The Sex Myth: Why Everything We're Told Is Wrong (3 page)

The Ann Summers strategy of making the experience a familiar and comfortable one worked for them on the high street as well, as their chain expanded into 139 brightly lit, female-friendly stores
in the UK.
⁵
Other ‘adult superstores’ and similar businesses soon followed. Suddenly, buying porn, sexy toys, and racy lingerie was seen as
something women could do without undue embarrassment or being perved on by creeps.

But it’s actually the availability of sex toys, porn, and other adult services on the internet that has been the greatest equaliser. How do we know? Because of internet search engines,
like Google. Search engines record the patterns of what their users look for, with very good cross-referenced information about the age and sex of the people using their services. With Google
making their results available to search, some surprising patterns in what men and women are looking at start to emerge.

Google search statistics for 2006 show that terms such as ‘porn’, ‘free porn’, and ‘playboy’ are more likely to be entered by men than by women (96 per cent,
97 per cent, and 86 per cent male users, respectively). So far, so stereotype. Men outnumber women, but only slightly, for searches of ‘adult DVD’, ‘XXX videos’, and
‘sex toys’. The search terms ‘sex’, ‘sex chat’, and ‘sexy’? Interestingly, those ones are equally as likely to be entered by women as they are by
men. But then the surprise – women are
more
likely to type the search terms ‘adult sex’, ‘free sex’, and ‘cyber sex’ into the search engine than men
are.
⁶

In the privacy of one’s home, at the computer, even what little stigma might arise from wandering into a friendly mainstream shop like Ann Summers is non-existent. It would seem that, once
free of the worry of who might see them doing it, women are indeed interested in sex and erotica.

SEX! Now that I have your attention . . .

When I was at university, this was by far the most popular advertising ruse for the thousands of fliers littering campus. Whether
advertising for a housemate or an upcoming
event,
SEX!
was emblazoned on notices posted all over the place – even ones in the women-only dorms. A few wags tried
PIZZA!
for a couple of weeks as an alternative
attention-getter. It didn’t have the same impact. They soon returned to the sexy standard.

But even if sex is as much an attention-getter for women as it is for men, do they process it in the same way? After all, genital response patterns vary between the sexes. Perhaps attention
patterns vary too.

As it turns out, that’s exactly the case – with data showing women don’t just physically respond to categories of porn in a different way to men, they watch it differently
too.

As far as sexual paraphernalia go, the eye-tracking device ranks low on consumer appeal. You’d never see it topping the sales figures at Ann Summers or featuring in a
Playboy
centrefold shoot. But as a tool for assessing attention and focus in test subjects, it’s the Rampant Rabbit of the research world. Its importance is in being able to measure what people are
looking at, and how long they look. With the combination of a laptop screen and an eye-tracking headset, experimenters can use software to determine where in a photo catches a test subject’s
attention and how long they spend looking at an image.

With a growing body of evidence to show that women and men do not respond to visual erotica in the same way – but that they do, definitely, respond – one intriguing question is,
what exactly are they looking at?
After all, the different results in what men and women find arousing might come from the different ways in which they are viewing and processing images.

A number of groups have looked into this area. Unfortunately, several of the studies did not use the same images when testing men and women, which makes the results impossible to compare. If you
show women photos of naked vs clothed men, and show men pictures of naked vs clothed women, all that will demonstrate is whether people prefer to look at nudes (unsurprisingly, yes, that’s
exactly what they prefer).
⁷
It doesn’t answer the question of how men and women respond to the
same
stimuli.

A research group in Atlanta set out to do just that. Digital photos of oral sex and intercourse were downloaded from the internet.
Researchers rated the photos for overall
attractiveness to come up with seventy-two test images – the ones considered most attractive. Not a bad day’s work in the lab, if you ask me.

Both men and women were recruited to look at the same set of photos. Participants were hooked up to the eye tracker while they looked at the seventy-two test images. They could look for as long
as they liked before pressing a key to continue to the next. They were allowed to stop if they felt uncomfortable.

One interesting feature of this study is that women on hormonal birth control (HBC) were analysed separately from other women. Hormonal birth control, such as the pill, works by mimicking the
state of the body in pregnancy, causing the ovaries to stop releasing eggs. The hormonal fluctuations that would ordinarily be experienced by women are dampened, and they show lower, less variable
patterns of sexual motivation than women going through the natural cycle. If the body thinks it has already conceived, then the factors influencing sexual attraction will be significantly altered.
This is something that has already long been noted in studies looking at differences in mate choice between HBC and non-HBC women. So what did the results show?

The researchers did not find much difference between men and both HBC and non-HBC women in how they subjectively rated each photo on attractiveness, nor did they find differences between
men’s and women’s viewing times. This is inconsistent with the common myth that men find visual stimuli more engaging, since if you believed that, you would expect men to spend more
time looking at the pictures. But what did differ were the areas of the images on which the men and women were focusing.

When comparing men, women on birth control, and women not on birth control, researchers noticed diverging patterns between the groups. Tracking eye movement over the screen revealed that men
spent more time looking at female faces, and were more likely than either group of women to do so.
⁸

But it was the non-HBC women, not the men, who had a truly roving eye. Those women who were not on birth control and therefore experiencing more natural hormonal influence had more first looks
towards genitals. They also spent markedly more time looking at
genitals, and not only that, were more likely than men to do so overall.

The HBC women’s watching patterns showed that they spent more time looking at the clothes of the people in the images and at the background.

What do the differences between the men and non-HBC women tell us? Again, it goes back to the idea that while the external male body conveys sexual interest unambiguously, the clues as to
whether a woman is turned on are more subtle. It could be that for heterosexual men, looking at the face of a woman is a better way of interpreting the level of sexual excitement than looking at
her body. Is she naked and emotionally uninvolved, or is she ‘up for it’? The face probably tells more about how interested a woman is than the naked body alone would. Women, on the
other hand, don’t need to see a man’s face to know whether he’s sexually ready, so they don’t spend as much time looking there.

Not only does pornography of all varieties turn women on, but it also seems to address problems even pharmaceutical science can’t touch.

An interesting bookend to the revelations about women and erotica is the parallel discussion about women’s sex lives as they go through the menopause. It’s an issue that relies
heavily on stereotypes about women and lack of sexual desire. It also seems to exploit modern insecurities about having the ‘right’ kind of sex, having it often enough, and being
perfectly satisfied at all times.

The ‘problem’ of female sexual dysfunction (FSD) has been a research holy grail for drug companies in recent years. It seems partly inspired by the runaway success of Viagra and
Cialis, and partly by a new openness among women when it comes to talking about and pursuing good sex. And with people not only living longer lives but healthier ones too, the expectation of
continuing to have fulfilling sex continues even after menopause in women.

However, no drug has emerged to transform female sexual response in the same way that Viagra has for men with erectile dysfunction. And it isn’t as if the big pharmaceutical companies
haven’t tried. They have tested everything from giving Viagra to women to testosterone patch treatments and developing new drugs altogether, but success has been far from universal. The
straightforward approach
of increasing blood flow to the genitals or pumping the system with increased hormones doesn’t seem to be the magic bullet for women in the way
it is for men.

The pharmaceutical industry wields a lot of power. Companies that produce drugs maintain internal research units, fund outside academic activity, and supply sponsorship for conferences. When the
pharmaceutical industry as a whole becomes interested in a particular topic, it has – far more than any scientists or patients on their own – the means to help direct where research
attention goes.

Groups with this kind of impact can be thought of as Agenda Setters. Their interest can define the discussion, and their views on particular topics nudge others into action.

Agenda Setters needn’t be companies or industries. They may be governments, NGOs (non-governmental organisations), religious groups, or charities. They are usually large, well funded, and
well organised. Agenda Setters are anyone with a particular viewpoint and the resources to disseminate that viewpoint through experts to the general public. Often, they have a particular outcome in
mind. That could range from selling certain products to pushing particular laws or furthering a specific ideology.

Now, what exactly is meant by an agenda? Usually, the agenda is a focus on money, political power, or morality. Often, all three: getting money, maintaining power, and enforcing morality. Why do
the agendas exist? Mainly because they are financially and socially profitable. After all, the people involved in these activities are hardly volunteers. They are well remunerated, respected in
certain circles, and influential.

At the risk of sounding a bit ‘enemy of the state’, I’d like to emphasise how the economic and social agenda differs from, say, the patriarchy conspiracy theory advanced by
some feminists. Feminism has, like people who claim to have seen UFOs, correctly identified a phenomenon, but completely misappropriated its origin. The agendas at work here have nothing to do with
Masonic secret societies or their like.

Rather, the agenda is the agenda of the schoolyard – getting to the top of the social heap and staying there. The rules are not coded in indecipherable hieroglyph and filed away in the
depths of the Bodleian; they are obvious, popular, and widely accepted. And the
tactics are simply the tactics of the schoolyard writ large.

The Agenda Setters interested in female libido have some impressive-sounding numbers to quote. In 1999, a paper in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
claimed to have
uncovered a widespread phenomenon: that 43 per cent of women suffered from sexual dysfunction – in other words about 50 million American women. The author, sociologist Edward Laumann, based
the conclusions on the results of a survey of 1800 women under the age of sixty.
⁹

Laumann, of course, is not an Agenda Setter, but his paper could be used by them. The results he reported provided the impetus for a whole raft of research activity: activity that was, by and
large, commissioned by and conducted for Pfizer, the manufacturers of Viagra, and other companies such as Procter & Gamble and Boehringer.

According to Ray Moynihan, a journalist who has written extensively about female sexual dysfunction in the
British Medical Journal
and in a recent book, ‘The corporate-sponsored
creation of a disease is not a new phenomenon, but the making of female sexual dysfunction is the freshest, clearest example we have.’
¹⁰
The Agenda
Setters put their focus on women’s sexual lives, and their agenda – to sell a cure – is clear.

One way to convince people they’re unwell is to suggest a problem is widespread. A former manager for a company that worked on a hormonal vaginal cream, described it in the film
Orgasm
Inc.
as ‘kind of complicated, because you have to have a disease before you can treat it’. She even went so far as to admit, ‘We’ve been able to get thought leaders
involved in female sexual dysfunction, and really work closely with them to develop this disease entity, so that it makes sense.’
¹¹

‘Developing’ diseases in this way may even include manipulating the data as it is gathered. Asking questions about people experiencing acute symptoms in the recent past will get you
far smaller numbers than asking about a range of symptoms occurring over time. Are pharmaceutical companies massaging the numbers to convince people they have something that might not exist?

The numbers from the original survey on the prevalence of FSD look high, but even in peer-reviewed research it’s important not to simply take statements at face value. The results are from
questions
asking if the women had experienced pain or lack of desire at
any
time in the previous year
. The rather high 43 per cent is actually a grand total . . . not the proportion of women experiencing this on a regular basis. People who said they sometimes and
seldom had problems were also included. ‘When you look at the proportions of women experiencing these sexual difficulties “frequently”, the numbers collapse,’ says Ray
Moynihan in his book.
¹²

It’s a bizarre sleight of hand to imply that if a woman, at any time and for any reason, lacks desire even once in a year, she has some kind of sexual desire disorder. And equating pain
during intercourse – which could be due to all kinds of medical causes, or recent childbirth – with sexual dysfunction? It boggles the mind, it truly does.