Maybe she just likes to cuddle first?
By Vito Anthony
Thursday, October 5, 2006
MONTREAL — The next time your girlfriend tells you that it takes longer for women to get turned on than men, don’t be so sure. A new study reported on Physorg.com suggests that she might just want to cuddle first.
According to Dr. Irv Binik, who has utilized the latest in thermal imaging technology to measure sexual arousal rates in men and women, the “fact†that females become aroused more slowly than males may indeed be a myth.
"Comparing sexual arousal between men and women, we see that there is no difference in the amount of time it takes healthy young men and women to reach peak arousal," said Binik, a psychology professor and founder/director of the Sex and Couple Therapy Service of Royal Victoria Hospital.
Thermography, aka thermal imaging, is an infrared imaging process that detects the radiation emitted by an object based on its temperature. In other words, it makes it very easy to see warm objects in the dark.
In the past, sexual researchers measured the subject’s arousal with instruments that actually required genital contact. Binik surmised that this would have an adverse effect on the data, so his idea was to focus the thermographic cameras on the subject’s genitals
from a distance as they observed a wide variety of televised material.
First, Binik showed them a lot of boring or non-sexual programs, including
The Best of Mr. Bean and a series of travelogues produced by the Canadian tourism Board. From this he gathered a base of control data before he sprung the more erotic stuff on his subjects.
During the actual experiment itself, Binik showed the male and female subjects a series of sexually explicit films that he borrowed from the Kinsey Institute (ya gotta love ol’ Alfred!) that were determined to be sexually arousing to specific genders.
To minimize distractions, the images were viewed through special video goggles.
The most stimulating find in the study (no pun intended) was that the arousal rate in both men and women was statistically negligible. Both men and women began to show signs of arousal within 30 seconds, with men reaching maximum arousal in 664.6 seconds – roughly ten minutes – and women doing so in 743 seconds.
That's not a lot of lag time, folks.
"In any experiment on sexual arousal done in a laboratory, there is some distraction," Binik said. "But compared to previous techniques involving invasive measures or electrodes, this is minimally invasive and the same measurements are used for men and women, which makes it very interesting that the data ended up being the same."
