Faye Flam at Philly.com reports on the recent results of porn-induced sexual arousal in men and women. You may recall a few weeks ago I posted about this. The researchers found that there’s no statistical difference between the time it takes men and women to become turned on when shown porn.
Faye seems astounded that women would even get turned on at all, given that she assumes “women are so much less likely than men to consider viewing porn a valuable use of our time.”
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The article goes on to speculate about why men get turned on by visual images, wheeling out a zoologist to suggest all sorts of evolutionary theories and reproductive scenarios. Unfortunately, the zoo guy makes the assumption that women aren’t motivated by the same biological urges.
Then the author comes up with this sentence, which made me kind of mad:
So what’s going on with the women in this McGill study? Is there something funny about Canadians?
Heaven forbid that women should be turned on by porn! Those women must be freaks, right? Thankfully, the researcher does a bit of reassuring, telling us all that “in women you get a lot of disagreement between what the body is saying and what the mind is saying.”
Phew.
I have an interest in pornography (strictly for indecent reasons, and not out of intellectual curiosity) and have collected scientific articles about gender differences in pornography use. I find your blog interesting, particularly the porn for women.
In young Danish men and women (18-30 yrs old) Hald (Archives of Sexual Behavior, Oct. 2006) found that male gender, higher frequency of masturbation, and younger age of first exposure to pornography accounted for 48.8% of the variance in pornography use. This means that the majority of the variation is not accounted for by gender. So, while men in general use pornography more than women, there are many women who use pornography more than the average male. This could be said about almost any gender-related behavior.
As far as Evolutionary hypotheses by people like Steven Pinker are concerned, there really is no way to verify whether what they are saying is true or false. He’s the one who related this to the behavior of some birds and said “The sight of a fertile member of the opposite sex would normally correlate with an opportunity to make babies,” he said. “Porn fools your body into reacting instinctively as if the images were real.†This might be true, but no one really knows for sure why such complex behavior evolved. For that matter, it just might be that many adolescent boys get together for a “circle jerk†and learn to enjoy group sex with their buddies from this experience.
I think that it is important to figure out why as a society we call erotic art “dirty picturesâ€. We need to figure out why more women don’t enjoy porn. We need to figure out why some women don’t have orgasms. These are issues that relate to sexual health and enjoyment.