for women/ppl with vaginas, "genital arousal" makes penetrative sex less painful and less likely to cause injury. "women have an evolved program along the lines of "if someone might try to have sex with you, adjust your body to make it safer"" is probably a better description of the phenomenon than "women are aroused by literally all depictions of sex including nonhuman animals."

I'm not convinced that exhibiting genital arousal and being attracted are the same thing. One may experience genital arousal for all kinds of reasons, including but not limited to something reminding you of sex

This. If I'm shown any kind of pornography, I could probably get aroused by it, simply due to the idea of people experiencing sexual pleasure is arousing in and of itself; it doesn't mean that I'm attracted to the people in said pornography.

I think it is entirely possible that all women experience genital arousal from pornographic material with other women. That does not mean that they're all lesbian/bisexual and that they're all attracted to women.

In fact, I may even consider a possibility that men would also experience arousal from porn involving men, and the only thing preventing that is the societal stigma around that.

If controlled for things like social environment and taking/not taking birth control I’d say very much no

any female born after 1993 can’t cook… all they know is mcdonald’s , charge they phone, twerk, be bisexual , eat hot chip & lie

@TiredCliche Is this a serious comment or some kind of joke/irony ?

@dionisos some kind of joke/irony

@dionisos https://twitter.com/ariasagay/status/1123681771789389824

@TiredCliche Phew x)

@dionisos

Scott seems to consider that idea was a mistake.

@JohnSmithb9be I don't think the argument for it being a mistake is very good. The argument that it's a mistake is that women are also aroused by bonobos fucking. But actually women are much much less aroused by bonobos fucking than by humans fucking, in fact their arousal to bonobos (NH) is almost the same as their arousal to nonsexual control stimuli (C) and completely different from their arousal to human intercourse (I, FMI):

"does it replicate" and "is it true" are two very different questions. The rate of bisexuality among women on a college campus who agreed to be shown porn and have equipment attached to genitals is not going to be representative of a general population

@Shelvacu If I recall correctly, in one of the studies they actually investigated whether there was much difference between those who agreed to participate and those who did not. I think they found some differences but not big differences. Also they said that when talking to the women, it didn't seem like it made much of a difference.

Disclaimer: I can't 100% remember how thorough they were, and probably they were suboptimally thorough. But I don't expect this to make much of a difference for replication, since IME this finding tends to be quite stable across all sorts of ways you could change it.

🤔

Gotta do another one with photos of men instead

Selling not because I don't think the paper replicates (I think it has replicated a bunch of times), but because I am unsure whether it satisfies the ">90%" threshold.

It definitely replicates that straight-identifying women are similarly aroused by erotic depictions of women as erotic depictions of men. In fact it replicates even in self-reported and not just genitally measured arousal (despite the fact that women have limited correlation between self-reported and genitally measured arousal), so if you are skeptical you can throw together a survey where you show people porn and ask them how arousing it is and post it to /r/SampleSize to see for yourself. (I did so 5 times.)

That said, I suspect eventually we will find the appropriate answer to this question is N/A. While one possible interpretation of the paper is that women are equally attracted to men and women, this relies on the assumption that women's sexual orientation is accurately measured by looking at their arousal to porn. This sort of measurement definitely works with biological males - that's what inspired scientists to use it - but the fact that it correlates so poorly with female self-reported sexual orientation suggest to me that there is something odd going on. I would start by mapping out women's sexual feelings and behaviors in much greater detail in order to be sure that we are not missing anything.

@tailcalled Also in my experience it's usually the same types of people who emphasize female bisexual genital arousal patterns that also emphasize that female bisexuality is fake.

Isn't this a contradiction? I think kind of yes, but the types of people who get into this research literature are absolutely ridiculous.

@tailcalled I am saddened that their aren't more people who emphasize this research because they're women who want to bang other women
I think this suggest extreme civilizational inadequacy or that sapphics are rare

@tailcalled also curious if you have any ideas for a better resolution criteria (for a new market ofc)

@Sinclair Some ideas:

• What is the bisexuality identity rate among gender progressive women?

• If you carefully ask women about their sexual attraction, how many will report as much attraction to women as to men?

• How much success will you have flirting with straight women, compared to bi women?

Reasoning for "What is the bisexuality identity rate among gender progressive women?":

When you intuitively think of LGBT-repression and patriarchy, you probably think of the ideology I call "gender conservatism", which asserts that men ought to be masculine and women ought to be feminine and homosexuality is bad an so on. Among men, it is often held by the sort of "macho" "wtf, are you suggesting I'm gay? wanna fight?" dudes. I don't have as clear a picture for gender conservatism in women (I guess to some extent "trad" and "pickme" but meh. YMMV.) but you probably know what I'm referring to.

Anyway insofar as we think of gender conservatism as repression, the bisexuality identity rate among gender progressive women might show what non-repressing women's sexuality is like. Though gender conservatives would argue that this comparison is wrong because gender progressivism is a mental illness and women fake bisexuality for attention, especially young women who they feel are insanely dramatic. Also there's lots of other objections that can be raised, e.g. maybe progressivism is inherently appealing to bisexuals.

Anyway the downside for this is that gender progressivism is more of a continuum than a discrete thing so it is unclear what threshold to use (maybe one could just let latent class analysis pick one, but I think that would be arbitrary, ~50th percentile in the sample), while the upside is that I probably have data on it that I can give you to resolve it immediately. Though that arguably makes the market useless.

(Hmm, now I wonder if bisexuality confounding explains the GP/A*P correlation. 🤔 )

Reasoning for "If you carefully ask women about their sexual attraction, how many will report as much attraction to women as to men?":

So as mentioned I think the whole approach of focusing on genital arousal to porn is pretty sketchy. But I think one could maybe do something with more embodied approaches. For instance asking people about their attraction to their friends or something. Though I don't really know what to ask, I'm too male and autistic. I think it wouldn't be that hard to research though.

Reasoning for "How much success will you have flirting with straight-identifying women, compared to bi-identifying women?":

This is presumably the outcome you really care about; the rest are just useful proxies for that. Though this outcome may also have various confounders so YMMV.