Last Thursday the Times ran an article by Andy Newman entitled “What Women Want (Maybe),” (horrible header for an interesting piece) that addressed a study that “showed people video clips of naked men and women in various sexual and nonsexual situations and measured their genital arousal.”
What they found pretty much affirms a lot of what I believe, so I really liked the article. To wit:
Heterosexual women . . . were no more excited by athletic naked men doing yoga or tossing stones into the ocean than they were by the control footage: long pans of the snowcapped Himalayas. When straight women viewed a video of a naked woman doing calisthenics, on the other hand, their blood flow increased significantly.
That is to say, women are just plain sexier than men. Okay, it’s not necessarily saying that, but that’s one way to read it, the most obvious way to read it, certainly the way I’ve always seen it. Women with all that softness, all those curves, are just plain more blood-flow increasing than hairy, protuberant men. (Yes, I’m working with stereotypes here, granted.) The article continues, quoting one of the researchers, one Dr. Chivers:
“Women physically don’t seem to differentiate between genders in their sex responses, at least heterosexual women don’t. For heterosexual women, gender didn’t matter. They responded to the level of activity.”
Dr. Chivers and her colleagues found women slightly but significantly aroused by footage of bonobo chimps mating. Men showed no such response.
But wait, there’s more:
And when Dr. Chivers asked her subjects to rate their own arousal to the videos they watched, the women, whether gay or straight, tended to give higher ratings to films showing women. “Heterosexual women are responding to women, which is counterintuitive,” Dr. Chivers said. “Why are women so turned on by watching other women?”
It is tough to know what to make of this information.
It is?!? (imagine confused Scooby Doo head-tilt with that "Huh?" questioning bark of his) Or is the Times protecting itself, although I’m not sure what from. To this guy, “this information” says wicked clearly that women are nicer to look at then men. Whether that’s nature or nurture, that’s another question, and how relevant a question that is is yet another.
The article continues, addressing male versus female sexuality:
Dr. Chivers’s work adds to a growing body of scientific evidence that places female sexuality along a continuum between heterosexuality and homosexuality, rather than as an either-or phenomenon.
As I’ve witnessed it, heterosexual women not only experience arousal, to put it in the positive light that I see it, with more variance and subtlety than men, they also perceive beauty in their partners in a much more flexible way than do men. A woman will find a man physically attractive regardless of his looks (or even in direct contradiction to his looks – see Charles Bukowski et al) because he has a sexy brilliant mind, is funny, or charming, or, yes, sure, Glenn Sacks readers, you bitter bitter bunch, because of the size of his . . . bank account.
Men, on the other hand, tend to find women first and foremost (and last and aftmost) attractive based on looks, with other attributes as titillating bonuses. Sure, some men, I like to think of myself among them, will find a women decidedly less attractive if she turns out (after the initial eyes-popping-out-of-head-on-springs boing-boing visual identification of said woman as h-o-t HOT) to be petty, mean, boring, unintelligent, etc., but that is, again, after the initial hubba-hubba moment.
Moreover, (and, moreover, this may be the first use of “moreover” – nay the first THREE uses of moreover, make it four, ever in a piece of writing by yours truly), when it comes to disenchantment with a lover, and/or enchantment with someone other than one’s significant other, for men it is dissatisfaction with looks or attraction to another’s looks that so often make/break the deals. Thus, by those hefty-portfolioed captains of industry, the older version dumped for the trophy wife.
All my life, I’ve felt my strong attachment to the physical attractiveness of my partner before other factors to be a moral weakness on my part, on a majority of men’s parts, but what if it’s just the nature of the beast? What if men and women are just plain attracted to women because women are just so dern attractive? Does that (along with the awesome power of the Coolidge Effect) let us off the hook for philandering, for porn, for strippers, for prostitutes?
Of course, the answer is no, it doesn’t let us off any hook, but it does give men another way to look at ourselves, our desires, and how to address them that’s not based on guilt and shame.
