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663 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Published July 1, 1986
Kinsey Institute researcher Dr. Heather Rupp is the lead author in a new study analyzing the viewing patterns of heterosexual men and women looking at sexual photographs. The results are not what you might expect.
Researchers hypothesized that women would look at faces in the photographs, and men would look at genitals. Instead, they found that the men were more likely than the women to look at a woman’s face before other parts of the body, and that men and women did not differ in their overall time spent gazing at pictures or in their subjective evaluations of the sexual attractiveness of the photos. The photographs were of heterosexual couples in sexual activity.
The study included 3 groups: men, women, and women taking oral contraceptives.
“The men looked at the female face much more than both groups of women, and women who were not taking the pill spent the most time looking at the genitals,” said Dr. Rupp. The data also showed interesting differences in attention that may be explained by hormonal state – the women on the pill paid more attention to contextual elements of the pictures, such as the clothing and background scene than did either of the other groups. These findings may help interpret previously reported sex differences in neural activation in response to similar stimuli.