A sex difference in features that elicit genital response
Section snippets
Participants
We recruited heterosexual women and men via advertisements in an “alternative” urban newspaper (Chicago Reader). Fifty women responded to the advertisement, 28 were eligible to participate and scheduled an appointment, and 20 attended the experimental session. Thirty-nine men responded to the advertisement, 35 were eligible to participate and scheduled an appointment, and 20 attended the experimental session. Women were much more likely to be excluded than men because women who used oral
Results
Genital and subjective sexual arousal to neutral, nonhuman, and human stimuli were examined separately for women and for men. We submitted subjective and genital responses to each stimulus category to planned repeated contrasts, comparing the mean response to each stimulus category to the mean of adjacent categories. The human sexual stimuli were entered in a separate order for each group, reflecting the expected arousal pattern for heterosexual women and men. For women, we entered both genital
Discussion
Our results suggest that nonspecific sexual features are sufficient to induce intermediate levels of genital arousal in women, even in the absence of a subjective appraisal of the stimulus as sexually arousing. In other words, women showed a significant increase in genital arousal to a nonhuman sexual stimulus, but did not report being sexually aroused by this stimulus. In contrast, men showed neither genital nor subjective arousal to the nonhuman sexual stimulus; nonspecific sexual features
Acknowledgements
This research was based, in part, on the first author's doctoral dissertation, presented to the Department of Psychology, Northwestern University. A National Institute of Child and Human Development Grant R03-HD41770-01 and a grant from the American Psychological Foundation funded this research. We thank R. Blanchard, J. M. Cantor, M. Lalumière, and M. Seto for helpful comments, G. Reiger for his assistance with video editing and data collection, and we thank the study participants.
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