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. 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.
“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. “For heterosexual women, gender didn’t matter. They responded to the level of activity.”
And yet, ensuing headlines on Chivers’s research did not read, “Science says women are all kinda into monkeys.”
Sexual desire, arousal, and identity are all complicated forces that often conflict with each other when it comes to women. But the study fails to take into account a few factors that might complicate its all-women-are-a-tiny-bit-gay hypothesis. The first is that women exhibit
arousal nonconcordance, which is a sexy way of saying there is only a 10 percent overlap between what a woman’s genitals (or pupils) are doing and her subjective level of arousal. Ten percent! With men, their genitals respond somewhat predictably with their subjective arousal, that is 50 percent of the time. So half the time a man gets an erection, it’s due to something he finds sexually appealing, and the other half of the time, it’s a willy-nilly willy. But with women, 90 percent of the time, her body and brain are on completely different wavelengths. In other words, a woman’s genitals respond to ANY stimuli it deems sexually relevant (hence, chimp fucking), but it doesn’t mean women necessarily find that stimuli sexually appealing (or secretly want to act on it).
Arousal nonconcordance is one of the reasons that simply prescribing Viagra to women doesn’t work. In both men and women, Viagra increases blood flow to the genitals, but just because there’s activity going on down there in women, it doesn’t mean anything’s going on up here, in our brains, which is incredibly important to women actually becoming aroused, as opposed to simply lubricated or exhibiting “ecstasy eyes.”
