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Huh.
Even after all these years, I still learn new things from Savage Love. Yay!
You never know until you ask.
But tell her BEFORE she finds out by accident--or through snooping--on her own, so you can discuss it and allay any concerns she may have that you're secretly a closeted homo.
There are several theories born from this. One is that women have evolved to be physically ready for sex quite easily, so as not to endure discomfort even if they weren't necessarily aroused mentally, which implies that most sex females had was non-consensual. There is also the thought that rather than just studying blood flow and moisture levels to indicate arousal, at least in females, studies might want to give credence to the idea that "it's not what's between your legs; it's what's between your ears." Maybe sex researchers should spend more time doing brain scans and less time showing women images of apes getting it on.
(I just can't help grinning when I say "panda porn." It just sounds so gosh darn cute! But it's all gay, I suppose. After all, two bears...)
That doesn't make any sense as far as evolution goes, because enduring discomfort during non-consensual sex doesn't make you die or make you less likely to reproduce. If something is unpleasant but you still reproduce as well as everyone else, selectional pressure doesn't tend to get rid of it. (E.g., we aren't evolving away from having menstrual cramps, because as much as they are unpleasant, they don't kill us or keep us from having babies.)
This study is fascinating (in both the Times report and the Journal article) and Chivers is definitely blazing new trails in the study of women's arousal.
Perhaps the issue isn't her discomfort, but his? Women who are more comfortable to rape get raped more often and thus have more kids, whereas women who are less comfortable to rape get raped less often and have fewer kids? Wow, evolutionary adaptation can really suck sometimes.
As an aside, I treat any "evolution" argument with a great deal of skepticism, since you can use "evolution" to explain just about any position. For instance, I could argue that women who are less likely to be rape targets are also less likely to be kicked out by their spouses, and thus their offspring are more likely to be cared for and live on to reproduce themselves. Ergo, being more "rapeable" is evolutionarily disadvantageous.
Women however don't have any reason to work at suppressing their physical arousal since it isn't so readily noticeable when fully clothed. Both men and women get messed up in the head when it comes to sex by our culture.
Or rather, sex happened at the male's initiative.
If it was really the subconscious suppressing arousal because of shame, then despite the clothing covering things up women would probably still get aroused less because when women are shamed for being sexually active it's directed at their desires and not the appearance of them having desire. There'd be no such thing as a girl who's had it drilled into her head her entire life that she shouldn't like certain guys, but then getting aroused by their presence.
Seriously though, how come when men have differing verbal and physiological responses they're "lying" but when women do the results are 'inconclusive"?
Turns out beard porn IS NOT a turn on.
And thanks to living in germany for 3 months when I was 17, I find arm pit hair on women sexy, but leg hair not so much. Too much info, I'm sure, but, hey, I'm on my 3rd beer at SFO waiting for a plane.
I'm not suggesting that anyone is lying. I do think that it is worth listening to what participants *say* they're aroused by, as well as testing for physiological changes.
I'm not male-bashing at all.
(and I did an exchange in Italy one semester...couldn't get used to seeing the women hanging onto the bus railing and thinking there was a hamster under their arms...so, um, I'll keep my Daisy Razor, thank you...)
>> Ultimately, though, Chivers [the scientist] spoke ... about female sexuality as divided between two truly separate, if inscrutably overlapping, systems, the physiological and the subjective. Lust, in this formulation, resides in the subjective, the cognitive; physiological arousal reveals little about desire.>>
Women's genitals may get turned on by almost anything (but, oddly, not by watching a "a chiseled man walking naked on a beach.") But that doesn't mean that the woman wants sex. As the article points out, women do get wet during actual rape, but that doesn't mean they want sex with that person. The science is driven by the goal of figuring out how to make women want more sex. But it doesn't seem like they've advanced very far toward that goal.
As to this answer, it's half good, half bad. Of course he should tell her. It's a harmless interest, and if she's such a great catch, why would she mind? But he shouldn't use an argument based on men misinterpreting female physical arousal as sexual interest, which feeds into justifications for rape ("she was asking for it, because her body was aroused") as a justification. And Dan should stop misinterpreting this study.
Don't lose it man ... try lifting your mind to a higher plane.
The girl was early twenties, blonde and fit, exercising naked on a white set. The man was early forties, he had a lot of body hair and a full beard, and a bit of a gut. Also, the film seemed to be home-video quality.
Now, I'm sure that both of these people are attractive, but the girl was much more conventional, and honestly I (a gay guy) preferred her.
But you'd be surprised at the things that can make you reproduce more or less well. Small genetic advantages that make you less tired, less depressed, more attractive, etc., can result in more total kids and grandkids, and can spread quickly through a population.
There have been studies of historical records showing that some pretty non-life-threatening factors can make a difference in how many children and grandchildren a woman has.
and what you're saying about this study.
I don't intend a male vs female dispute at all but rather a science vs "science" observation.
Yeah, some regard should be taken concerning the word of test subjects but how seriously do you (and I mean "you" in the universal sense, myself included, not the accusatory sense) take the word of homophobes who claim they're "not gay" yet get aroused by man on man video lovin'?.
All I'm sayin' is that we need some more ladies to watch bonobo porn and where do I sign up?
MUST WE CHOOSE?
"The science is driven by the goal of figuring out how to make women want more sex."
While I wouldn't oppose such a goal :-P I don't know of anything in the experiment which contained this goal. The experiment (which is described in "Sex At Dawn") seems to show that while self-described lesbians and all men showed arousal appropriate to their declared sexualities, self-identified straight women did not. The latter category showed arousal at a wide range of images, including "hot bonobo-on-bonobo action." Was the "goal" of the research to get straight women interested in bestiality?
Yeah, I can appreciate the beauty of a smooth female armpit as well. I haven't seen an actual hairy one in ages, even during subsequent visits to Europe.
An woman's unshaven armpit can be surprisingly feminine, though. It's her natural state. It's taboo. It's Un-American. There's something alluring in all of that.
But I'm a hypocrite when it comes to legs. I like them smooth.
>>> To account partly for the recent flourishing of research like Chivers’s, Heiman pointed to the arrival of Viagra in the late ’90s. Though aimed at men, the drug, which transformed the treatment of impotence, has dispersed a kind of collateral electric current into the area of women’s sexuality, not only generating an effort — mostly futile so far — to find drugs that can foster female desire as reliably as Viagra and its chemical relatives have facilitated erections, but also helping, indirectly, to inspire the search for a full understanding of women’s lust.
We had a joke:
How do you tell the bride from the groom at a Portuguese wedding? The bride's armpit hair is braided with ribbons.
Nothing at all against the Portuguese, they were great neighbours and a lot of fun.
The Kinsey scale tells us what the actual experience of the person is. People often use it to describe what they aspire to but it's not really meant to describe that.
0 -exclusively hetero
1 -hetero with incidental homo experience
2 -hetero with more than incidentally homo experience
3 -equally hetero/homo
4 -homo with more than incidentally hetero experience
5 -homo with incidental hetero experience
6 -exclusively homo
I am a Kinsey 2: 3 men and 7 women. My porn viewing has nothing to do with that record.
I would say that anyone with a 1-5 rating is bisexual. If we take the LW at his word he is a 0. He could easily become a 1 or higher but he seems rather defensive about not being homo at all. He doesn't seem to recognize the gradations of sexuality that Kinsey does. He has a 0 vs. 1 mindset.
I would suggest a theory of resource allocation. Animals often allocate different resources in to copulation events, dependant on how fit they deem the partner to be. In females this normally takes the role of putting few resources into the egg, in egg laying species. In males this is normally done by sperm number (and sperm size, but this does not vary by event within an individual). I would suggest that, in mammals, arousal is one of the key mechanism by which males both select mates and allocate sperm quantity. Whereas in female placental mammals it is almost impossible to allocate resources, because the cost of carrying a child is so high that taking a few nutrients back makes little difference. So, in females arousal is less of a mate selection and allocation device, and other more cognitive reasons for mate selection, like attraction or numerous other ways in which mates can be selected playing a more important role. This also ties in to another comment suggesting that there is a discrepancy between what women say they are attracted to and what arouses them.
Just an idea.
Our sex has evolved way beyond reproduction. Two things about us, our big brains and our highly cooperative social organization, make putting these things into an evolutionary context much trickier. They also make it difficult for me to believe that rape was ever de rigeur.
We use sex socially as well as reproductively. Women don't have to give away our genetic material when we have sex. Men do. We keep ours in our wombs when we're fertile.
That could explain why a man's sexual response would tilt more towards reproductive than a woman's. The men whose sex tilted more towards reproduction would have an advantage over the others to a point.
The men would be fighting to get to the perfect point between reproductive and non reproductive sex that maximized both how many children you have and your social standing with the reproductive benefits that affords. Women, on the other hand, would have the luxury of just getting turned on by every goddam thing.
I was talking about mate selection in the very narrow and genetic fitness orientated sense. I wasn't disagreeing with the content of your post, just trying to contextualise mine, which I did poorly.
I agree, it is very interesting to discuss the wider ramifications, I am certainly no expert.
But what I am wondering is how does that explain non-straight male's highly-specified preferences? If men's sexual tastes are much more specific and women's are much more generalized, regardless of orientation, then breeding success, evolutin and heritibility only account for modern-day straight males' strong preference for straight porn. Why is male sexuality so much more specific across the board? Could it be something socialized or is it something hard-wired? Gay males have no evolutionary precedence to singularly prefer gay porn and yet the study says that they do.
Poor kid's brain has been muddled by the grammar nazis. I'm sure he can think straight and talk straight, but when it comes to writing ... He's obviously had a whom-Hitler as a teacher.
How about this?
"Men evolved to be stronger than women because men who raped women and abused their wives found it easier to force them to stay in their homes and produce children"
Or maybe, "Evolution in modern days selects for the uneducated and the conservative because they have the most children..."
Or, the ever popular:
"White people evolved to be smarter than black people because they lived in more complex environments where food was not as easy to acquire or preserve..."
Wow! Science is EASY! Isn't evolutionary speculation fun? Let's all make up reasons for things, together! :) :) :)
The great thing about evolution is that it is accessible to everyone, a large portion of it is logic, as long as the information, or studies, you base it on are correct.
So fuck you, science is for everyone, not some small elite group of people.
But what conclusions can we draw from this? That women are randy, lustful creatures, who are lying when they claim not to want sex with some man, or woman, or bonobo? Or that we can't understand what women want from how they respond vaginally?
I'd say if she seems surprised, THEN he should direct her to the article.
Whatever lifts your luggage, that's what I say.
Interestingly, the LW didn't post what type of gay porn he likes. Maybe it's S&M, B&D, humiliation porn of some sort, and he gets off on imagining himself in the "victim's" position. Or he sees himself as the dom? Or there's some sort of high school testosterone locker room thing being triggered subconsciously. Who knows. But the type of gay porn he watches, if it's specific, could be illuminating.
Interesting. In order to generalize these findings beyond the specific actors in the videos, the study would need samples of different actors matched by ratings of attractiveness. The results they report only tell us sexual responsiveness to those specific people and chimps.
It's an interesting topic of study, though. They should fix the methodology, and run it again.
Two points: First, I really have no desire to be with a guy in real life, so I know where LW is coming from. Show me 100 women - I would sleep with most willingly. Show me 100 guys and none of them do it for me.
Second - and with credit to the Slogger who coined the "one drop rule:" One drop of black blood means your black and one gay porn movie makes you gay. Or so some people would judge. So depending on your girlfriends outlook, disclosing your fetish for gay porn might make her suspicious of your desire to cruise, even though it would never happen.
I tend to disagree with Dan. Unless, you are sure your girlfirend is going to shrug off your taste for gay porn, I would chalk it up to one of those quirks that we keep from our significant other to keep the peace and the illusion of relationships. Unless I am grossly underestimating the average woman, most wouldn't feel too secure if they knew their husband was tugging it to asian teenage porn, let alone muscle bear gang bang videos.
Doesn't the tech savvy youth know how to turn on private browsing??
A proactive disclosure lets him be in charge and set the context: "I enjoy all kinds of porn - including this kind."
The LW makes it pretty clear that watching gay porn is an important part of his sexuality. I think that hiding any important part of one's sexuality from one's intimate partner is a mistake. She's going to find out eventually - better she do so early, and on his terms.
Dude, wtffff are you talking about? "Women who are more comfortable to rape"? That doesn't make even the slightest bit of sense. Rape isn't about "comfort," it's about males' aggression towards, and domination over someone else. You're making rape about the WOMAN, when it's really about the man. No woman ever wants to be raped, or is "comfortable" getting or being raped. End of story.
@72 - I agree, but boring gay porn is just as bad as boring straight porn, except that in boring gay porn there's a better chance of seeing at least one hot naked man. I would totally love to date a guy who would want to watch gay porn with me (most guys can't seem to extrapolate from their interest in watching girl-girl porn to a straight woman's interest in watching guy-guy porn).
Lots of theories out there about this, from the simple to the torturous, but for me, it's the old dollar bill theory (TM Thebratqueen) -- one dollar bill? Good. Two dollar bills? Better :)
Go back and read the comment again, then read the comments to which I was responding. I'm not saying what you think I'm saying.
Also, you may not want to be so quick in pulling the trigger on your anti-rape diatribe. I realize you just attended a few lectures where you learned how horrible rape is and shit, and you want to express your shiny new enlightenment whenever you can. Understand that some of us got the memo decades ago.
I read your comment multiple times, and it doesn't make sense.
"Women who are more comfortable to rape get raped more often and thus have more kids, whereas women who are less comfortable to rape get raped less often and have fewer kids?"
...What does this even mean? How can anyone be "more comfortable to rape"? Do you mean they FEEL more "comfortable" to the man who's raping them? Or do you mean they are more (psychologically, physically) comfortable (somehow) when they are raped, as compared with other women?
I was responding to the above statement (which once again doesn't make sense), as well as the comment about "women who are less likely to be rape targets." The latter was where I discussed my "anti-rape diatribe" (btw, how is anything other than pro-rape sentiment NOT "anti-rape diatribe"?), and merely pointed out that a woman being a "less likely rape target" is basically impossible, since women don't cause rape; men do.
Also, you "realize" nothing. (Especially about me).
I assumed you were a college student and just needed more experience. That was the more charitable interpretation. If you want to assert decades of experience in the face of your inability to parse a basic conversation, that's your prerogative. It really doesn't make you look any more knowledgeable, though. Kinda the opposite.
Rather than responding with your holier-than-thou diatribe, maybe you could explain what exactly you were trying to say when you referred to "women who are more comfortable to rape." (You still haven't explained what you meant by that).
Also, making assumptions and judgments about a person and their education/age/intellect rather than responding to their point doesn't make you appear any more knowledgeable than I may appear (based on my two comments) to you.
So, do you care to explain what you meant by the quote I referenced earlier? I'm curious to know what you mean.