An article in the New York Times and other media sources today cites new research that suggests straight women aren’t necessarily turned on by naked men. The study, by Meredith Chivers from the Center for Addiction and Mental Health at the University of Toronto, measured the genital responses of women to various images. It found that women were often more turned on by other women, although the researchers concluded that it was what people were doing that made a difference.
Heterosexual women, Dr. Chivers and her colleagues found, were no more excited by athletic naked men doing yoga or tossing stones into the ocean than they were by the control footage: long pans of the snowcapped Himalayas. When straight women viewed a video of a naked woman doing calisthenics, on the other hand, their blood flow increased significantly.
What really matters to women, Dr. Chivers said, at least in the somewhat artificial setting of watching movies while intimately hooked up to a device called a photoplethysmograph, is not the gender of the actor, but the degree of sensuality. Even more than the naked exercisers, they were aroused by videos of masturbation, and more still by graphic videos of couples making love. Women with women, men with men, men with women: it did not seem to matter much to her female subjects, Dr. Chivers said.
“Women physically don’t seem to differentiate between genders in their sex responses, at least heterosexual women don’t,” she said. “For heterosexual women, gender didn’t matter. They responded to the level of activity.”
The study found that men, both straight and gay, and lesbians, were more gender-oriented when it came to visual arousal. This echoes similar research by Northwestern University in 2003.
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The research is discussed in a documentary called “Bi The Way” and is seen as an example of the bisexuality of women.
What grabs my attention here is that the study hasn’t factored in the way that straight women aren’t trained to appreciate male bodies. Society constantly presents the idea that “sexy” equals “female” and this is drummed into all of us from a young age. Advertising, films, television and magazines reinforce this. We’re taught to see the female body as alluring and erotic, as something to be desired. Men’s bodies were rarely held up as sex objects – at least, not until recently.
On top of that, there’s the way that porn, a tool of arousal, is almost always focused on the female body. From those first moments when we stole a glimpse at a Playboy or Penthouse as kids, women are trained to admire and lust after other females.
So I’m almost not surprised that the nude woman doing aerobics produced a sexual response. It’s a little Pavlovian, really.
Beyond that, the research does back up the idea that straight women can get turned on by anything. I like that we’re so flexible. It does, of course, advance the idea you can’t define “porn for women” because you can never tell what women want. Even so, I’m going to keep using the phrase because it’s a nice way of creating a little happy space on the internet for horny chicks who are sick of mainstream porn.
EXCELLENT!
What grabs my attention here is that the study hasn’t factored in the way that straight women aren’t trained to appreciate male bodies. Society constantly presents the idea that “sexy” equals “female” and this is drummed into all of us from a young age.
OMG, I couldn’t agree with you more!! This is a, ahem, big beef of mine!
And to piggyback this to my comment on your “Weird Critique,” I think this is more reason that we need to increase exposure to non-typical sexuality. The Time article’s conclusion is exactly what feeds the porn industry’s ignoring women and allows them to continue in sexism: women apparently like it, after all. But we need non-sexist imagery, we need real lesbians having hot sex, we need vulnerable male representations, we need sex positions that are not all about displaying women’s vaginas, etc…
and women (or men) will likely not embrace these kinds of imagery until they enter into sex culture in a meaningful way.
Beyond that, the research does back up the idea that straight women can get turned on by anything.
I think men absolutely have the capacity to be turned on by anything too…but just like you say above that it’s Pavlovian that women will be turned on by women when women’s eroticization is shoved down our throats, it’s also Pavlovian that when homophobia is so much a part of men’s sexuality and when the eroticization of male bodies is all but nonexistent and when it is, it is targeted primarily for gay men, that men would not be turned on by male bodies. In fact, the men I know tend to recoil even from man ass in movies!
Therefore, I conclude that representing men as sexual for a hetero female audience would benefit both heterosexual women and men…although it won’t benefit sexism (and maybe that’s why it has yet to materialize).
Nice analysis. 🙂