Women’s sexuality

Researchers from the University of Essex in England are positing that no woman is “totally straight.” The study, published by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, asked 345 women about their sexual preferences and measured their physiological sexual responses when shown videos of attractive men and women, finding that only 28 percent of straight women were mostly aroused by their preferred sex, compared with 68 percent of women who identified as gay. Such sexual arousal patterns from gay women is similar to those of men, whose physiological responses are typically consistent with stated preferences. Dr. Gerulf Rieger, the study's lead author, suggested that women's sexuality is far more complex than men's. “When it comes to straight women and sexual arousal, there is such a disconnect between what a woman tells me and what her body does,” he said. “It suggests it's a different world for women when it comes to their sexualities.”