“Probably for reasons other than sexual arousal.” “Since most women seem capable of sexual arousal to both sexes, why do they choose one or the other?” Dr. Bailey and three graduate students in Northwestern’s psychology department: Chivers, Gerulf Rieger, and Elizabeth Latty. “Taken together, these results suggest that women’s sexuality differs from men and emphasize the need for researchers to develop a model of the development and organization of female sexuality independent from models of male sexuality,” she said. The study’s results mesh with current research showing that women’s sexuality demonstrates increased flexibility relative to men in other areas besides sexual orientation, according to Chivers. “But I have long suspected that women’s sexuality is very different from men’s, and this study scientifically demonstrates one way this is so.” “In fact, the large majority of women in contemporary Western societies have sex exclusively with men,” said Meredith Chivers, a PhD candidate in clinical psychology at Northwestern University and a psychology intern at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, who is the study’s first author. That is, heterosexual women were just as sexually aroused by watching female stimuli as by watching male stimuli, even though they prefer having sex with men rather than women. In contrast, both homosexual and heterosexual women showed a bisexual pattern of psychological as well as genital arousal. As with previous research, the researchers found that men responded consistently with their sexual orientations. There were three types of erotic films: those featuring only men, those featuring only women, and those featuring male and female couples. The Northwestern researchers measured the psychological and physiological sexual arousal in homosexual and heterosexual men and women as they watched erotic films. The Northwestern study strongly suggests this is true. Bailey’s main research focus has been on the genetics and environment of sexual orientation, and he is one of the principal investigators of a widely cited study that concludes that genes influence male homosexuality.Īs in many areas of sexuality, research on women’s sexual arousal patterns has lagged far behind men’s, but the scant research on the subject does hint that, compared with men, women’s sexual arousal patterns may be less tightly connected to their sexual orientation. Michael Bailey, PhD, professor and chair of psychology at Northwestern and senior researcher of the study “A Sex Difference in the Specificity of Sexual Arousal.” The study is forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science.
“These findings likely represent a fundamental difference between men’s and women’s brains and have important implications for understanding how sexual orientation development differs between men and women,” said J.
In contrast to men, both heterosexual and lesbian women tend to become sexually aroused by both male and female erotica, and, thus, have a bisexual arousal pattern. In other words, men’s sexual arousal patterns seem obvious.īut a new Northwestern University study boosts the relatively limited research on women’s sexuality with a surprisingly different finding regarding women’s sexual arousal. Contact: Pat Vaughan Tremmel at 847/491-4892 or on Differences in Female, Male SexualityĮVANSTON, ILL.- Three decades of research on men’s sexual arousal show patterns that clearly track sexual orientation-gay men overwhelmingly become sexually aroused by images of men and heterosexual men by images of women.
0 kommentar(er)
