The Psychophysiology of Sex

General Discussion

General Discussion Kevin McKenna: I have a general comment for both Meredith and Michael, especially since both of them were interested in the idea of the speci¤city of what is arousing about the images. It seems like there is another psychophysiological measure that would be really helpful and that’s eye movement. It is really pretty easy now to measure eye movements, and you can measure exactly what somebody is looking at and for how long. I think you might be able to detect deliberate distraction strategies from it. There’s a large amount of literature about eye movement control operating on a largely subconscious, or nonconscious, level, and this might be a very useful thing in addition to subjective reports and genital measures. You can¤nd out what people are really interested in by how much time they spend looking at genitals versus looking at something else. I think it would be really useful and it’s not that hard anymore and not ridiculously expensive either. Jim Geer: I want to respond just brie®y to some of Ray’s comments. He asked whether we have looked at other aspects of gender differences, like sports, and so on. The answer to that is, not to my knowledge. We use as control words in our research another domain, the kitchen domain, which involves kitchen appliances, and I really don’t think that there’s a gender difference there, but it’s an interesting and reasonable question. What do I think, you asked, about the difference of biological versus cultural in®uences on networks? Well, language is cultural, in the sense that we learn English or French or German or Spanish. But if we were to look at some of the literature, many people think basic language mechanisms are wired in. I don’t know that we can say anything about looking at that level. It would be very nice if we could, but I’m not optimistic that we have the methodology at this point. And you wondered about generality of this stuff. The only thing I can speak to is the fact that these networks do make predictions concerning the sexual orientation of the individual as well as the gender of the individual, which suggests to me some external validity, although it’s not been looked at in clinical populations, which would be interesting. Walter Everaerd: This is related to the question about sex differences. 496 In a priming study where we measured recognition times for men and women in reaction to sexual stimuli, we found, preovulatory, a greater sensitivity to these stimuli in women, while postovulatory, reaction times to reproduction-relevant stimuli were longer. In men you don’t ¤nd that. So there are gender differences that are dependent on hormonal and endocrine factors. Heather Hoffmann: I think the obvious question for me is the etiology of target speci¤city. Are we talking about a predisposition? Perhaps not exclusively , but potentially also some learning mechanisms could be involved, and why would they or how would they be different between men and women? Meredith Chivers: It’s a fascinating question and in the paper that Mike and I wrote, I started speculating about this a little bit. Roy Baumeister recently published an article looking at sex differences and sex drive, or the concept of sex drive, and concluded that there were reasonable data to show that men do have a higher sex drive than women. If this is true, perhaps awareness of sexual arousal is linked to a higher sex drive. Therefore in women, who typically aren’t as aware of their physical arousal as men, physical sexual arousal may not be an important factor in any learning process because the perceived levels of arousal are not substantially different between different sexual stimuli. My data show that, indeed, the levels of genital arousal women experience are not substantially different, suggesting again that any learning process involved in the development of sexual preferences is likely not dependent on a relatively static factor like genital arousal. And as to the etiology, who knows? We really don’t know what’s going on. Certainly what I’m proposing is that, for women, there is little differentiation in genital arousal between types of sexual stimuli and that a nonspeci¤c response pattern is an adaptive mechanism. (The byproduct of nonspeci¤c and automatic genital arousal is lubrication, which protects the genital tract during intercourse.) But I don’t know how a learning...