Finally, the devices that measure porn study arousal revealed

Image by elaisted.

And despite the description of the woman who ran the study, it sadly wasnt me. But I’m accepting study funding and applicants day and night (and you know I have the outfit). O — and hey, women LIKE PORN, we want it, and it does the job, thanks, (fer crissakes, I’ve only been telling the world for ten years). Read the astonishingly lamely named What Women Want about the mechanics and results of a legit porn study (NYT), snip:

(…) While the subjects watched on a computer screen, Chivers, who favors high boots and fashionable rectangular glasses, measured their arousal in two ways, objectively and subjectively. The participants sat in a brown leatherette La-Z-Boy chair in her small lab at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, a prestigious psychiatric teaching hospital affiliated with the University of Toronto, where Chivers was a postdoctoral fellow and where I first talked with her about her research a few years ago. 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. Any expectation that the animal sex would speak to something primitive within the men seemed to be mistaken; neither straights nor gays were stirred by the bonobos. And for the male participants, the subjective ratings on the keypad matched the readings of the plethysmograph. The men’s minds and genitals were in agreement.

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. (…read more, nytimes.com, thanks Praemedia!)

Update: A couple of commenters are taking me to task for my opinions about the way I feel the NYT piece was significant for a few reasons, but lacking and tiresomely problematic in regard to understanding female sexuality for *many* other reasons. I’m not sure how my words above are being interpreted, and I do enjoy being disagreed with (especially because you’re being constructive, articulate and cool about it). But to try and clear up why I wrote what I did and how I’m feeling about the piece, I’ll let Mind Hacks and Neuroanthropology do some explaining, as it looks like they feel the same way I do about the NYT piece and have excellent write-ups on it. From Mind Hacks – Corseting Female Desire:

(…) It does a great job of discussing the often surprising results of recent scientific studies but a commentary on Neuroanthropology really nails why it misses the mark.

The whole article is pitched to support that old tired cliché of sexuality that ‘women are complicated, men are simple’ and it uses the differences in research findings to suggest women are enigmatic, complex, they don’t know what they want, or are torn by competing sexual desires.

But this is largely because the scientific studies have looked at specific research questions that don’t relate to ‘what do women want?’ line, as if this is a question that could actually be answered.

Neuroanthropology uses a great analogy that demonstrates why this is just bad spin:

One can imagine an article with the title, ‘What do diners want?’, which bemoaned the fickleness and impenetrable complexity of culinary preferences: Sometimes they want steak, and sometimes just a salad. Sometimes they put extra salt on the meal, and sometimes they ask for ketchup. One orders fish, another chicken, another ham and eggs.

One day a guy ordered tuna fish salad on rye, and the next, the same guy ordered a tandoori chicken wrap, hold the onions! My God, man, they’re insane! Who can ever come up with a unified theory of food preferences?! Food preferences are a giant forest, too complex for comprehension. What do diners want?!

You get my drift. The line of questioning is rhetorically time-tested (can we say clichéd even?) but objectively and empirically nonsensical. So many of these experiments seem to be testing a series of different, related, but ultimately distinct questions.

Can they all be glossed as, ‘What do women want?’ Yeah, sort of, but you’re going to get a hopeless answer.

Rather ironically, the NYT article celebrates the complexity of female sexuality but ultimately suggests that it’s the one-dimensional question that’s important when this is nothing but a caricature of human nature. (…read more, mindhacks.com)

I was just excited to see an article where they finally described the technical means used in these arousal studies. And I thought the title was not only a bad Freudian sign going in, but some pretty shameless linkbait. Not that I have high hopes of ever seeing an unbiased, sex-positive, non-judgmental article called, “What Do Men Want?” in the NYT anytime soon… Because that’s supposed to be obvious. Right?