Adventures in selection bias

I always love a naughty research study, and this one sounded like fun: Spanking 'brings couples together'...

Researchers at Northern Illinois University measured stress hormone levels in couples engaging in S&M activities, and found evidence that these activities, while causing some anxiety at first (which, I suppose is the point, right?) ultimately left the couples feeling closer.

And what was their research sample? People attending an S&M party.
Yes. Really.

So... S&M brings couples who are into S&M closer? You don't say!

Visualizing Bedroom Banter

This may come in useful next time you're at a loss for words in the bedroom...


You're welcome!

Click the image for a larger version.

Bonobo Love

Continuing on my previous post about that NYTimes article on female sexuality...

Does arousal imply desire? And is the source of arousal necessarily the object of desire?

The article raises this question in response to an unusual finding of Chivers' experiment on sexual desire: that, while reporting no emotional arousal, women displayed physical arousal to a video of bonobo monkeys having sex.

"Physiological arousal reveals little about desire. Otherwise... I would have to believe that women want to have sex with bonobos.”

While it may well be true that we need to make a distinction between physiological arousal (which is merely an unconscious physical reaction) from real emotional arousal, it seems overly simplistic to conclude that if a woman is truly aroused by monkeys having sex, then she actually wants to have sex with one.

I mean seriously. It's this simplistic black-and-white view of sexuality that makes women so confused about what they want and how they feel. No, I don't think women want to bed bonobo monkeys, but if seeing them mate makes them think of sex and consequently become aroused, then by all means lust away.

What Women Want?

This New York Times article was sent to me by a male friend of mine in an email titled "Women are weird." The article, surprise surprise, is about female sexuality and the seeming paradoxes of female desire.

It starts off by describing an experiment in which men and women are shown videos of sexual content and then asked to report on whether or not they felt aroused by the scene. At the same time, their physical arousal is directly monitored (don't ask -- it involves something called a plethysmograph).

Here are the results of the experiment:


Okay, so women seem to get turned on by just about anything, except, ironically, naked men on beaches. But even more striking, in the author's words: "With the women... mind and genitals seem scarcely to belong to the same person." Conclusion: women don't know what they want.

So here were are, dealing once again with the old cliche', where men throw up their hands and lament that all women are crazy.

My question is: couldn't social factors be at play here? After all, though the women's physical reactions were pretty consistent within the sample group, they are definitely not very orthodox. The standard, socially acceptable, type of arousal is heterosexual (or at least consistent with one's sexual preferences) and certainly restricted to humans, not bonobo monkeys. So it's possible that women are simply misreporting their responses to conform to socially accepted norms.

Going one step further, if women live in a society that constantly condemns what they might feel are their natural sexual responses, it seems natural that after a while they would begin to disregard their physical inclinations, causing a rift between mind and body when it comes to sex.

It's not that women don't know what they want; it's that they've been systematically taught to disregard their natural inclinations by a society founded on a very male-centric understanding of sexuality.

Click here to view the full article.