Interesting article today that I wanted to comment on:

(Source: livescience.com)

Night vision is not known for helping anyone get better in the bedroom, but infrared cameras reveal that women become aroused as quickly as men.

In previous research, sexual arousal was generally detected with instruments that require genital contact and manipulation. One might argue that can spoil the mood.

Thermal imaging technology, which uses cameras that detect heat given off by different objects, is a relatively non-invasive way of measuring the time it takes a person to reach peak arousal.

So researchers focused the cameras on the genitals of test subjects while the subjects watched footage of pornography, travel shows and horror clips. This provided measurements of heat from both the sexually aroused and from whatever arousal or lack of it was spurred by the other programming.

“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 Irv Binik, a McGill University psychology professor and founder and director of the Sex and Couple Therapy Service of Royal Victoria Hospital.

Binik and colleagues were able to detect temperature changes to within 100th of a degree. Both women and men started showing arousal within 30 seconds.

Men reached peak arousal in about 665 seconds, while it took the women 743 seconds, a difference that researchers say is statistically negligible. The researchers hope that this knowledge will help diagnose and treat sexual dysfunction in women.

The findings will be published in the January issue of the Journal of Sexual Medicine.

I’ve harped a few times on the fact that in marriage, sex declines. As a result, we see more instances of a husband cheating on their wife, or the wife cheating on their husband, or just a lot of fighting and bitterness with nobody getting any. In other words: dysfunction.

This study was interesting, because in marriage, as well as serious relationships, there is often that phase where the woman feels that “he only wants me around for sex”. This in turn breeds anger and resentment, perpetuating the problem that caused everything to start with. The truth is that it’s really a matter of miscommunication, but with women being emotionally aroused creatures, this shuts them down pretty fast.

Physically however, this study proves that with the correct stimuli, that both individual bodies react fairly similarly. Sexual dysfunction, which the article hopes to use this data to help treat, becomes a major problem as women grow older and as their time in a relationships grows with little emotional growth. As men become disappointed with the amount of physical growth in the relationship, we tend to see a lot of men re-evaluate the return on their investment regarding the emotional energy spent on their wives. In other words, why work so hard to make her happy if she still doesn’t give me what I want…

There’s an old saying that all men need is a pretty picture on paper to make them aroused, while women need a pretty picture painted in their mind for arousal. The state of arousal can come from the same source, as the study shows, but the deliver is what’s important here.

Tags: science, women, men, arousal, pornography, sex