By Manasi Nene
Canadian sexologist and researcher Meredith Chivers has found, through years of hard work, that Wonder Woman might have had the right idea when she tells Steve Trevor that “when it comes to procreation, men are essential, but for pleasure, not necessary”.
“We’re expecting women’s sexuality to behave like men’s,” says Dr Chivers, who spoke on CBC Radio about her research. Dr Chivers explains that back in the 50s, the most popular take on desire was that people had “spontaneous feelings of desire”. But sex isn’t a drive like hunger or thirst – you won’t die if you don’t act upon it, but instead “we are drawn towards things that have previously been pleasurable or reinforcing”.
Chivers and her team predominantly carry out sexual psychophysiology research. They have sensors that can provide data about their subjects’ heartbeats, and also their levels of arousal. They also have cameras and eye trackers, so they can see exactly what their subjects are reacting to. They’ve now started measuring neurosexual responses, to get idea of what happens in the brain when someone is aroused.
Have any surprises emerged from her research? Indeed.
Women who identify as straight, or heterosexual, show “fairly significant” amounts of arousal when shown both male and female sexual stimuli. Chivers and her team don’t really know why this happens, why women who identify as straight still have such a quantifiable physical response even to female stimuli.
One of her hypotheses is that the oversexualisation of women in the media has added to this – we are so saturated with images of women being overtly sexualised, that straight women psychologically cannot help but be attracted to women as well. Of course, it’s still a hypothesis, one that we don’t have the science to support or reject, but Chivers thinks it’s an interesting one nevertheless.
A second hypothesis is that heterosexual sex “may not be that rewarding” for heterosexual women, so they also react to female stimuli. “For exclusively heterosexual women, unfortunately the status quo is very low rates of experiencing sexual pleasure with their male partners,” she tells CBC Radio.
It’s good new for queer women, whom Chivers says are more likely to experience pleasure. In the same interview, Chivers cites the importance of research not being held back by politics and morality – good to know, then, that at least somewhere, there are governing bodies that are taking the issue of sexuality seriously