Second sex, what?

We already knew that guys get insane in the membrane when a pretty girl is around, but a newer study says that she doesn’t have to be around at all. That’s some serious woman power.

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Jezebel reports:

Psychologist Johan Karremans, lead study author Sanne Nauts, and their team gave a group of 71 men and women a common cognitive test. Then the subjects had to do another task with help — via instant message only — from a “monitor” with either a male or a female name. Then they took the Stroop test again. The dudes did way worse after an e-encounter with a lady monitor, but dude monitors didn’t affect their performance. And women weren’t affected either way. In a second experiment, participants were told that a man or a woman would IM them, but they never actually got any IMs — even this was enough to make guys screw up on the Stroop.

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Women don’t need to be present to freak with guys’ minds, they just need to exist somewhere, and there must be some possibility that they will interact with the guy on some level. It didn’t even matter if the guys know if the female was attractive or not — it didn’t matter. Researchers theorize that’s because guys are more likely than women “to perceive relatively neutral situations in sexualized terms”. That explains why my guy friends shoot back with “That’s What She Said” after everything I say. Har, har, guys.

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