It is a well-known belief that most men are interested in all sorts of stuff related to sex. Being around my male college friends, I can somehow attest to this idea. Whenever I am with them, there would never be a conversation wherein there is no mention of anything related to a woman’s anatomy. They would find ways to inject green meanings to topics that seem harmless and innocent like giving a sexually explicit meaning to the word “picnic”. Having my personal experiences in mind, I wonder if there is a difference in the visual attention that men and women give when they watch sexually explicit videos. In 2010, Goldstein mentioned that people pay more attention to the objects in their environment that they want to process more. Considering this, I was expecting that the results would reflect the interests of men and women as they watch sexually explicit film.
In 2008, Akira Tsujimura and colleagues decided to conduct a research on this topic by using an eye-tracking device that they developed. This particular mechanism allows the researchers to readily record the movement of the participants’ eyes while they viewed videos containing sexually explicit scenes. They asked their male and female participants to watch two video clips, one showing sexual intercourse and another without, and indicate whether or not they felt sexually aroused while viewing the scenes.
The participants indicated that all of them were aroused by watching the videos. The results gathered from the video without sexual intercourse were really interesting. As expected, there was an obvious preference of the heterosexual participants to view the body and face of the opposite sex. Although the time spent by the male participants looking at the face of the actress was significantly longer than the time spent by the female participants, it was somehow surprising that the data gathered showed there are no significant differences in the visual attention on the actress’ body by both the male and female participants. These data might mean that women were equally attentive to the bodies of both actors and actresses. However, these findings do not indicate that the females are into women. Also, the results of the experiment show that women pay more attention to the nonhuman objects in the setting of the scene. This additional data might mean that women are attentive to all the different aspects of the videos as compared to the male participants. These results might mean that women are more interested in perceiving all the different aspects of the film aside from the actors and actresses compared to the men who participated in the study.
The second clip shown to the participants involves sexual intercourse. When the participants viewed the second clip, there were no significant differences between the males and the females. The researchers hypothesized that sexually explicit videos evoke the same attention responses from individuals of different sexes, indicating similar interests of male and female participants.
It is quite interesting to find out what goes on in a person’s mind from what he or she pays attention to and what she or he chooses to perceive as exhibited in this particular study. As I expected, men paid more attention to the actress than the other aspects of the film. Women on the other hand notice most of the other things in the scene. I guess that my preconceptions on how individuals of different genders would respond to sexually explicit stimuli are largely affected by the society that we live in. In a patriarchal, conservative and predominantly Christian society, it is more widely accepted for men to be vocal with their thoughts about the topic of sex. Also, men are expected to be macho which somehow prevent them to be interested in the body and face of other men. It is amazing how the environment affects one’s attention and perceptions.
Goldstein, B. (2010). Sensation and Perception.Canada: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
Tsujimura, A., Miyagawa, Y., Takada, S., Yasuhiro, M., Takao, T., Hirai, T.,...Okuyama, A. (2008). Sex differences in visual attention to sexually explicit videos: A preliminary study. Journal of Sexual Medicine, 6, 1011-1017.
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