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.

So even if you only read USA Today you may have heard about yet another variation of the how-often-men-think-of-sleep study. Where (naturally, it's always strongly implied) almost all men think about sex more often than almost all women do. Lassoing popular press accounts and bringing them back to earth, Emily Nagoski passes along the following five points.

My favorite part is on page two of the Psychology Today article, where Brian talks about problems in the media’s coverage of the study, which parallels my thinking on mainstream journalism reporting science:

1. Writers were either confused or deliberately choosing the more extreme, less representative central tendency (the mean rather than the median) to report.

2. Writers emphasized the central tendency, to the exclusion of standard deviation, when one of the most compelling results of the study was the wide variability among subjects.

3. Writers also emphasized the sex part, paying inadequate attention to the fact that thoughts about sleep and food were as frequent as thoughts about sex.

4. Writers emphasized population-level differences between men and women, neglecting to clarify that there was lots of overlap so that, even though the men on average reported more thoughts about sex (and food and sleep), many of the individual women had more thoughts about sex (and food and sleep) than many of the individual men.

5. Writers generalized the results to All People, rather than recognizing the delimitations of the population studied: college students, who are likely to be WEIRD.

What can we really conclude about frequency of thoughts about sex? We think about sex about as often as we think about food and sex, and we vary a great deal from each other in all three topics.

Source: Emily Nagoski :: sex nerd ::

Perfect.  Nagoski says the actual paper's legit (within its constraints) and I'm inclined to agree.

Other than that I've got one question and one observation.  First of all, why do I remember reading about an almost identical study a year or so ago (same basic shape: men think about sex more, but also think more about food and sleep.)  Is this one a new study or is the old one just making the rounds again?

Second, I'm not sure who mentioned it last week, but someone referring to this same study pointed out that men don't actually think about sex every seven minutes.  As I said I can't find the original source but I got that similar link via Em & Lo.

Anyway, bottom line.  The study shows that men tend to think about bodily functions more often than women do; there's considerable overlap not only within sexes but between them.  As always, good to know.

Anastasia of Sexualité has an interesting post on an unexpected-to-me consequence of the introduction to Viagra.

...However, just when sexual therapists have prepared to put down their diplomas and clean up their offices, the wide use of the blue pill seems to have spawned female patients, majority of them partners of avid Viagra users.

These females are now rushing in despair to their sex therapists to get an explanation as to why this little blue pill can arouse her husband when she could not no matter what she did.  A lot of questions along the same line of thought are now being discussed in the privacy of the offices of sexual therapists.

It appears that Viagra has not really displaced the sexual therapists after all.There was only a change of clients, from the male species suffering the erectile dysfunction symptoms to the female species who are suffering from busted egos and insecurities.

She said it here.

The good news is I’m guessing that to the extent women are concerned about this a sex therapist can probably help them work it out in very short order.

1) On the one hand, as the sex class men are indoctrinated to value themselves in direct proportion to their ability to, well, be sexual. On the other hand men, assumed by heteronormativity to be the ideal against which all other sexuality is measured, learn almost nothing about how thoroughly enjoyable sex without penetration can be. Consequently we tend to back off, sometimes sharply, from all sexual activity if we’re even afraid we might not “perform.”

2) The kind of erectile dysfunction that Viagra treats has a lot more to do with anatomy than psychology. Yes, it won’t make you have an erection if you’re not at least somewhat organically aroused (for that you need something really direct like Caverject) but it’s main effect is on the cardiovascular system, not the brain.

3) Consequently if someone (the article says women but obviously it could be any partner of a man with erection difficulties) is beating him or herself up about desirability in the face of Viagra they’re doing so unnecessarily. Between the psychological self-defeat of erection difficulty on the one hand, and the benefit of anxiety relief due to Viagra’s hydraulic effect, it’s just hard to see why a caring and/or sympathetic partner needs to feel responsible for prior difficulties.

4) But that’s with caring partners. Side B of Viagra, though, is that as the sex class men are expected to be able and willing to have sex even when other considerations that would be seen as reasonable libido-suppressors in women — things like stress, alienation, or alienation of affection, for instance… or even maybe pressure from a partner for sex! And the advent of Viagra undermines the excuse of physiology.

I know, I know, as the no-sex class heterosexual women are never supposed to have desires unless their partners initiate it but… um, yeah, about that. But a) almost everything we “know” about sex we know about people between roughly ages 15 and 30 but after about age 40 everything we “know” starts becoming even less true, and b) nothing anybody has ever said, anywhere, about libido imbalances and its consequences has required that the imbalance be men high, women low. So…

5) As reality continues to intrude on our still-rigid definitions of masculinity and femininity and who’s “supposed” to initiate, I’m guessing that sex therapists are going to begin seeing even less expected and also more serious confrontations arising from greater availability of drugs like Viagra.