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Actually, you can't study whether men and women have different visual-spatial and verbal abilities at birth. For one, infants can't speak yet. Second, infants can't perform abstract visual-spatial problems. You can't study this stuff until kids are little bit older. So, there is a case that gender differences could be the result of socialization, but it could also be genetic. It is difficult to discern which is operative, or if it is a combination of nature and nurture.

In any case, traditionally, women have been thought to be better at tasks involving verbal ability, while men have been thought to be better at tasks involving visual-spatial abilities and quantitative and reasoning abilities.

Early studies indicates that girls outperformed boys on a variety fo verbal tasks. In a meta-analysis by Hyde & Linn (1988), they found that females were better than males at anagrams, speech production and general verbal ability, but the sum of the reliable differences were rather small.

A meta-analysis by Linn & Peterson (1985) looked at three types of spatial abilities:
--Spatial perception: spatial relationship with respect to one's own body
--Mental rotation: mentally rotating objects in space
--Spatial visualization: finding specific shapes in complex figures

They found that there were only small differences in spatial visualization. There were moderate effects for spatial perception that increased with age, and there were fairly large effects with mental rotation tasks.

Why are men better at some spatial tasks? Males have more practive with that type of task, females may display more caution and less trust in responses, and/or hemispheric lateralization, that is, men may have more lateralized brains (more specialized functions).

Maccoby & Jacklin (1974) found that boys begin to perform girls beginning at age 12 or 13. Benow & Stanley (1980;1983) used SAT scores for Junior High school students. Overall, both sexes had equivalent verbal scores, boys scores about 30 points higher on average in math, and at extremely high scores, the ratio of boys to girls was especially high (e.g., 700 = 13 to 1).

There are some alternative explanations for gender differneces. One such alternative explanation is the theory that different types of motivation account for these differences. There are two types of motivation: mastery-oriented and performance-oriented. Mastery-oriented motivation involves setting high goals for one's self and persisting when one encounters obstacles. It also involves the attribution fo failure to lack of effort and the attribution of success to ability and skill. The peformance-oriented is more likely to lead to learned helplessness: the failure to set high goals and the tendency to give up easily, as well as the attribution of failure to lack of ability and the attribution of success to luck.

These styles can be influenced, for example, by feedback from teachers. Women tend more often to be performance-oriented than mastery-oriented, which could explain the gender difference.

Another theory is the connected learning theory, which helds that men take a traditional approach to tasks, using rationality and objectivity, sometimes called "separate knowing," whereas women tend to think more intuitively and subjectively, sometimes called "connected knowing." The areas that men excel in (e.g., math) seem to rely more on rigor and proof and thus may appeal to those with a separate knowing way of knowing. Or so the argument goes.

With all that said, I don't think this tells us much about why men are more turned on by nudity.