differenceblog, posts by tag: erotica - LiveJournal

Reuters (2008) reports that a new "roleplay cafe" has opened in Tokyo, this time catering to women. The roleplay cafe idea is not a new one. Author Neil Gaiman (2007) discussed maid cafes (see Wikipedia for cosplay restaurant) in his blog last September. However, the new "Edelstein boarding school" cafe claims to be the first schoolboy cafe, cashing in on the genre of boy-on-boy manga written for a female audience (see yaoi). The manager, Emiko Sakamaki, also opened the first "butler cafe" for women, according to Reuters.

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So, my immediate reaction is "that's the kind of equality I'm talking about!" However, I suspect that while I'm not alone in this (they have customers), I get shot down for these suggestions on a regular basis. Women, I'm told, don't want to gawk at and objectify pretty boys. Expecting women to enjoy gender-swapped versions of male entertainment is expecting women to be men. My reactions can not be trusted as typical of any gender: I'm too male, too female, too bisexual, and too kinky for that. So, what do you think? Are cosplay cafes for women feeding into a male-centric paradigm, or are they just kinda hot?

Oliver and Hyde's 1993 meta-analysis of 177 studies on human sexuality found the largest gender difference in incidence of masturbation, which was a variable in 26 of the studies examined, and was defined as "any experience with masturbation." Janet Hyde, you may recall, is the author of "The Gender Similarities Hypothesis" (Hyde, 2005). Oliver and Hyde also report that gender differences narrowed from the 1960's to the 1980's. Alexander and Fisher (2003) tested the effect of social expectations on self-report of sexual activity, and found the largest effect of social expectations on masturbation and use of erotica.

According to the book Solitary Sex: A cultural history of masturbation (Laqueur, 2003), anxiety over masturbation is a fairly recent invention. Laqueur traces the history of "onanism" as an illness to 1708. Mah and Binik (2001) attempt an analysis of current trends in the conceptualization of human sexuality, but sadly, the studies they found on masturbation attitudes and incidence seem to end in the 1970's.

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Where the hell are the current studies on masturbation? It seems like it's a subject I discuss at least once per week with my friends. Every recent study I was able to find focused on such narrow populations (e.g. Attitudes of hospital staff to masturbation by disabled adults, Yool, 2003) that they really couldn't be applied to the general population. This seems to be a major hole in the data, and someone needs to massage it.

Jiang et al (2006) tested the effect of "invisible" erotic pictures on the attention of gay/bisexual and heterosexual males and females. After comparing attraction/repulsion to male or female erotic stumuli, Jiang et al found that while gay men responded like heterosexual women to the suppressed images, gay/bisexual women responded in between this group and the heterosexual men. Lykins et al (2006) found that both men and women focused less on faces and more on bodies in response to normally presented erotic (vs. non-erotic) stimuli, and the results suggested that women's attentional patterns may be more affected than men's by the erotica context. However, Lykins et al point out that because their study showed different pictures to the male and female groups (heterosexually delineated) comparison between groups is not valid.

Neither of these studies report the menstrual cycle stage of female participants, which may be an issue. Gizewski et al (2006) studied fMRI results of 25 women during mid-luteal phase (post ovulation) and during menses. Self-reported arousal in women was similar to men's at the mid-luteal test, but significantly lower at menses. Some activation differences between mid-luteal and menstrual phases were reported (e.g. reduced in the left thalamus at menses). However, between-sex differences were more robust than menstrual phase differences.

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One big concern I have with studies using "erotic stimuli" is the source of the images. Lykins et al wrote that they got their images of females from Playboy's website, and images of males from Falcon Studio's website. Both of these websites design their erotic content for men. Unfortunately, I can't think of any source for erotic images of men by women that would match Playboy on production values. Obviously, more women-driven erotica needs to be produced, in the name of science!

Canli and Gabrieli (2004) (pdf) , in a review of Hamann et al (2004) (pdf) for Nature Neuroscience, quote Woodrow Wyatt as saying that "a man falls in love through his eyes, a woman through her ears." As previously discussed, it is believed that there may be physical truth to this statement, in that men may be more attuned to visual stimuli than women, especially as pertains to sexual arousal. Furnam and Bitar (1993) found that British advertisers more often used males as voice-overs and women as images, in what may be a nod to this phenomenon.

If true, this presents a problem for researchers studying sexual arousal. In order to study arousal in women, it may be more appropriate to use auditory stimuli rather than visual ones. However, the attempt to do this by Polan et al. (2003) did not show any correlation between presence of auditory stimulus and rate of arousal, using physiological measurements or self-reported levels of arousal. Youn (2006) points out that while many studies use visual or audiovisual stimuli, there has been very little research done with purely auditory stimuli (Youn's experiment used audiovisual stimuli).

While problems such as reactions to vocal types or language barriers may make studying auditory stimuli more difficult, it may be key to understanding differences between men's and women's arousal patterns. Wired's sex columnist Regina Lynn points out that recorded auditory erotica targeted to men has until recently been almost non-existent (although I wonder if recorded phone-sex lines count in her estimation). Whatever the difficulties, it seems clear that auditory stimulus research is not only needed, but long overdue.

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I'll admit it: my arousal patterns are more auditory than visual, and more verbal than non-verbal. My erotica of choice is generally first-person stories. I have not noticed any particular difference in these patterns since starting testosterone, but it's hard to tell. My consumption of porn was fairly low prior to testosterone. When my libido increased, I acquired a lot more, because I started to resent the amount of time I was spending masturbating, and wanted to speed the process up. In terms of auditory cues, I have found that it is nearly impossible for me to become aroused by audiovisual porn in which the soundtrack does not include the actor's voice or breath, but non-porn music tracks that include moaning or heavy breathing often get me embarrassingly worked up (in inappropriate situations).