Article About Female Sexuality Compared to Male's.

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New York Times Article, "What Do Women Want?" (Link)

Bonobos were recently used as pornographic material to test physical stimulation among men and women who watched videos of them. This article mentions that study as an introductory attention grabber, but it is actually about many studies done by many researchers and their findings of reported sexual turn ons vs the physical measurement of arousal in males and females. Quite interesting stuff. I'm only in the middle of the article, but it is really cool, and I'm eager to share it. Enjoy, and learn something.

Interesting. It took me over 45 minutes, but, was worth reading.

They'll never get a good answer because they're asking the wrong questions.
For women, it's a package deal. You can't isolate one little thing and say that it's everything. There is no one thing. It all has to work together.

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I not sure I understand what you mean Tahitiii, although I am aware that women might have a different outlook towards sex.

Thing is with scientist experiment you can't introduce any preconceptions at all because it could bias the results.

I thought the experiment was very interesting. I think it could be refined more. For instance are they comparing like with like? The sensor for the women is different from he men. What is it exactly they are measuring. How near is it to indicating arousal? They are not measuring anything internal on the men.

In both men and women there is blood flow and swelling for a number of reasons. Temperature is a big one. I wouldn't say men are more susceptible to this but their organs are more external. Actually in other respects women are more sensitive to temperature down there.

Women provide most of the lubrication during sex, and can take longer to get fully aroused. A response like that might not be indicative of full arousal, merely a mechanism prior to arousal. Natural mechanisms are nothing to ashamed of anyway, even if it could be classed as arousal. It doesn't necessarily follow that women are going to watch animal porn, and engage in animal’s sex.

They might try the test with zoophiles.

If your main guy makes a certain gesture or whatever, it turns you on.
If someone else tried the exact same thing, you'd call the police.

Last edited by Tahitiii on 30 Jan 2009, 9:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I don't think that is fair on the study Tahitiii. You prefer we live in ignorance?

I'm not saying it perfect, but I'd rather they did it than they didn't.

You can ask question like this. If you have preconceived notions, then you aren't ready to se up an experiment.

You are talking about taboos. The science can't be swayed by taboo.

I think they should also reap the experiment with fMRI, eeg, heart rate.

There was study that showed that gamblers, and charity givers where stimulated in the same part of the brain as those that were sexually aroused.

Arousal is a physical mechanism as well as mental. In fact people usually think of arousal as in sexual arousal. But actual there are many types of arousal, such as fight or flight reaction.

I recently read "Bonk," by Mary Roach - which is about the history of sex research & it mentions a recent study on female arousal. They found that even if a woman exhibits all the physical indicators of sexual arousal, she still won't report feeling aroused if she feels no emotional response. In other words, for women, it's a package deal.

Last edited by zeichner on 30 Jan 2009, 2:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I'm sorry by terms like "package deal" are too vague.

I guess that applies to both men and females, to various extent, that a potential mate has to fulfill various different criterias. But how does this relate to the research described in the article? And how does it make their research less meaningful? I say go sexology, an interesting field indeed

Exactly. Nobody is saying it isn't. I don't think the experiment claimed to be all encompassing.

Hmmmm.....
I find that hard to believe.

I do too. The emotional response thing is also really vague. I know what the study is trying to generalise, but it seems like one of those debunked myths due to the sexual deviances women take part in. What exactly is the emotional response that they are refering to? I think that women think with their minds about who or what they have sex with, under the best of circumstances for themselves. Emotional response? I'm aroused by my vibrator, an inanimate object. Emotional responses to people are nice sometimes and can be very intimate, but the last guy that I had an emotional response with, was a complete jerk. However, I was turned on until he started tyrannising my lifestyle, then it was over with before it was over with, if you know what I mean. Women can have emotional responses even if the mental feasibility isn't present, and that turns some women off right away. I don't want emotional response to be the end all say so in female sexual research. Once I realised that the last guy was an as*hole, I wasn't turned on by him any more, but he can still get an emotional response out of me. I still care about him, and he's just as physically attractive as he was three weeks ago. So what made the difference? I think deeming women's sexuality as a "package" is diminishing. It is so much more complex to the individual.

What if women just start reporting arousal every time they get a physical response? When the answers are reported, women take into account social acceptability, but that doesn't indicate who or what they are sexually active with in their lives. Women are often ashamed to report incidences of rape and sexual assault, especially by their partners. Yet the article mentions women getting turned on in some cases of sexual assault. I would assume that there are women who have been physically turned on as they were being raped by a partner, but that's not acceptable as part of the "package". Women who enter into consensual rape play with partners are taking desire one step further in a safer direction, but even in those situations, the rules get blurred and limits get pushed. The decision making process to determine a rape is something I'd like to see a study about.

After reading this paragraph on the first page, my first impression was that the women weren't totally honest with their keypad entries. I'm not sure whether it was denial, embarassment, social pressures, etc.... but, I think that most women aren't willing to readily admit that they're turned on by gay porn, or other things, outside of their claimed sexual orientation. I'm guessing that this tendency is both conscious and subconscious.

I am not trying to sound like a jerk or anything, that is just the impression that I got.

I've been too edgy lately. Trying to find a balance between too wimpy and too in-your-face. It's like a digital volume control, too loud or too quiet, and there ain't nothin in-between. The volume on my posts around here has been obnoxious in the past couple of days.

I intended to express the sentiment that this experiment just didn't work for me.

Chivers says that the study "measured their arousal in two ways, objectively and subjectively." Which was which, and on what do we base the assumption?

The participants were not in their natural habitat. I have trouble believing that you can get any useful information from someone sitting in a lab, under a microscope, with a little plastic probe inside. That doesn't sound even a little bit like fun. Outside the context of a complex, personal relationship, nothing is normal. (I'm not talking about monogamy or anything like that. Even a prostitute is a real person and has some kind of a relationship with the customer, who is also a person.)

The study was limited to people who were willing to participate. We have no way of knowing how they were recruited and how good a cross-section that was. I doubt it was a representative sample of the species. I would not have been there.

Also, how and why did she chose those particular scenes? The descriptions alone invite tons of questions. If I saw them, I'd probably have a thousand more. How do we know what someone was responding to at any given moment? Is the mole on that guy significant? The angle of the sun on the beach? Why enhance a scene with artificial sounds, and how we know what difference that made?

I just don't see how it qualifies as science.