I’ve just read two books about
sex (Sex at Dawn, and Perv), and the same fascinating study,
about something called “erotic plasticity,” was mentioned in both.
In 2005 psychologist Meredith Chivers
set up an experiment where she showed a variety of sexual videos to heterosexual
and homosexual men and women. The videos depicted a wide variety of activities
covering various sexual combinations: male/female, male/male, female/female,
female alone, and man alone. At the end, just for the hell of it, she threw in
one of bonobos mating. The subject’s genitals were wired to measure blood flow
(an accurate indicator of arousal) and the subjects also indicated how turned
on they felt with a keypad.
Men were consistent—if they were
heterosexual the naked women turned them on but the men did not, and if homosexual,
vice versa. The bonobos didn’t turn any of the men on. In addition, the men’s
reported feelings matched their genital blood flow.
But women responded genitally to
everything—even the bonobos! However,
they didn’t report being turned on to everything. They only acknowledged
arousal about a subset of videos.
This is interesting enough, but
there’s more. It would be easy to conclude that this is just a strange human
quirk. But another study, done in 2001 with goats and sheep, shows the same erotic
plasticity difference between males and females.
