July 2, 2013
Incredibly, women attached to a machine that tracked their vaginal arousal (through engorgement of blood and moisture seeping through the vaginal walls), showed that they were indeed aroused by watching bonobo monkeys have sex. But when questioned, the women reported they were not aroused. In the same study, straight, gay and bisexual women all appeared to show arousal at watching videos of gay men having sex, straight intercourse, lesbian sex and naked women doing calisthenics. They reported in each account experiencing less desire than their body’s responses showed (except in the case of straight women watching heterosexual sex where they reported more arousal than their body showed).*
One of the conclusion of the study were that women are not recognizing arousal in their body due to so many cultural filters and judgements that can intercept the arousal pathway from the vagina to the head.
The judgment of what is acceptable sexuality and makes a woman a “good girl” versus a ” bad girl” is so profoundly internalized. Body and sexual shaming is so prevalent at every turn that it is entirely possible women have stopped hearing their body’s cues of arousal. Any stirrings of arousal are put through a rigorous internalized cultural lens of judgement. In judging arousal we extinguish it.
Straight men hooked up to a similar test showed arousal while watching women having sex together and straight intercourse but experienced no arousal when watching bonobos or gay men together. Gay men experienced no arousal watching women or bonobos but plenty of arousal watching men be sexual together. They reported what their body’s responded to accurately. Some might say that men have an external barometer from a young age of their own erection, so it is easy to notice whether they are turned on or not and that makes it easier to recognize their own arousal honestly. Men also live in a culture that supports their sexuality. I’m not saying its all easy for men, but we do understand that men being sexual makes them a stud, which gains them social status, while parallel behavior in women may gain women the title of “slut” instead, and with that judgement the idea that their value as a woman has decreased. Growing up in a culture that asserts, subtly and overtly, that being sexual can decrease your value as a human can lead to a woman distrusting, shutting off and suppressing her own sexual arousal for fear of the social consequences acting on it could incur for her.
What I love about this study is the inkling that perhaps women are really turned on by a huge variety of sexual stimulus, and they just don’t know it.
Perhaps it is not that it is “harder for women to get turned on”, but that perhaps it is just harder to accept that they are turned on.
The quest for women of navigating the neural pathways of desire from between their legs, to their mind, accepting it, owning it and expressing it is certainly a long and winding path that she can allow or block.
This idea that women’s bodies and minds are not always unified, not through any fault of their own but due to hundreds of years of conditioning about what they are supposed to feel or do in order to be deemed valuable by others is useful for women to know.**
Perhaps if we understood that as women, we don’t fully know what our bodies are turned on by.
If we arm ourselves with this information we could choose to start a new era of connecting with our bodies with a spirit of total curiosity about what our bodies are turned on by.
If we begin to pay exquisite attention to our physical responses, we may notice when arousal appears, and it may surprise us when our mind doesn’t agree.
Feeling arousal does not mean we have no choice in how we act on our arousal, it just means we are aroused.
It is unlikely any of the women wanted to have sex with bonobo’s but that watching something so similar to human sex merely made them feel sexual.
If we begin to recognize when arousal occurs between our legs and know that it might not be when we expect it, and get curious about it instead of judge it we could make a little more space for our vast erotism to breathe a little more freely.
When we begin to soften our own internalized judgment or practice holding other people’s values at bay long enough that we can begin to hear our body’s call over our minds opinions long enough to recognize our own arousal.
Only then can the lock of the constraints of cultural shaming begins to loosen.
That is when the distance from our own wetness to our hearts and minds becomes a direct pathway, dripping in our own compassion for ourselves.
Know that the maps of your desire are still to be written, explored and discovered.
They begin to be uncovered only by us, in the privacy of our body, as we pay attention to our quickening pulse.
Become an explorer, trying on the idea that you don’t know fully what you are turned on by and life starts getting much more interesting.
Do you notice your own judgment about yourself sexually? Have you ever noticed that moment of internalized shaming and chosen to be compassionate with yourself instead? Did anything open up for you?
With love,
Charlotte Mia Rose
*These are studies from Meredith Chivers. A pyschology professor at Queen’s University in Ontario, “a highly regarded scientist and a member of the editorial board of the world’s leading journal of sexual research, Archives of Sexual Behavior.” There is more about this study in a New York Times article here.
The genitals of the volunteers were connected to plethysmographs — for the men, an apparatus that fits over the penis and gauges its swelling; for the women, a little plastic probe that sits in the vagina and, by bouncing light off the vaginal walls, measures genital blood flow. An engorgement of blood spurs a lubricating process called vaginal transudation: the seeping of moisture through the walls. The participants were also given a keypad so that they could rate how aroused they felt.
** Of course there are a whole myriad of other factors as well. Some that will be covered through this blog over time.
July 4, 2013