Study: No Sexual Arousal Gender Gap

A Canadian study shows women become sexually aroused as quickly as do men.

McGill University researchers used thermal imaging technology to obtain the finding, contradicting conventional wisdom that women become aroused more slowly than men.

We see that there is no difference in the amount of time it takes healthy young men and women to reach peak arousal, said Psychology Professor Irv Binik, director of the Sex and Couple Therapy Service of Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, part of the McGill University Health Center.

Previously, sex researchers have measured arousal with instruments requiring genital contact and manipulation. During Binik’s arousal experiment, male and female subjects watched separate, sexually explicit films and, as the subjects responded, the Binik team monitored body-temperature changes to within a 100th of a degree. They found both the men and the women began showing arousal within 30 seconds. The men reached maximal sexual arousal in 664.6 seconds, the women in 743 seconds — a statistically negligible difference.

The study is to appear in the January issue of The Journal of Sexual Medicine.