An exploration of genital arousal category-specificity and sexual concordance in men and women

Abstract

There are substantial differences between the sexual arousal patterns of men and women. Men’s genital and subjective sexual arousal are category-specific; different sexual stimuli elicit different degrees of arousal. Women’s subjective sexual arousal is also categoryspecific, but their genital arousal is category-nonspecific; different sexual stimuli produce similar arousal. Men also exhibit a high concordance or correlation between their genital and subjective arousal, whereas women exhibit much lower sexual concordance. I conducted five studies with 219 participants to further explore these sex differences and test different explanations for their occurrence. The results confirm the existence and stability of sex differences in arousal patterns, provide support for a functional explanation of the sex difference in genital category-specificity, provide mixed support for an informationprocessing model of sexual arousal in relation to sexual concordance, and provide no support for the notion that sexual concordance is another manifestation of sex differences in interoception.