But the study fails to take into account a few factors that might complicate its all-women-are-a-tiny-bit-gay hypothesis. Sexual desire, arousal, and identity are all complicated forces that often conflict with each other when it comes to women. They responded to the level of activity.”Īnd yet, ensuing headlines on Chivers’s research did not read, “Science says women are all kinda into monkeys.” “For heterosexual women, gender didn’t matter. “Women physically don’t seem to differentiate between genders in their sex responses, at least heterosexual women don’t,” Chivers told the New York Times. Chivers hooked participants up to a photoplethysmograph, a tiny flashlight that measures blood flow to their genitals, and found that women responded physiologically to videos of masturbation, couples making love, women with women, men with men, men with women, and monkey with monkey. Perhaps the most prominent study on women’s sexual fluidity is Meredith Chivers’s research from 2008, which found that women were turned on by just about everything, including footage of bonobos doin’ it. For this reason, when someone asks me to describe my sexuality, I often respond not with a word, but with a haiku : Of course, this is far from the first study to suggest that women’s genitals are unpredictable, like sexual tyrannosauruses.
While the lesbians were found to be much more attracted to women, pupil-wise, results showed that all the participants were at least a little bit turned on by other ladies, even if they identified as fans of the wang. In gay-woman’s terms, I think of things like: How prominent were their chain wallets? Did they ride a motorcycle to the study? To determine what the women were aroused by, Rieger and his team showed participants videos of naked men and women and then analyzed their responses, using predictors such as pupil dilation and genital arousal. Rieger surveyed 345 female participants, wondering if there was a connection between sexual orientation and “nonsexual behaviors and characteristics” - in layman’s terms, one’s masculine or feminine presentations. What’s going on here?Īccording to lead researcher Gerulf Rieger from the University of Essex, “Even though the majority of women identify as straight, our research clearly demonstrates that when it comes to what turns them on, they are either bisexual or gay, but never straight.” Straight women have been rejecting my offers to split an Awesome Blossom at Chili’s for more than a decade. For women who have already confirmed they are into women (like me), the results leave me with more questions than answers. In a twist confirming the plotline of many porn films made for straight men, a new study claims that when it comes to arousal, all women are at least a little bit into women.
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