No, really, it says that in the study. (Well, more or less.)
PlanetOut - Study: Females get aroused by both sexes: It's no surprise that lesbians like to watch lesbian pornography. But the big news in a new study is that they also get turned on by watching heterosexuals and gay men have sex. And straight women? They like it all, too. The findings confirm what researchers have suspected for some time -- women may prefer to date one gender or the other, but they get sexually aroused by both. Men, on the other hand, aren't nearly as flexible. Straight men like to watch women have sex, and gay men like to watch men. Case closed.
Well, no. I really don't think it is, somehow.
"This may well be relevant to the flexibility of female sexuality. I wouldn't be surprised if this is one reason why women transition more between sexual identities than men," said study co-author Michael Bailey, chairman of the psychology department at Northwestern University and author of "The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism." In his study, completed over several years, Bailey and colleagues recruited 69 men and 52 women, both heterosexual and homosexual, to watch two-minute snippets of X-rated movies in a laboratory.
Well, let's see ... first you have to find people who are comfortable answering questions from total strangers about their sexual preferences. Reduce that number further by making sure they're people who are comfortable watching pornography. Reduce number even further by making sure that they're comfortable watching it in front of researchers with measuring instruments on their dinguses, and then draw generalized conclusions!
(OK, OK, I'll be good. Mostly.)
Thing is, I don't actually doubt the conclusions, beyond a certain point. It's just where that "certain point" is that I wonder about; it may be much further forward or much further back along the continuum of sexuality than they're seeing. For example, our culture seems to place more of a premium on men being very definite about their sexuality and sexual attractions than it does on women. Partly, this is because women's sexuality has been, in many ways, invisible to men in western culture; you can see that in Victorian era laws that outlawed male homosexual practices, but took no notice of female activities. It's not as if our modern day culture has completely gotten past that; if we had, there wouldn't have been any reason to do this study, now would there? One wonders if that plays into their results, producing something of a social desirability bias. Women are allowed to be more flexible because the society hasn't really paid attention; men are required to be more definite because the society has.
Posted by iain at June 20, 2003 03:30 PMComments
