Here’s a selection from the book I’ve been referencing that’s a little more illuminating, raising further questions.
“Meredith Chivers is an assistant professor of psychology at Queen’s University in Canada. As the director of the Sexuality and Gender Laboratory at the university, she is one of the world’s leading researchers on the neuropsychology of female desire. In 2004, Chivers conducted an ingenious experiment to find out what turns women on.
She invited women to her lab and showed them a variety of erotic pictures. Chivers measured their arousal from viewing the pictures in two different ways. First, she asked them how they felt—a measure of conscious, psychological arousal. Second, she inserted a plethysmograph into their vaginas—the female version of the device used to measure erections in the jar of pennies experiment. The plethysmograph measured blood flow in women’s vaginal walls—a measure of physical arousal. But the most interesting part of Chivers’s experiment was the pictures themselves.
They consisted of photographs depicting exercising men, exercising women, gay sex, lesbian sex, straight sex—and monkey sex. One of the images showed copulating bonobos, a type of primate also known as the pygmy chimpanzee.
So which images elicited physical arousal in the women? All the images, even the monkey porn. Women’s vaginal blood flow increased after viewing each erotic picture. Which images elicited psychological arousal—which caused the women to say they were turned on? Heterosexual sex generated the greatest psychological arousal, followed by lesbian sex. Watching people exercise wasn’t much of a turn-on. The reported amount of psychological arousal from watching monkey porn? A very emphatic zero.
In other words, there was a dissociation between the conscious arousal of the mind and the unconscious (or semiconscious) arousal of the body. When the exact same experiment was conducted with male subjects, there was virtually no dissociation between the two types of arousal. If a man was physically turned on, he was also psychologically turned on. And none of the men got turned on by monkey sex.
This intriguing dissociation between the mind and body in women seems to reflect a common experience among women that is frequently unvoiced. “Thanks to you women who wrote about the dichotomy between getting turned on and (intellectually) being turned off,” writes one woman on Salon.com, in response to an article addressing why women don’t watch porn. “Just last night my husband was asking me to watch porn with him and I was trying to explain that after about 10 minutes of it I’m more turned off than on (even if I’m turned on too—the other part won’t let me enjoy it). I think it would be easier to be a guy when it comes to porn—having all this conflicting stuff flying around my brain and body makes me crazy.”
