“For heterosexual women,” a researcher, Meredith Chivers, says in a new documentary about bisexuality called “Bi the Way,” which was shown at the NewFest film festival in New York last Friday, “looking at a naked man walking on the beach is about as exciting as looking at landscapes.”
Heterosexual women, Dr. Chivers and her colleagues found, were no more excited by athletic naked men doing yoga or tossing stones into the ocean than they were by the control footage: long pans of the snowcapped Himalayas. When straight women viewed a video of a naked woman doing calisthenics, on the other hand, their blood flow increased significantly.
In a 2004 experiment, and again in the recent study, published in the December 2007 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Dr. Chivers and her colleagues found women slightly but significantly aroused by footage of bonobo chimps mating. Men showed no such response.
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