The standard belief is that it’s men, overwhelmingly, who are interested in sexy pictures. This ties in with the general view of male sexuality, more attuned to visual clues than those of status as with women. Hmm, well, collate your prejudices as you have them perhaps. Research now tries to say that this is not so:
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Women as likely to be turned on by sexual images as men – study[/perfectpullquote]That is interesting, isn’t it?
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] The belief that men are more likely to get turned on by sexual images than women may be something of a fantasy, according to a study suggesting brains respond to such images the same way regardless of biological sex. The idea that, when it comes to sex, men are more “visual creatures” than women has often been used to explain why men appear to be so much keener on pornography. But the study casts doubt on the notion. “We are challenging that idea with this paper,” said Hamid Noori, co-author of the research from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Germany. “At least at the level of neural activity … the brains of men and women respond the same way to porn.” [/perfectpullquote]That would explain why hen reels have always been just as popular as the stag kind.
Except, of course, we do need to have a look at the details of what they’ve found:
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]The subjects were shown everyday images of people as well as erotic images while they lay inside a brain-scanning machine. Noori said all participants rated the sexual images as arousing before being scanned.[/perfectpullquote]Ah, no, they’ve not found an equality in the enjoyment of skin flicks, have they? They’ve found that the brain activity of sexual excitement is the same in both sexes.
For they’ve *started* with stuff that arouses people and seen how that arousal looks in the brain. What they’ve not done is test what arouses.
All very interesting stuff but not showing what The Guardian purports it does in the slightest.
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Surely they should be looking at hormonal responses not just which parts of the brain are firing? Arousal is after-all not an intellectual exercise but something much more physical, and its possible that for the same crude level of electrical activity male bodies generate far higher concentrations of the relevant hormones.
Areas of the brain can light up but produce different responses in men and women, and the areas lighting up may not even be "arousal" but simply recognition of a picture of sex say.
Unless they can stick a probe in the area and when stimulated men and women say "oh sexy!", this is just data, not conclusion.
Surely this will lead to the salvation of all sexual and gender identity crises - absolute scientifically measurable test of what sex and sexuality a person's brain is.