Assessing Differences In Physiologic Subjective Response Toward Male And Female Orientated Sexually Explicit Videos In Heterosexual Individuals

The goal of the present study was to examine sexual response to male-and female- oriented sexually explicit films in heterosexual men and women. Forty participants (20 men and 20 women; mean age = 29.42 years) attended three separate lab sessions. One 15 minute sexually explicit video was shown per session. For session one, all participants viewed a female-oriented film selected by the experimenters. The films used for subsequent sessions were counterbalanced male-oriented or female-oriented clips that had been previously studied. A thermographic camera measured temperature on the penile shaft for men and labia for women. Continuous and discrete self-reported sexual arousal was also obtained. Genital temperature was averaged into 15 one-minute bins and a repeated-measures ANOVA was conducted. Men demonstrated significantly greater increases in temperature over time than women, F (14, 980) = 19.27, p = .000, however there were no significant differences between films or sex x film interaction. Women reported significantly higher subjective sexual arousal to the films than men, F (1, 69) range = 3.89 to 9.67, p range = .01 to .05, but there were no significant differences between films or a sex x film interaction. Results suggest that film orientation has minimal impact on physiologic sexual responsiveness in men or women. Although both sexes demonstrated significant increases in sexual arousal for these pre-selected films, future laboratory research would benefit from examining whether participant-selected stimuli produces a greater response than experimenter-selected films.