Among the lesbian volunteers, the two readings converged when women appeared on the screen.
During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated watching gay men, they reported a great deal less and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much more. The readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren’t in much accord. And with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person. They responded objectively much more to the exercising woman than to the strolling man, and their blood flow rose quickly - and markedly, though to a lesser degree than during all the human scenes except the footage of the ambling, strapping man - as they watched the apes. No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men. The men’s minds and genitals were in agreement.Īll was different with the women. And for the male participants, the subjective ratings on the keypad matched the readings of the plethysmograph. Any expectation that the animal sex would speak to something primitive within the men seemed to be mistaken neither straights nor gays were stirred by the bonobos.
Gay males were aroused in the opposite categorical pattern. They were mostly unmoved when the screen displayed only men. Males who identified themselves as straight swelled while gazing at heterosexual or lesbian sex and while watching the masturbating and exercising women. The men, on average, responded genitally in what Chivers terms “category specific” ways. The participants were also given a keypad so that they could rate how aroused they felt. An engorgement of blood spurs a lubricating process called vaginal transudation: the seeping of moisture through the walls. The genitals of the volunteers were connected to plethysmographs - for the men, an apparatus that fits over the penis and gauges its swelling for the women, a little plastic probe that sits in the vagina and, by bouncing light off the vaginal walls, measures genital blood flow. The participants sat in a brown leatherette La-Z-Boy chair in her small lab at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, a prestigious psychiatric teaching hospital affiliated with the University of Toronto, where Chivers was a postdoctoral fellow and where I first talked with her about her research a few years ago. While the subjects watched on a computer screen, Chivers, who favors high boots and fashionable rectangular glasses, measured their arousal in two ways, objectively and subjectively. To the same subjects, she also showed clips of heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a chiseled man walking naked on a beach and a well-toned woman doing calisthenics in the nude.
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She showed the short movie to men and women, straight and gay. She found footage of bonobos, a species of ape, as they mated, and then, because the accompanying sounds were dull - “bonobos don’t seem to make much noise in sex,” she told me, “though the females give a kind of pleasure grin and make chirpy sounds” - she dubbed in some animated chimpanzee hooting and screeching.
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The bonobo film was part of a series of related experiments she has carried out over the past several years. She is a 36-year-old psychology professor at Queen’s University in the small city of Kingston, Ontario, a highly regarded scientist and a member of the editorial board of the world’s leading journal of sexual research, Archives of Sexual Behavior. Meredith Chivers is a creator of bonobo pornography.