Women like porn just as much as men, study finds
“Female sexuality has quite a lot of stigma around it.” (Pexels)
Women are equally as aroused by watching porn as men, despite the popular belief that men are more turned on by it than women, a new study has found.
The research is titled “Neural substrates of sexual arousal are not sex dependent” and was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) on Monday July 15.
German researcher Hamid Noori told New Scientist that even though the levels of reaction in men’s and women’s brains are the same when watching porn, women are less likely to do it regularly because of the stigma that surrounds it.
Noori said: “There are differences in behaviour – the number of men going to porn sites is roughly 80 per cent of the consumers.
“But men and women respond the same way at the brain level to visual sexual stimuli. What we do with it afterwards is what brings the difference.”
The study says that “erotic media stimulate numerous cortical and subcortical regions [of the brain].”
Researcher Hamid Noori said: “Female sexuality has quite a lot of stigma around it”
Researchers looked at 61 brain scanning studies, covering around 2,000 participants, in which people of different genders and sexual orientations lay in a brain scanner as they were shown pornographic pictures and videos.
Women react the same amount as men to porn, but watch less of it. (Pexels)
They found that the areas of the brain that were active varied slightly by orientation, but concluded that: “The neurocircuitries associated with sexual arousal do not differ in men and women independent of their sexual orientation.
“Visual sexual stimuli induce activation in the same cortical and subcortical regions in both men and women.”
According to The Guardian, Noori said of the fact that women don’t watch as much porn: “Female sexuality has quite a lot of stigma around it. Maybe the main reason is that for the woman there are secondary inhibitory effects that keep them away from expressing what they really feel.”
