Scientists think they’ve unraveled the mystery of female arousal and what they’ve discovered will blow your mind in bed
Hillary Rosner
A slightly different aspect of desire has been the focus of studies by University of Utah psychologist Lisa Diamond, Ph. D. She’s been interviewing a group of roughly 100 women for nearly 15 years, asking them questions about changes in their sexual cravings and reactions over time. “Many women feel that desire is fluid and based on who they’re coming into contact with,” Diamond says. “Desire is often the result of an emotional connection.” In some cases, that connection can be a close friendship—even one with another woman.
One of Diamond’s subjects is a straight woman who became intimate with her female roommate. “When I first interviewed her,” Diamond recalls, “she said, ‘I’ve always been heterosexual, but just last week I got involved with a woman who’s been my best friend since I was 12.’” When the two shared an apartment, emotional intimacy spilled over into physical intimacy.
Diamond has been grappling with the question of why some friendships take a turn toward the physical while most don’t, and she’s drawn some preliminary conclusions. In cases where both women identify themselves as heterosexual, a series of what she calls “situational factors” come into play. One is relationship status: If neither woman has a boyfriend, they’re more likely to become strongly emotionally invested in the friendship. The other is proximity: There’s something very powerful about spending a lot of time together— as roommates, travel partners, or close colleagues, Diamond says. The woman in the study ended up in a two-year relationship with the roommate, after which she went back to sleeping with men. “It’s been 10 years since that happened, and she’s pretty certain she’s still heterosexual,” Diamond says. “The attraction was real, but it wasn’t representative of her sexual orientation.”
Diamond’s research reiterates the fact that female desire defies easy categorization. University of Nevada psychologist Marta Meana, Ph. D., also studies why women seem to be attracted to other women in certain circumstances, but she has a different take on why. Meana originally set out to see how men’s and women’s visual attention patterns differ from one another when they look at erotic images—in this case, very sexy shots of nearly naked people in a panoply of sexual positions. Meana outfitted her research subjects with eye-tracking goggles, which measured eye movement per millisecond. (“Our eyes are constantly darting around,” Meana says. “It’s essentially impossible to control, so you get this really nice data that’s not influenced by social acceptability.”) Then she showed them each picture for 10 seconds.
The result: “Men barely looked at the guy in the picture. They spent most of their time looking at the women. In women, there was an almost 50-50 split.” Meana doesn’t know for sure why women’s eyes were drawn equally to the men and women in the photos. She acknowledges that they may have been turned on by images of other women, but she thinks it’s more likely that they were trying to measure themselves up—a finding supported by some of her previous research, which found that sexual desire boils down to how a woman feels about herself; specifically, how she feels about her body.
“There is a relational component to female sexuality and there’s a very self-focused component,” she says. “I don’t mean that negatively. Women have to be convinced that they are desirable in order to believe that anyone else finds them desirable.” Think about it this way: If you haven’t been in the mood lately, it might be because you’re feeling unattractive (gained a few pounds, noticed your breasts sagging, spotted a new dimple of cellulite), and figure your man couldn’t possibly think you look hot.
Source: http://www.womenshealthmag.com/sex-and-relationships/sex-tips-1?page=3