In other news: Science proves the Obvious

It's what you mother told you when you first tried on that skimpy thing: a bikini will stop a man from thinking of an attractive woman as a human being, and turns her, in his mind, into an object.

It's normal, it's natural, and it's not something they expect women would do when confronted with pictures of Chippendale's men. Women look at men, the say, as potential partners in wealth and power, or, at a baser level, as means to an end. But men look at shapely women and stop thinking beyond "Ooooh, shiny," and they mentally begin to grope.

Or, as paragraph 3 puts it, men are

more likely to associate images of sexualized women with first-person action verbs such as "I push, I grasp, I handle," said lead researcher Susan Fiske, a psychologist at Princeton University.

and (graf 5)

these men see women "as sexually inviting, but they are not thinking about their minds,"

But, as I was reading this aloud to my sainted mother, this was the part, right near the beginning, which got her snickering:

Brain scans revealed that when men are shown pictures of scantily clad women, the region of the brain associated with tool use lights up.

She wondered about "tool use."

Mom has a very dirty mind. Guess which side of the family I most resemble?