From: nedervol@schaefer.math.wisc.edu (Eric Nedervold)
Newsgroups: soc.motss
Subject: Sexual Landscapes (was: Hospital study)
Date: 13 Oct 92 17:29:12 GMT
Organization: Univ. of Wisconsin Dept. of Mathematics


The thread was about a hospital study on correlation between
sexual orientation and child molestation.  Here is a pointer to some
related research, specifically that (on the average) naked girls are
more arousing to heterosexual men than naked boys are to homosexual
men.  The following is from Sexual Landscapes, by James D. Weinrich,
pg. 51-52:

Heterosexual men can be aroused (a bit) by looking at pictures of
naked little girls or pictures of teenage males' buttocks.  Why?

To answer this question, we need the experimental data provided by
penile plethysmography.  "Penile" is the adjectival form of "penis,"
and "plethys-" comes from the Greek word meaning "volume" or
"balloon".  So a penile plethysmograph is a penis-volume measurer;
when it's hooked up enclosing a penis, it squiggles out a
moment-by-moment record telling the good doctor how much of an
erection the man has.  I'll let you discover more about this
technological marvel in chapter 8; here I just want to single out a
couple of findings.

The inventor of the plethysmograph, Kurt Freund, a sexologist at the
Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto, found that the most
exciting stimulus he could show an ordinary heterosexual man
was--surprise!--a picture of a naked woman.  A picture of a naked
teenage female was a little less arousing, on average, and one of a
naked girl (aged nine to eleven or so) even less.  He did find a
little bit of arousal, too, to even younger girls (aged eight to ten
or so)--more than the landscapes (the so-called control stimulus).
[There is no evidence for the existence of landscapophiles--people
sexually aroused by the viewing of pictures of landscapes.  If there
were, let me assure you that Freund would have found them by now.]

When testing homosexuals, he found a mirror-image pattern of arousal:
homosexual men found pictures of naked adult men most arousing, teen
males, next, older boys third, and younger boys last.  But not quite a
perfect mirror image; in this case, the average arousal to younger
boys was *not* significantly more than to landscapes.  [This and other
experiments are described in Freund 1974.]

Frankly, I don't know why little girls are more arousing to
heterosexual men than little boys are to homosexual men, but I do
suspect that it accounts for friction between otherwise well-meaning
homosexuals and heterosexuals.  This finding intrigued Freund enough
that he conducted another experiment to check it out.

This experiment Freund conducted on heterosexual men only.  Instead of
using photos of people naked from head to toe, he used photos of body
parts: the head, the chest, the pubic region, the buttocks, and the
legs.  For each of these 5 categories, he had pictures of the 2 sexes
and of 3 different age categories (adult, adolescent, just
preadolescent), for a total of 30 (= 5 x 2 x 3) different kinds of
photos.  He showed these combinations to the heterosexual men, along
with some more landscapes as controls.  [This experiment is described
in Freund, McKnight, Langevin, and Cibiri 1972.]

Virtually all the pictures of females were arousing to these men, and
all but one of the male categories were not.  That one category was
teenaged males' buttocks.  On average, this category aroused these
ordinary heterosexual men a bit more than landscapes did.  These
finding show that the men's penises were capable of some remarkable
discriminations.  Little girls' buttocks somehow must have looked
different from little boys' buttocks, for example, because the first
category was more arousing than landscapes and the second category was
not.  So it's difficult to argue that the teenaged males' buttocks
looked too much like teenaged females' buttocks; all the more so
because it's in the teen years that the hips widen in girls and stay
slim in boys.

There are two things that interest me about these puzzles: the
solutions and the consequences.  The solutions, I suspect, have to do
with our primate heritage, some of which I address in chapter 13.
The consequences are some conflicts among us--ranging from when
homosexuals and heterosexuals misunderstand each other all the way to
child abuse and molestation.  These questions are addressed in other
places in the book, especially chapters 4 and 8.

----

[Freund 1974] Male homosexuality: An analysis of the pattern.  In
Loraine, J. A. (Ed.) Understanding homosexuality: Its biological and
psychological bases, pg 25-81.  New York: Elsevier.

[Freund, McKnight, Langevin, and Cibiri 1972] The female child as
surrogate object.  Archives of sexual behavior, 2:119-133.