Sexuality

Female sexual arousal .
Gender dysphoria .
Sexual arousal erotic aggressive stimuli .
Sexual responses - SF, SM, GF, GM .

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Sexual responses - SF, SM, GF, GM

Excerpts from NYT magazine article, What Do Women Want?:

[Chivers] showed the short movie to men and women, straight and gay. To the same subjects, she also showed clips of heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a chiseled man walking naked on a beach and a well-toned woman doing calisthenics in the nude.

The genitals of the volunteers were connected to plethysmographs — for the men, an apparatus that fits over the penis and gauges its swelling; for the women, a little plastic probe that sits in the vagina and, by bouncing light off the vaginal walls, measures genital blood flow. An engorgement of blood spurs a lubricating process called vaginal transudation: the seeping of moisture through the walls. The participants were also given a keypad so that they could rate how aroused they felt.

The men, on average, responded genitally in what Chivers terms “category specific” ways. Males who identified themselves as straight swelled while gazing at heterosexual or lesbian sex and while watching the masturbating and exercising women. They were mostly unmoved when the screen displayed only men. Gay males were aroused in the opposite categorical pattern.

All was different with the women. No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men. They responded objectively much more to the exercising woman than to the strolling man, and their blood flow rose quickly — and markedly, though to a lesser degree than during all the human scenes except the footage of the ambling, strapping man — as they watched the apes. And with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person. The readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren’t in much accord. During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much more. Among the lesbian volunteers, the two readings converged when women appeared on the screen. But when the films featured only men, the lesbians reported less engagement than the plethysmograph recorded. Whether straight or gay, the women claimed almost no arousal whatsoever while staring at the bonobos [a film of bonobos mating].

Richard Lippa, a psychologist at California State University, Fullerton, has employed surveys of thousands of subjects to demonstrate over the past few years that while men with high sex drives report an even more polarized pattern of attraction than most males (to women for heterosexuals and to men for homosexuals), in women the opposite is generally true: the higher the drive, the greater the attraction to both sexes, though this may not be so for lesbians.

. . . a recent study by one of [Chivers'] mentors, Michael Bailey, a sexologist at Northwestern University: while fM.R.I. scans were taken of their brains, gay and straight men were shown pornographic pictures featuring men alone, women alone, men having sex with men and women with women. In straights, brain regions associated with inhibition were not triggered by images of men; in gays, such regions weren’t activated by pictures of women. Inhibition, in Bailey’s experiment, didn’t appear to be an explanation for men’s narrowly focused desires. Early results from a similar Bailey study with female subjects suggest the same absence of suppression. For Chivers, this bolsters the possibility that the distinctions in her data between men and women — including the divergence in women between objective and subjective responses, between body and mind — arise from innate factors rather than forces of culture.

Testosterone, so vital to male libido, appears crucial to females as well, and in drug trials involving postmenopausal women, testosterone patches have increased sexual activity. But worries about a possibly heightened risk of cancer, along with uncertainty about the extent of the treatment’s advantages, have been among the reasons that the approach hasn’t yet been sanctioned by the F.D.A.

(emphasis mine)

Gender and sexual orientation differences in sexual response to sexual activities versus gender of actors in sexual films.

J Pers Soc Psychol. 2007 Dec;93(6):1108-21.

Chivers ML, Seto MC, Blanchard R.

In this study, the authors investigated the hypothesis that women's sexual orientation and sexual responses in the laboratory correlate less highly than do men's because women respond primarily to the sexual activities performed by actors, whereas men respond primarily to the gender of the actors. The participants were 20 homosexual women, 27 heterosexual women, 17 homosexual men, and 27 heterosexual men. The videotaped stimuli included men and women engaging in same-sex intercourse, solitary masturbation, or nude exercise (no sexual activity); human male-female copulation; and animal (bonobo chimpanzee or Pan paniscus) copulation. Genital and subjective sexual arousal were continuously recorded. The genital responses of both sexes were weakest to nude exercise and strongest to intercourse. As predicted, however, actor gender was more important for men than for women, and the level of sexual activity was more important for women than for men. Consistent with this result, women responded genitally to bonobo copulation, whereas men did not. An unexpected result was that homosexual women responded more to nude female targets exercising and masturbating than to nude male targets, whereas heterosexual women responded about the same to both sexes at each activity level.

Law and Mental Health Program, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto, Ontario M6J 1H4, Canada. meredith_chivers@camh.net

Bailey JM Chivers ML

Lippa R Hershberger S

Female sexual arousal

A model of women's sexual arousal.

J Sex Marital Ther. 2002 Jan-Feb;28(1):1-10.

Basson R.

A model of female sexual arousal shows the composite emotion of subjective sexual arousal, which results from conscious appraisal of sexual stimuli and their context in the presence of positive affective and cognitive feedback. Genital feedback augments the subjective arousal to a variable degree. Genital congestion can be triggered by sexual stimuli in the absence of subjective arousal. Then the congestion either is ignored or not interpreted as sexual. An anhedonic or even a dysphoric response to the sensations of genital congestion are further possibilities. This model allows for various subtypes of arousal disorder and thus facilitates a choice of therapeutic intervention.

UBC Departments of Psychiatry and Obstetrics & Gynecology Sexual Medicine, VHHSC Centre for Sexuality, Gender Identity & Reproductive Health, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Sexual arousal erotic aggressive stimuli

Sexual arousal to erotic and aggressive stimuli in sexually coercive and noncoercive men.

J Abnorm Psychol. 1997 May;106(2):230-42.

Lohr BA, Adams HE, Davis JM.

Sexual arousal to erotic stimuli depicting various levels of force were examined among college men. Study 1 used phallometric indices to measure penile circumferential change during combined audio-tape and slide presentations varying in degree of force. The results indicated that the sexually coercive group exhibited more penile tumescence than controls to scenes involving verbal pressure and verbal threats. Analyses across time blocks suggested that control participants inhibited sexual arousal with the introduction of force cues but that the sexually coercive group did not. Study 2 was a replication of Study 1 without slides. Both groups showed increases in penile tumescence in response to the consent scenario. Only the sexually coercive men demonstrated significant tumescence in response to force scenarios. The results indicated that the sexually coercive males had a lower threshold for arousal to sexual cues and did not inhibit sexual arousal when force cues were introduced.

Department of Psychology, University of Georgia, Athens 30602-3013, USA.

Gender dysphoria

The classification and labeling of nonhomosexual gender dysphorias.

Arch Sex Behav. 1989 Aug;18(4):315-34.

Blanchard R.

This report suggests systematic strategies for the descriptive classification of nonhomosexual gender identity disorders, based on clinical observations and research findings. The classification of biological males is considered first. A review of cross-gender taxonomies shows that previous observers have identified and labeled a homosexual type far more consistently than any other category of male gender dysphoric. It is suggested that the apparent difficulty in differentiating reliably among the nonhomosexual types results from the sharing of many overlapping characteristics by the various groups. This is supported by a review of informal, mostly clinical, observations and by the findings of three studies designed to test the hypothesis that the nonhomosexual gender dysphorias, together with transvestism, constitute a family of related disorders in men. It is concluded that the main varieties of nonhomosexual gender dysphoria are more similar to each other than any of them is to the homosexual type. Two recommendations, based on the foregoing review, are offered for the classification of male gender dysphorics in research studies. When the number of subjects is small, they may be classified simply as homosexual or nonhomosexual. When the number is larger, the nonhomosexual cases may be classified as heterosexual, bisexual, or analloerotic (unattracted to male or female partners, but not necessarily devoid of sexual drive or activities).

Gender Identity Clinic, Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.