Photo by Flickr user marsmet462. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Sweet mother of pearl is there ever a mind-bending difference in the number of research papers on "female arousal" compared to similar studies of men.
This despite the fact that it sure looks like sex researchers (particularly principle investigators) are overwhelmingly male. And would have plenty of research material at... er... hand.
You'd think, especially for no-brainer (heh) PET-scan research like this one, called High-intensity Erotic Visual Stimuli De-activate the Primary Visual Cortex in Women, someone would bother to try the same experiment on men to see whether there were differences or similarities.
Or, if they did do use such experimental "controls" you'd think they'd mention it in the abstract. Not least because you'd think someone would be interested in one of two obvious outcomes
- Research showed that women's brains categorically process "high-intensity erotic visual stimuli" differently than do men's, or
- Research showed that women's and men's brains process such stimuli similarly.
Either way you'd think news about the latter two would be more interesting. But... probably because it would involve learning something about male sexuality... either nobody bothered mentioning it or, more likely, nobody's even bothered to try.
It's not that nobody's interested. But most of the time it's not very integrated -- people generally seem to study a) female arousal, b) female arousal, c) female arousal, d) male arousal, e) female arousal, f) gay male arousal, g) female arousal, etc. But you only occasionally see the same experiements conducted on both men and women.
I still think the problem is that since everybody already "knows" everything you could possibly know about male sexuality (e.g. 90% of men masturbate and the other 10% are liars) there's no real reason to look... to see what if any of what we "know" is true.
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Lesley Hall, as usual, has
Submitted by Irene (not verified) on Mon, 2012-04-23 12:23.Lesley Hall, as usual, has some interesting things to say on the subject (from the point of view of the historian, though, not the scientist -- seems to me she has some remarks about the science, too, but I can't find those at the moment): http://www.lesleyahall.net/contemp.htm
"Largely absent has been any consideration of the figure against whom these others were defined: the ‘straight man’, the ‘normal’ heterosexual male. It is twenty years since I published Hidden Anxieties: Male Sexuality 1900-1950,[2] which still seems to be almost a lone example of a historical analysis of the problematic aspects of 'normal' male sexuality, although a handful of other works by e.g. Angus McLaren have addressed these issues.[3] There has been a certain amount of work on the construction of masculinities more generally but quite often these have eschewed close engagement with what these meant in sexual terms. Is this simply because the 'normal heterosexual male' was the person gazing rather than an object of the gaze, the one who was defining himself by categorising others? Early studies in the history of sexuality tended to focus on discourses produced by the emerging science of sexology from the later nineteenth century, which was embedded in efforts to understand divagations from an assumed norm, implicitly, if not explicitly, the white bourgeois heterosexual male subject."
Because who wants to think
Submitted by PattyCake (not verified) on Mon, 2012-04-23 15:46.Because who wants to think about guys jacking off?
(Me!)
mmmmm, srsly. I had to BEG a
Submitted by Plymouth (not verified) on Sun, 2012-04-29 01:07.mmmmm, srsly. I had to BEG a certain partner to do that for me - he just didn't understand how I would find that hot. But it is OMG hott!
I only just looked at the
Submitted by Irene (not verified) on Fri, 2012-04-27 15:56.I only just looked at the research link. Interesting -- they state "When watching the third however, they found that blood flow to the visual cortex was reduced in all of the volunteers indicating that the brain had decided that focusing on arousal was more important than fixating on exactly what was occurring on the screen in front of them (or that women just don’t want to really see what is going on with sex)."
Er. Logic leap, much? Did anyone ask the women what they thought of the hardcore porn in the third video? Why would it necessarily make you against seeing "what is going on with sex" to happen to turn away from one particular hardcore porn video? And if I was watching something that I didn't want to see much, it's entirely possible that I wouldn't be aroused, either, or not as much as I would be by something that didn't also disgust me or make me roll my eyes. Even if I quite liked the video, it might be embarrassing watching it under research circumstances, which would also affect matters. (All of the above might well apply to men, too, if anyone cared to, you know, check in with them.)
Oh, and even if it's exactly as the researchers say, that the women turned away from the visual stimulus to concentrate on their arousal? That means they darned well HAD BEEN aroused by the visual stimulus, but it's getting spun as women NOT being visually stimulated. Because that's what everyone already "knows" about how women get aroused.
Isn't that kind of like arguing that if you put your hands over your ears when the music seems too loud to you, your ears aren't very sensitive? Actually, that suggests a new theory: maybe visual porn is like testosterone, and women are way more sensitive to it than men, and need less to get aroused. Makes as much sense as anything the paper said.