Sexual Arousal in People With Different Typologies of Adherence to the Sexual Double Standard

What is it about?

Sexual arousal combines physiological, psychological, and behavioral processes. Its evaluation is focused on physiological reactions (genital response) and the person's assessment of this experience, through self-reported measures. In other words, sexual arousal would have a physiological or objective manifestation and a self-reported or subjective one. Sexual concordance is expected to occur - i.e., the agreement between the measures of both dimensions, the recording of the genial response, and the subjective assessment of sexual arousal. However, this does not always occur, especially in women. While sexual concordance is more frequent in men, in the case of women we find positive, negative, and no association between the two measures of sexual arousal. One explanation for these differences could lie in gender norms. Specifically, in the context of sexual behaviors, the attitude of the sexual double standard (SDS) stands out, which implies the different valuation of the same sexual behavior depending on whether it is performed by a man or a woman. The possible relationship of SDS with sexual arousal had not been analyzed until this study. This research aimed to examine sexual concordance in different typologies of SDS adherence: man-favorable, woman-favorable, and egalitarian. For this purpose, they conducted an experimental study at the Human Sexuality Laboratory of the University of Granada in which 104 young adults (42 men and 62 women) participated. The experiment consisted of the viewing of sexually explicit videos by the participants, while their genital response (erection in men and vaginal pulse amplitude in women) and their assessment of sexual arousal were recorded. The results indicated that men and women with egalitarian and mam-favorable SDS adherence typologies showed sexual concordance, i.e., there was a positive correlation between objective and subjective measures of sexual arousal. Moreover, in these two typologies self-reported sexual arousal had explicative capacity in genital response.

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Photo by The 77 Human Needs System on Unsplash

Photo by The 77 Human Needs System on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This study provides evidence about the relationship of SDS attitude with sexual arousal. Moreover, its results are useful for the research and clinical areas by supporting the assessment of sexual arousal from self-report measures, but SDS adherence typologies should be considered for further understanding of the experience of sexual arousal.

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