what about men?

I would be interested in this study being redone with a different method for reporting arousal. I have a feeling that allowing the women to verbally report their arousal may lead to a response bias due to what they perceive as “normal”. In other words, the women may not report when they are aroused due to homosexual or non-vaginal intercourse because they do not want people to think they are odd. Perhaps some sort of electrode system that measures activity in a part of the brain could be used.

Mary Roach wrote about this in her book “BONK,” where the women (she included) had something inserted into their vagina to measure the arousal, and also to fill out a questionnaire afterwards. Both results were explained, mostly that women would respond to most any sex happening on screen but mentally be most responsive to watching couples of their own sexual orientation.

Yep.

It just so happens that I am in possession of just such a device. The best part about it is that it’s fairly portable, and I can usually carry it around in my pants without arousing too much suspicion. This enables me to perform on-the-spot analysis of female sexual arousal in real-time, the only disadvantage being that the device must be repeatedly removed and re-inserted into the vagina in order to keep it turned on (I’ve assigned a few grad students the hands-on job of addressing this issue, though little progress has been made thus far). We have already submitted our latest results to Science and Nature.

what about cunnilingus? that’s what does it for me…

Thanks for clearing that up Kris, I had a feeling that might be the case.

LOL @ Kris

what about female homosexual “behavior”?

Well, having the camera man BACK UP A FEW STEPS would be a good start. NO woman wants to see scary things up close. It’s all in the hips!

Surely it also depends on the sexual orientation of the women being studied and also their own personal experiences/fantasy?

I think research like this is a step in the right direction. I agree with Rob H above about the self-reporting problem. I do have a bone to pick with the small sample size. But my biggest problem is that the study is primarily concerned with heterosexual women. There were some bisexuals, 19%, which is great to see, incidentally, as bi visibility is always refreshing. But there were NO self-reported lesbians in the sample, so their conclusions do not apply to “women” in general. All of the subjects liked men to some extent, besides an unknown 4% who did not report an orientation, and yet the study makes conclusions about “women” in general, not specifically about hetero and bi women. So the sample itself is a self-fulfilling prophesy–women who like dudes will likely like watching sex with dudes.