Women aroused by monkey sex?

Posted by Evan Derkacz at 11:03 AM on December 23, 2005.

Yes, I approach this with just as much skepticism as you do. I'm not sure what's to be gained here except for some possible cross-marketing with the latest King-Kong remake.

Casey writes: "Pornography studios might do well to take a tip from the Discovery Channel. According to a recent study, women are aroused by watching monkey sex..."

According to the study, led by a woman and a man, women responded to images of many types of human and nonhuman sex while men only responded to hetero (and lesbian) human sex. A thoroughly unscientific poke around the internet gives me pause.

I don't recommend doing it if you're at work but a Google search for "animal sex" yields 25,900,000 responses in 0.27 seconds.

Unless these sites are viewed exclusively by women, I should think there may be other factors at work.

The scientists, however, are careful not to draw any conclusions from the observed genital response (the criterion used to determine arousal in the study):

"There's the possibility that genital response for women is not necessarily imbued with meaning about her sexual interests," says Chivers. She also emphasized that her findings do not imply women harbor a latent desire for lesbian sex or bestiality."

Or to draw any conclusions about the intrinsic or biological differences between men and women:

"I would wonder if the men weren't concerned about being labeled as homosexual or perverse by being interested in these things, and therefore their erections were inhibited," she said."

The point of the study, something I found myself asking about repeatedly, was to:

"discover what specific aspect of a visual stimulus causes women to become aroused. Some experts believe mentally labeling an act as sexual arouses women. Others, including Chivers, believe innately recognized sexual features such as an erect penis, even out of their usual human context, stimulate women. She said she did not yet know how similar to humans an animal would need to be in order to elicit a sexual response from women."

A great tie-in article on King-Kong and people/ape-lovin' is [HERE] by Josh Bearman. (Monkeysinthenews)

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Evan Derkacz is a New York-based writer and contributor to AlterNet.