The fMRI scans revealed significantly higher levels of activation in the amygdala, which controls emotion and motivation, in the brains of the male subjects compared to the females, despite the fact that both males and females expressed similar subjective assessments of their levels of arousal after viewing the images.
Hamann and Wallen had a separate group pre-select the images to ensure they would be equally arousing to both males and females.
While I partly agree with your overall point based on my personal experience/anecdotal evidence, (women often assess looks in a way more rational, standardised and logical way than men do, where they'll scrutinize even small facial or bodily features and hold men up to quite exact social or personal beauty standards that they rank them on, very similar to how they assess the looks of other women even if they are straight, whereas straight men especially very rarely do that and 99% of the time just instantly feel attracted to someone on instict alone - to be fair I would actually call women more visual than men though, as they can very much get the same 'looks orgasm' as we guys do from someone they find really hot, but they will be a lot more conscious and observant about the specifics of what they like, including crap like jawline, convex facial profile, nose bridge, or other tiny details that definitely also factor into what straight men find attractive about one woman or another, but that we never really conscientize on a rational level...) I think this study could be bogus science because of 2 reasons:
1. It assumes that just because a separate group that was also equally split among the 2 sexes picked the images, they would be equally appealing to the people of either sex from the tested group, when in fact it could be that the picked images were only found attractive by the group that selected them because of reasons unrelated to their biological sex, but more related to either beauty standards or erotic fantasies they personally had, which could potentially be shared by people from the second group because of cultural/upbringing/life experience reasons for example, not because of their sex. Basically, I think this study both had a tiny sample size of just 28 and also failed to account for external biases well.
2. This
"This study helps us get closer to understanding the fundamental functions of this area of the brain," Hamann says. In addition to adding to basic neuroscience knowledge, the findings potentially could have applications that could help scientists develop therapeutic measures to help people overcome sexual addictions and other dysfunctions, he says.
yet again seems dubious scientifically, because neurology is a very nascent science (humanity barely understands the most basic facts about how the brain works and has no idea how something as complex as consciousness arises) and therefore using neurological research to directly create psychologic therapeutic meassures for anything seems like an extremely optimistic and unlikely goal... People also often credit psychologists with having a way better understanding of the human psyche than they actually do, as I have someone in my family with a quite severe form of complex PTSD, who was originally wrongly diagnosed by 4 therapists as only having a "mild/moderate anxiety" disorder, was made worse by their sessions and on a few occasions driven close to suicide. I talked with her several times about it and there are some things therapists do that wouldn't fly in more established exact sciences and would even be considered pseudoscientific! (or malpraxis)
This devolved into a rant but my point here is that far more than one study with a small sample size should be needed to make absolute statements like "men are more visual creatures and women less so", or in general to draw any conclusion about how attraction universally works differently based on sex. I already outlined above that I tend to agree men are more emotional and instictual about it and women more rational and analytical about it, but that's just personal opinion based on my interactions with women, not something I hold as a conviction or backed by science.