intercourse.

Yet it is women who are told that they need to stay beautiful, stay thin, and make sure they give their husband something to look at. So who benefits?

• By telling women that men will only be attracted to them if they look similar to when they married, and if they put a lot of work into their appearance, women remain insecure and thus are more reliant on their husbands.
• By telling women they must put a lot of work into their appearance, women have more work placed on them, so they become more docile and less likely to demand more of men.
• By telling women that women aren’t visually attracted, they make women who are visually oriented feel like freaks. 
• By telling women they aren’t visual, they can pressure women into marrying men who have put very little care into their appearance, so that men have to do less work
• By promoting the false dichotomy that men care about appearance while women don’t, they can create a burden of work on women while men are excused from this work. And men now get attractive wives while the men have to do very little. 
• By promoting the idea that if they don’t stay attractive their husband will stray, they create rivalries and jealousies among women as women vie to protect their relationships.

These teachings make women insecure and add labour to women’s lives that men don’t have to do, making women busier and more exhausted, and thus easier to control while men have more leisure time. And they create a situation where women blame other women for being too pretty or trying to steal their men, so that women are busy fighting each other rather than challenging the underlying premise.

It all works great–women are insecure, exhausted, and fighting amongst themselves, while men have to do very little and get attractive, complaint wives.

Is this actually great for men?

I hope you’ve all seen now that this isn’t actually beneficial for men who want to be emotionally healthy. As we talked about in our podcast for His Needs, Her Needs, it’s so interesting that all of the needs that Harley named “feminine” actually result in emotionally mature, healthy relationships, while the needs he named “masculine” result in men feeling connected without having to do any actual work of connection or vulnerability.

It’s a false intimacy rather than a real one.

What women “need” in these books are the universal needs for intimacy. What men “need” are the trappings that let them feel important without having to emotionally connect.

That’s not a healthy marriage at all. That’s a shell of a marriage.

What’s a healthy way to teach about appearance?

I think all of us should endeavour to honour ourselves and our spouses by making sure that we care for our hygiene and that we put some effort into looking after our external appearance. Get a manageable and attractive haircut. Buy clothes that fit you and flatter you. Find a “beauty” routine that is manageable, realistic, and that you can stick to. And all of those tips pertain to men and women alike!

Some women will be makeup people; some will not. But everyone should wear clean clothes that fit and flatter (both men and women!). Some men will want beards, some will not (but they should be kept trimmed!). And shaving? That’s up to everyone’s preference, with the understanding that keeping hair-free in different areas of the body takes work fighting ingrown hairs.

Some people will love being able to relax together in sweats, and that’s great. That can be part of intimacy–to be more casual with each other than you are with anyone else. It’s the meaning that clothes give to each of you individually that shows how you should treat them. But regardless, everyone should care about hygiene!

But we should not have a gender-based teaching on appearance at all. We should teach our sons not to be sloppy as well as our daughters. Everyone should know how to dress up for a night out. And absolutely everyone, men and women alike, should know what proper oral hygiene is and how to make sure we don’t have BO.

The purpose to all marriage advice should be building an intimate connection.

We should be striving to feel close to one another, valued, and able to fully enjoy each other. That’s what we get when we teach about appearance and hygiene equally–the emphasis is on caring for each other.

But when it’s one-sided, the emphasis is not on intimate connection. The emphasis is on men’s entitlement to women’s work (on her own appearance) while men get to do less of it. That’s not intimate; that’s a using of her for his own gain.

And it needs to stop! So let’s stop buying the books that claim that men are visual while women aren’t. Let’s challenge the advice that says that women need to keep their husband’s attention. And let’s not put up with any of this anymore!

Listen to last week’s podcast for more–it was a great discussion!

Have you seen the double standard when it comes to appearance? What have you heard? Let’s talk in the comments!