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Secrets of Female Sexual Arousal: A Complete Study
 Since those initial studies, Barlow and his collaborators have been trying to
tease apart the factors that distinguish men with and without sexual problems.
One of the key differences, he says, is that men with sexual arousal problems
tend to be less aware of how aroused they are.
Another difference has to do with how men react to instances when they can't
become aroused, says Barlow. "Males who are able to get aroused fairly easily
seem unfazed by occasions where they can't get aroused," he notes. "They tend to
attribute it to benign external events--it was something they ate, or they're
not getting enough sleep--not as characteristics of themselves." In contrast,
men with arousal problems tend to do just the opposite, thinking of every
instance of difficulty as a sign of a long-term internal problem, either
physiological or psychological, he says.
At the Kinsey Institute, Janssen and John Bancroft, MD, the institute's
director, have been developing a theoretical model and a set of measurement
tools that define sexual arousal as the product of excitatory and inhibitory
tendencies. Last year, they published papers in the Journal of Sex Research
(Vol. 39, No. 2) describing the Sexual Inhibition and Sexual Excitation Scale--a
new questionnaire that measures individual differences in the tendency to become
sexually inhibited and excited.
Early research on the model suggests that while a single factor accounts for all
of the variation among men in their tendency to become sexually excited (SES),
there are two inhibitory factors--one that represents inhibition due to the
threat of performance failure (SIS1) and one that represents inhibition due to
the threat of such performance consequences as an unwanted pregnancy or a
sexually transmitted disease (SIS2).
One implication is that people with different levels of SES, SIS1 and SIS2 will
respond differently to different kinds of stimuli, says Janssen. In one study,
for instance, Janssen, Bancroft and their collaborators found that people who
scored highly on SIS2 were less likely to be aroused by erotic films that
included threatening stimuli than people with low SIS2 scores.
"We believe that people who are high in inhibition-proneness are more vulnerable
to developing sexual problems, whereas those who are low are more likely to
engage in high-risk sexual behavior," says Janssen.
Physiological and subjective arousal
For most of the history of research on sexual arousal, studies involving women
have been much rarer than studies involving men. Recently, however, the gap has
started to narrow due to the work of psychologists such as Cindy Meston, PhD, of
the University of Texas at Austin, Julia Heiman, PhD, of the University of
Washington, and Ellen Laan, PhD, of the University of Amsterdam. Janssen and his
colleagues at the Kinsey Institute have also begun studying female arousal.
One of the most interesting results to come out of that work, researchers say,
is that there are significant differences between men and women in the
relationship between physiological and subjective arousal.
"What we find in research in males is there's a very high correlation between
their erectile response and how aroused they say they are," says Meston. "But in
women we get low, if any correlations."
In addition to being interesting from a scientific standpoint, the sex
difference could also have important implications for the treatment of female
sexual dysfunction, says Meston. Researchers have not yet been able to pinpoint
the source of the difference, she says, but some progress has been made.
Several explanations that once seemed likely candidates have been eliminated in
recent years. One of them is the idea that women are less likely than men to
talk honestly about their sexuality because of sexual taboos. But Meston says
she sees no evidence of reticence in the women who volunteer for her studies.
Another possibility is that erotic films might evoke negative emotions in women,
which could mask their arousal. But Laan and her collaborators at the University
of Amsterdam have found no evidence that such reactions can account for the
physiology-experience gap.
Meston and others suspect that the difference probably has something to do with
the fact that male genital arousal is simply easier to notice than female
genital arousal. Men also seem to be more attentive than women to all kinds of
physiological signals, not just sexual ones, says Janssen.
An open question is whether the resulting sex differences in the relationship
between physiological and subjective arousal are permanent, or whether they can
be changed through training. Meston says her lab is currently conducting a study
to find that out.
In 1559 Columbus�not Christopher but Renaldus�claims to have discovered the
clitoris. He tells his 'most gentle reader' that this is 'preeminently the seat
of woman�s delight.' Like a penis, 'if you touch it, you will find it rendered a
little harder and oblong to such a degree that it shows itself as a sort of male
member.' Conquistador of an unknown land, Columbus stakes his claim: 'Since no
one has discerned these projections and their workings, if it is permissible to
give names to things discovered by me, it should be called the love or sweetness
of Venus.' Like Adam, he felt himself entitled to name what he found in nature:
a female penis.
For years now, we�ve been hearing that men on average are sexually
target-specific, while women on average are not. In other words, if you show men
various kinds of pornography while having a little measuring device strapped to
their penises, those penises don�t get hard to every type of pornography;
instead, they seem to evince a distinct preference for either men or for women
as sexual �targets.� By contrast, if you insert a blood-flow measuring device
into women�s vaginas and show them various kinds of porn, well, they appear to
become aroused to just about everything sexual�men, women, monkeys, you name it.
This kind of research has been carried out in the lab of Northwestern University
Michael Bailey, beginning with the dissertation research of Meredith Chivers.
Bailey and Chivers and colleagues have subsequently done related studies
seemingly confirming these sex-specific findings. Bailey has gone so far as to
raise the possibility that women don�t have a sexual orientation, if we
understand (as he reasonably does) sexual orientation to mean orientation toward
that which arouses us.
Notably, life history studies, like those done by Lisa Diamond, seem to provide
real-life support to these laboratory findings: In terms of sexual orientation,
women appear to be more sexually fluid over their life courses�and to understand
themselves as more sexually fluid�than men.
The vagina is not the homologue to the penis. The penis's homologue is the
clitoris. The vagina comes from different embryological tissue altogether, so
why should we expect it to behave in a way that is comparable to the penis? The
reason the clitoris gets an erection when a woman is sexually excited, the
reason most women don't reach orgasm via their vaginas, is because the clitoris
is the organ that corresponds to the penis.
Study the vaginal response and not the clitoral response when doing a study
comparing the arousal patterns of males and females. First, they say they
haven�t had a device for studying clitoral response, and they�ve had one for
studying vaginal response. The second reason sex researchers say is that the
vagina is the route through which women conceive.
 It�s entirely possible that women�s vaginas lube up at the slightest
provocation. More than one sex researcher has suggested that this might be the
case because women have historically had to deal with sexual assault, and
automatic vaginal lubrication might protect them, to some degree, from injury
that would ultimately interfere with reproduction.That doesn�t mean that
automatic vaginal lubrication indicates arousal. It might just indicate a primal
sort of fear. Clitorises might tell us, as the female homologues to penises,
indicate more choosy mothers.
By way of analogy, a choosy mother might find her mouth automatically salivating
to both coffee and peanut butter, but given a more exacting test of her tastes,
we�ll find she really would rather have Jif than Joe. As it is, it seems as if
sex researchers have been doing the equivalent of comparing women�s salivary
responses to various foods to men�s gastric responses to those same foods.
Well, good news. Years ago, an international group of sex researchers working
out of the Netherlands managed to cleverly redesign the usual laboratory vaginal
measuring device to also measure the response of the clitoris. They even managed
to design one that did not require lab personnel to hold it to the subject; this
is one the subject can insert herself, alone in a laboratory test room. And what
did they find when they strapped women up to this elaborate little lap puppy?
The clitoral measurement approach �is a valuable additional tool, providing data
that the vaginal photoplethysmograph cannot: it proved sensitive to inhibition
of the sexual response, in contrast to the vaginal device.� Meaning? By
measuring the clitoris, the researchers were able to observe the women subjects�
downturn of arousal in response to being startled out of the moment. This was
not so observable with the vaginal device. (The researchers staged the
cold-shower moment by arranging a �problem� announcement over the intercom to
suddenly interrupt the porn-viewing moment.) This difference seems important,
no?
Moreover: �The inverse relationship between VPA [the vaginal response] and CBV
[the clitoral response] at moments of high sexual arousal suggests that VPA may
be a more automatic, preparatory response rather than a measure of genital
arousal per se.� In other words, their results suggest that, sure enough,
women�s arousal patterns may be a lot more specific�more like men�s�than the
vaginal measurements reveal. A woman�s vagina may indeed lubricate to sexual
signals from both Jif and Joe, and even Jif's monkey and Joe's dog, but her
clitoris might reveal that she is, in fact, much more aroused by Jif than any
other option. And if she�s in an environment that allows her a choice of sex
partner, that differential arousal may well matter to evolutionary history.
So is it true, as we've been told, that men are on average more sexually
target-specific than women? Maybe not in terms of arousal. Then how could we
explain the life histories that seem to show that women are on average more
sexually fluid than men? Maybe the truth is that women choose sex
partners�especially long-term partnerships from which surviving children may be
more likely to result�based less on immediate arousal than on other
considerations.
Women Fitness brings to its readers a deeper insight in the secrets of female
arousal.
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Dated 09 June 2015
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