From: Spudboy100@aol.com
Date: Mon Jun 16 2003 - 00:29:40 MDT
With last week's thread on Semen-tics; I thought this article on the
differences between guys and dolls would be interesting.
http://www.nationalpost.com/home/story.html?id=3135D380-4E4D-4EBB-AE9D-736279E
7EC4F
<<Researchers studying female sexuality have found that women, regardless of
their sexual orientation, are aroused by erotic images of both men and women,
contrasting sharply with male arousal patterns.
Does this suggest women are generally bisexual?
Not necessarily so, say the scientists at Northwestern University in Chicago.
"Male sexual arousal is category-specific," said Meredith L. Chivers, a PhD
candidate in clinical psychology at Northwestern and a psychology intern at the
Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. She is the lead author of
the study.
"Men show their greatest sexual arousal to the categories of people with whom
they prefer to have sex. With respect to sexual orientation, heterosexual men
experience much higher ... arousal to women than to men, while homosexual men
show an opposite pattern."
That link, for men, is so strong that courts rely on measures of sexual
arousal for offenders being examined for sex crimes, particularly in determining
pedophilia, the sexual attraction to children.
An emerging body of research on female sexuality, however, suggests that
women's sexual preferences cannot be reliably measured in the same way, with
researchers classifying women's sexuality as "more flexible" than men's, with more
variation in preferences, behaviour, attitudes and the impact of cultural
norms.
Ms. Chivers, who will present her findings at a public lecture at the centre
on Wednesday, studied three groups of people for her study, which is to appear
in a forthcoming issue of the academic journal Psychological Science.
The researchers studied the responses of a group of men, a group of women,
and a third group comprised of transsexuals, who have been surgically altered
from male to female. The transsexuals were included to rule out the possibility
that differences between men and women are the result of the differing ways
genital arousal is measured because of the physical distinctness between the
sexes.
Researchers described the transsexuals as having the brains of a man but the
genitals of a woman.
All of the participants were privately shown six, two-minute films depicting
a variety of sexually explicit material while wearing devices that measured
genital blood flow.
The heterosexual men were most aroused when watching female-female couplings
and homosexual men to male-male couplings. The pattern for the transsexuals
matched that of the men.
Both heterosexual and homosexual women, however, experienced strong arousal
to the images of both male-male and female-female couplings, the researchers
found.
"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," Ms. Chivers said.
The study adds to the view that "female sexuality may be more motivated by
extrinsic factors, such as the desire to create or maintain a romantic
relationship, than intrinsic factors, such as genital sexual arousal," the study says.>>
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