Feds Spend Over $220k Studying How Drunk Men Look at Women

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is spending over $200,000 to study how men drinking alcohol look at women.

In an effort to limit “male-initiated sexual aggression toward female acquaintances,” University of Iowa researchers are going to use the hundreds of thousands of federal dollars to analyze the eye movements of young men when they are drunk and sober.

From Free Beacon:

“While their eye movements are monitored, participants will view 200 unique scenes that depict a woman who varies along sexual interest, provocativeness-of-dress, and attractiveness dimensions in a background context that varies in sexual relevance,” according to a grant for the project. “Participants will judge the woman’s sexual interest after viewing each scene.”

The project theorizes that men lose their “sensitivity to women’s sexual interest” as they drink. The study also will explore whether males aged 21 to 25 years old have “rape supportive attitudes.”

“In a third session, participants will complete assessments of drinking patterns, alcohol expectancies, rape supportive attitudes, insensitivity to women’s rejection cues in a simulated rape, and past history of sexual aggression,” the grant said.

The study began in May and has received $222,172 thus far. The budget for the project will not expire until April 2016.

According to the grant, the project is in line with the “general NIH mission of reducing the burden of health problems in the population and to the specific [National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism] NIAAA mission of understanding and reducing the negative impact of alcohol use.”

Teresa Treat, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Iowa who is leading the study, has used photos of women who vary in attractiveness and provocativeness of dress in previous research. She published apaper in 2010 that examined whether a woman’s level of sexual interest, provocativeness of dress, or attractiveness can reliably predict whether a man remembered if a woman was interested in him or not.

The feds use money so recklessly because it’s not their money — it’s ours. I, for one, don’t my hard-earned tax dollars to be going towards something that can be ‘studied’ with some simple observation and communication skills.

Drunkenness can definitely be a problem and women should be very cautious about what situations they put themselves in when around strangers, especially those who are intoxicated, but that budget is simply preposterous.

Our government is greatly in debt, and using that kind of money on research like this is an enormous waste when we don’t have the money to spend in the first place.