A new study from researchers at the Kinsey Institute may reveal that one man’s turn-on is often another’s turn-off; an erection doesn’t always signal arousal; and not every guy wants to jump into bed at the drop of a hat.
Researchers sat down with groups of men with the goal of understanding men’s sexual turn-ons and offs.
“We don’t tend to — from a research perspective — sit down a lot with men or groups of men and talk about such intimate topics, such as what influences…sexual desire and arousal and the topic or the question of where in all of this the penis comes in. This is one of the studies that attempted to do that,” said Dr. Erick Janssen, an author of the study and an associate scientist at the Bloomington, Indiana-based institute and one of the.
Their six focus groups consisted of 50 men with ages ranging from 18 to 70. Most of the men were white and heterosexual.
Participants were encouraged to share their opinions on what arouses them sexually and what enhanced or inhibited their arousal.
“As it was previously found in women, men described a wide range of physical (genital as well as nongenital) and cognitive/affective cues for sexual arousal,” researchers wrote.
Men reported getting erections without necessarily being aroused, while some men, especially older men, said they might become aroused without having an erection.
Others reported masturbating as a “great way” to change their mood when “something just feels off.”
Among things that men said led to increased arousal was feeling good about themselves. Others said a self-confident partner helped them become aroused more often than women who thought negatively about themselves.
Some factors, such as being depressed or being at risk of being discovered during sex, inhibited sex for some, while other men found that it could enhance their desire and arousal.
Also, many men found it difficult to distinguish between sexual desire and sexual arousal, a distinction prominent in most sexual response models used by researchers and clinicians.
Janssen said that the group’s findings prove that men’s sexual interests are far more complex than what is portrayed in men’s magazines.
“There’s huge variability among men in how easily they’re turned on or turned off, how easily they experience sexual desire and arousal,” he explained. “The differences among men and the differences among women are much larger than the average difference between the sexes in almost anything sexual.”
In fact, 30 percent of women may be more easily sexually aroused than most men, Janssen said.
“This study’s challenging the idea that men are simple.”
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