The Sex Myth: Why Everything We're Told Is Wrong (2 page)

But there is a growing hunger for the truth. More and more people are questioning whether what they see in the papers is reality, and whether the gut feelings they’ve been told to give way
to are real. Look behind the numbers reported in the media and you’ll see what they really mean. Dig that bit deeper below the surface and you’ll discover more information than ever
before. What you thought you knew often turns out to be what you didn’t know at all.

This book will be looking at some of the most persistent myths about sex and sexuality, and examining the evidence that supports and rejects the stories we hear every day.
It’s a step up from trying to peek under the changing-room door – and hopefully a lot more illuminating.

1

S
ex is everywhere. Sex sells. Sex is a biological urge, a natural part of life, and the most fun you can have without laughing – though
it’s even better if you do. Sex is a beautiful thing between two people . . . and between five it’s fantastic.

Or is it? For as many times as sex is painted as a natural, enjoyable activity, it’s also portrayed as something women use to get things from men, or put up with in a relationship, or
don’t really enjoy. Over and again men are stereotyped as slaves to their desires – and women are stereotyped as disinterested schemers who only use their erotic powers as a path to
domestic bliss.

Porn and erotic entertainment are presumed to appeal only to men, and women just want the relationship. Even in homosexual relationships it’s assumed gay men are all into anonymous sex,
and gay women just want to build nests together. It’s a broad generalisation, and not even really true. So, where on earth has this myth come from?

Consider the output of the amusingly named Cambridge Women’s Pornography Cooperative. Their work, including the book
Porn
for Women
, largely consists of images
of fully clothed men dusting, washing dishes, and tidying up. Why? Because, according to the publisher’s blurb, ‘A world where clothes get folded just so, delicious dinners await, and
flatulence is just not that funny . . . is porn that will leave women begging for more!’ While a certain amount of the book is no doubt ironic, it also says a lot about widespread assumptions
regarding women and sex. In other words, women couldn’t possibly be turned on by images of sex, and what they really want is . . . a man maid.

Of course, women wouldn’t actually be turned on by something as simplistic as an image of an excited naked man . . . or would they? We’re used to thinking of men as being the visual
ones. Women’s sexual response is a function not of physical lust but of emotional arousal, right?

When it comes to what triggers lust, there are some things you hear over and over: men are visually stimulated, women aren’t. Men will chase anyone, women are more discriminating.

The majority of pornography consumers are men, and so are the customers of strip clubs. Male clients of prostitutes far outnumber female clients. There is no equivalent to lads’ magazines
like
Nuts
and
Zoo
marketed for women, and most attempts to emulate such things have failed utterly. Page Seven Fellas, the
Sun
’s beefcake counterpart to their topless
Page Three Girls, was distinctly short-lived.

The idea that male sexuality is predominantly visual while women’s is not is taken as self-evident.

Hence the Cambridge Women’s Pornography Cooperative, with their soft-focus images of stereotypically handsome men lighting candles and drawing the bath being presented as ‘porn that
will leave women begging for more’. Women’s desire has been ceded as a territory so unknown it is presumed to exist only in the mind, and only in a state of emotional contentment. So,
instead of hot scenes of sex, women get domestic chores being served up as a suitable substitute for the naked body. And women who are always ‘up for it’? As rare as unicorns.

But while the popular assumption is that female desire is something unknowable, alchemical, difficult to pin down . . . increasing volumes of research in human sexuality are showing
otherwise.

At Northwestern University in Illinois, J Michael Bailey and his research colleagues conduct experiments into the practicalities of arousal. Traditional research hands out
questionnaires about romantic and sexual preferences and that’s all. Bailey’s group doesn’t just rely on people self-reporting their sexual likes and dislikes – it also
measures genital response. After all, what someone says they like can be influenced by any number of factors: discomfort with admitting to being turned on, or a desire to be seen as
‘normal’. Our disinclination to be perfectly honest when discussing sex is high. Even in the laboratory setting and even when anonymity is assured.

It’s their results with women that are especially interesting. The difference between what women report is turning them on and what is actually getting their bodies to respond, is
significant. We may think we know what turns people on, but the data are giving researchers a very different picture.

Previous studies of men and sexual orientation showed that, in general, male responses are straightforward. Heterosexual men respond strongly to heterosexual porn, and weakly to homosexual porn.
For gay men, it’s the opposite: gay porn turns them on; the hetero stuff, not so much. So, for men, the psychological and physiological desires are in sync – what turns them on is also
what they report enjoying emotionally.

This is so reliable in men, in fact, that detecting physical arousal has even been used to accurately identify men who are ‘still in the closet’ – the ones who have homosexual
desires but are not yet willing to admit to them.

This pattern of male physical response could be partly to do with the obviousness of their arousal. Men get erections. It’s clear to other people. But, more importantly, it’s clear
to the men. There is a direct, observable connection between a man’s physical response and his level of sexual interest. Associating the two in his mind? It’s easy. It’s also
undeniable.

The assumption that women lack interest in sex may start, partly, with anatomical differences. When we look at male and female bodies, there are obvious differences. Men, with outwardly placed
genitalia, come with an external signal of when they’re turned on. You know it. They know it. The whole world knows it. Women, on the other
hand, don’t come with
such an obvious sign. Male desire is apparent, whereas for reasons as much to do with cultural norms as biology, both sexes can be unclear about a woman’s sexual signals.

This is something of a double-edged sword. It isn’t always apparent when women are turned on, so you could assume they aren’t. On the other hand, the ambiguity does perhaps give
women the upper hand as
providers
of eroticism.

Consider strippers, for instance. Why is it that female strippers are far more successful than their male counterparts? There are far more women in stripping than there are men, and the women
can earn much more. The usual assumption is that this is because men have stronger libidos and a greater desire to see the opposite sex naked. But could it be something else entirely? After all, a
woman taking off her clothes for the entertainment of men is erotically ambiguous. She could theoretically be aroused, and the arousal of others is, in its turn, arousing to the viewer. In other
words, women are able to fake it.

A man stripping for the enjoyment of women, however, is less ambiguous. It is obvious even before the quick-release hot pants come off whether a male stripper is actually turned on by the
situation he’s in. If he isn’t erect – and male strippers generally aren’t – he is as sexless as a Ken doll. The signals of the potential partner being turned on, and
thus turning on the viewer, are all but absent. Hard abs are simply no substitute.

This difference between signs of men’s and women’s arousal may also affect porn. Women are the high earners, and their orgasmic performances may or may not be genuine. Men, on the
other hand, are paid a lot less, and the pressure to deliver the authentic goods? Pretty high. The same goes for prostitution: women can fake it until the client makes it – guys can’t.
And in the high end of sex work, a call girl will have more work and higher pay than her male counterparts.

So, it seems that at least part of the assumption that women don’t really enjoy sex is based on the observation that they don’t necessarily have to be in the mood to have it. In
other words, it may be a stereotype based on the possibility that someone
could
be lying, on feeling potentially insecure about how interested the other party is.

Until recently, the studies matching physical arousal to reported sexual preferences were not done on women. The assumption was that
for women, as for men, what they said
they enjoyed was exactly the same as what their bodies responded to. But without the corresponding data on physical arousal, there was no actual way of knowing. ‘Women’s sexuality has
been far more neglected than men’s in scientific research,’ Bailey has said.
¹
And when women were examined, the difference in the results was
startling.

One of the experiments conducted by Bailey and his colleagues at Northwestern recruited people with strong preferences for a particular sex of partner. In other words, the study included
heterosexuals and homosexuals, but not bisexuals. The subjects were presented with films depicting male-male, female-female, and male-female scenes of oral and penetrative sex. The subjects
submitted both to objective measurement of genital arousal as well as self-reporting their responses for comparison.
²

Participants ranked the films in order of how aroused they felt watching them. The heterosexual women in the study ranked male-male films the lowest, followed by female-female in the middle, and
finally female-male films the highest. But when the genital arousal data were compared to these rankings, something interesting emerged.

It turned out that the genital engorgement data told a completely different story from what straight women were putting on paper. They claimed male-male porn interested them the least, but
looking at the physical response, male-male and female-female films ranked similarly – and very high. On paper, straight women ranked heterosexual pairings as the most arousing . . . but
their physical response while watching these films was actually
lower
than with the other types of films. Straight women were getting more physically turned on watching homosexual pairings,
even films with no women in them at all, than they were by straight scenes. By contrast, over 90 per cent of men showed higher genital arousal for the films that corresponded to their preferred
partnerships.

Challenging preconceptions is a huge task, and results that contradict the prevailing assumptions rarely get media coverage. So, while you hear all the time that men and women are turned on by
different things, what you rarely hear is that women respond to visual stimuli too.

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis measured the brainwave activity of 264 women viewing a series
of slides. The pictures contained various
scenes from water skiers to snarling dogs to undressed couples in sensual poses. What did they find? That when the women viewed erotic pictures, their brains produced electrical responses that were
stronger than when looking at the other pictures. This difference in brainwave response emerged very quickly, suggesting different neural circuits are involved in processing erotic
images.
³
Women, in other words, are susceptible to the visual. It’s not only men.

Repeated studies by other research groups support these conclusions. Studies also show that women are consistently physically turned on by gay porn even when they’re not gay, and that
they’re turned on by hetero porn too. They also respond to footage of some of our closest animal relatives, bonobos, mating. And interestingly, even when they identify themselves as
heterosexual, women’s physiological response to images of sex is wide-ranging. It’s not category specific like men’s.
⁴

Why are these results so different from popular assumptions about women? ‘I think that the earlier impression was probably formulated from intuition. You would expect that somebody would
show the greatest amount of physical responding to the things that correspond with what they say they like,’ said scientist Meredith Chivers, commenting publically on the work. And since
previously only men had been tested, there was no data that challenged the assumption. It certainly throws a spanner into the belief that most women don’t like or even respond to porn and
other erotic imagery.

Dr Chivers, who began her career in Bailey’s research group at Northwestern, is particularly interested in the mysteries of female sexual arousal. She agrees that the research about
men’s preferences matching their physical responses was erroneously applied to women in the past: ‘I think that those [male] findings were then extended to women, but the research
I’ve done has shown that model of sexual interest and sexual response doesn’t work for women.’

Data showing the reality to be somewhat different from the myth is also backed up by other kinds of studies. Until recently, it was a lot harder to get your hands on erotic images without going
into licensed adult shops to buy it. These shops were perceived as unwelcoming and unfriendly to women, and had a mostly deserved reputation for being unsavoury places. Things began to change with
the expansion of Ann
Summers, which had originally been a chain of more traditional sex shops. The company started the trend in the 1980s for women-only home parties, where
women could buy sex toys and other adult materials surrounded by their close friends and in familiar spaces.