LEADING COMMENT A brief review and discussion of sex.pdfVIP

Sexual and Relationship Therapy Vol 20, No. 4, November 2005 LEADING COMMENT A brief review and discussion of sex differences in the specificity of sexual arousal MEREDITH L. CHIVERS Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Clinical Sexology Services, Toronto, Ontario, Canada ‘‘The notion must be abandoned that women are simply repressed men waiting to be liberated.’’ Donald Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexuality KEYWORDS: sexual arousal; sex difference; sexual preference; sexual interest; sexual response; sexual orientation; female; male Introduction Sex differences in human sexuality are plentiful and include physical, psychological, and psychophysiological variations (Geary, 1998). Examples include masturbation frequency (Oliver Hyde, 1993), sex drive (Baumeister et al., 2001), habituation of sexual arousal to sexual stimuli (Laan Everaerd, 1995a, b; O’Donohue Geer, 1985), cognition (Geer Bellard, 1996), self-reported arousal to sexual stimuli (Murnen Stockton, 1997), and the concordance between genital and self-reported sexual arousal (Laan Janssen, in press; Chivers et al., 2005), to name just a few. These examples suggest considerable variability between the sexes in various aspects of sexuality. However, most traditional models of sexual response (APA, 1994), sexual dysfunction (Barlow, 1986), and sexual orientation (Bem, 1996) are not sex- specific and, as such, may not adequately explain observed differences in male and female sexuality. As Symons’ (1979) quote suggests, undifferentiated models of sexuality run the risk of biasing observations and interpretations of sexual phenomena as deficits, excesses, etcetera depending on what standard is adopted. Recently, however, there has been a paradigm shift in thinking about female and male sexuality, and sex-specific models are emerging, e.g., the re