ATOMIC DOG
All Women are Lesbians
by TC

The Atomic Dog is a weekly feature that isn't necessarily about weight training or bodybuilding. Sometimes it's about sports in general, sex, women, or male issues of some kind. At times it's inspirational, but it can also be informative, funny, and even a little weird, but hopefully, always interesting and a little controversial. We hope it reflects the nature of Testosterone magazine in that, just as no man is completely one-dimensional and only interested in one subject, neither are we. If it makes you think or laugh — or even get angry — it's served its purpose.

In 1997, marginally hot moppet-haired actress Anne Heche freaked out the heterosexual world by starting a widely publicized love affair with the equally moppet haired lesbian comedian Ellen DeGeneres.

Bear in mind that Heche hadn't—prior to that point—been involved in any muff-diving relationships.

The affair lasted two years, after which Heche fluffed up her probably likewise moppet-haired vagina and went on to marry a dude.

In a similar situation, non-famous, ordinary person Julie Cypher left a hetero marriage to hook up with Chuckie look alike Melissa Etheridge. Twelve years later, they separated and Cypher returned to heterosexual relationships.

Separated at birth?

What in the wide, wide world of pussy is going on?  Can't these women, and untold thousands like them, choose between nuts and no-nuts?

Psychologist Lisa Diamond, prominent sexologist at the University of Utah and author of Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire, figures that in the case of the aforementioned celebrity hook-ups and others like them, female desire is largely dictated by intimacy or emotional connections.

She believes their desire is malleable, so much so that sharing a laugh over lattes or a rerun of Friends—whether it be with a compatible male or the comely dental hygienist she met in aerobics class—will do much more to determine lust and sexual proclivity than any sexual orientation.

Others believe it's cultural, as if watching girl-on-girl scenes on Gossip Girl or 90210 compels women to imitate the TV images and get naked with their sorority sisters. Most, however, probably believe as psychologist Diamond does, that women get sexual after shared experiences that foster emotional closeness.

I tend to think it has more to do with women being largely blank slates, sexually speaking. While the majority of men have a sexual orientation, women appear to be far less rigid when it comes to penis or vagina.

If you doubt that, consider the experiments conducted by Meredith Chivers, a psychology professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. Chivers put together a little porn movie featuring men making love to women, women making love to men, men making love to men, and women making love to women. The film also featured men and women masturbating, a nude well-toned woman doing calisthenics, and a chiseled dude walking naked along the beach. Oh yeah, it also featured clips of bonobo chimps fucking.

While the film might end up getting an award at the next AVN awards, her real intent was to show it to men and women and gauge their arousal, both objectively and subjectively.

Test subjects were individually plopped down into a brown leather La-Z-Boy chair and fitted with a device known as a plethysmograph.  The mechanics of the device are sex specific.  Men are fitted with a wired little cuff that slips over the penis and detects swelling, while women insert a little plastic probe that sits in the vagina and measures genital blood flow and subsequent moisture by bouncing light off the walls of the vagina. It also causes any Jimi Hendrix posters affixed to those vaginal walls to light up really weird and freaky.

Subjects were also provided a keypad so they could subjectively rate their arousal.

As you might predict, the men responded in what Chivers called "category specific" ways. Straight men bonered up while watching heterosexual sex or lesbian sex. They liked watching women masturbate, and seeing the naked exercising woman do splits and plant fat juicy labial kisses on the yoga mat was downright inspiring.

Straight men obviously didn't care much for the naked guy walking on the beach.

Gay men were aroused in the exact opposite pattern. Neither straights or gays cared much for the bonobo sex scenes, but that might have been because of the poor lighting or the unforgiveable absence of any money shots.

The subjective keypad ratings showed their mind and genitals to be pretty much in agreement.

But the women? Ha! They pretty much lathered up at allof it. No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, they showed strong and swift genital arousal at men on men, women on women, and women with men. They also like watching the naked babe work out.

Their blood flow even rose significantly to the ape sex, although to a lesser degree than all the situations, except for the scenes of the buff dude walking naked on the beach.

Oddly enough, though, their minds and genitals hardly seemed like they belonged to the same person, particularly in the straight women. Based on their keypad responses, heterosexual women reported less excitement watching lesbian scenes than their vaginas indicated. They reported much less excitement watching gay men than their vaginas let on, and they reported a great deal more excitement than their vaginas showed while watching heterosexual sex.

 The lesbians tested slightly differently in that subjective and objective ratings converged while watching lesbian sex. However, while watching heterosexual sex, they reported less excitement than their private parts let on.

Both groups claimed to get no sexual buzz from the ape sex, but as mentioned, they lathered up just a little bit, regardless.  

Freaks.

While the results of any one study can be met with skepticism, Chivers has compared 130 such studies and found a similar female mind/vagina disconnect.

So what really does turn women on? From the studies, we'd assume just about everything from aardvarks to toaster ovens get their body revving, even though their minds might not know it.

Another sexologist, Marta Meana of the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, seems to agree with Chivers' findings in asserting that women's arousal has little to do with intimacy. "Really," she explains, "women's desire is not relational, it's narcissistic; it's dominated by the yearnings of self-love." In other words, women want to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need.

She admits that women do indeed place a high value on relationships, but it's wrong to think they're the primary source of a woman's desire.

In fact, she suggests that what women really want is to be thrown up against a wall but not truly endangered. "Women want a caveman and caring."

This assumption seems to give credence to something Chivers theorized: that women are most turned on, subjectively at least, by the notion of sex with strangers.

But what of the female sexual malleability thing? Why is it that women seem more open to same-sex dalliances? Richard Lippa, psych professor at California State University at Fullerton, thinks it might be hormonal.

He's tested thousands of men and women over the years and he found that in men, those with the highest sex drives, straight or gay, tended to have a more polarized attraction than most males. That means that if you've got high Testosterone and you're straight, you're even more keenly zeroed in on hootchie mamas.  Similarly, if you're gay and you've got high Testosterone, there's little chance that any woman is going to convert you to her team.

But oddly enough, the opposite was true with straight women. The higher their sex drive, the greater their attraction to both sexes.

I'm puzzled. Puzzled but turned on. As is consistent with Chivers' study involving the bonobo movie, my response to watching or even contemplating girl-on-girl sex is significant, at least as measured by the crude penile plethysmograph represented by the restless bulge in my Hanes.

I'm pretty sure all the researchers are puzzled, too. The research is all over the vaginal board. Hell, there's even a theory that vaginal lubrication is a defense mechanism designed to prevent injury to the vagina. When there's even a hint of sexuality in the air, so the theory goes, women lube up to prevent injury from possible rape.

Gawd, I hope there's more to it than that. That ain't half as sexy as the notion that women are far more sexual and far more open to paraphilia—erotic desires that fall outside the norm—than I'd (we'd?) hoped.

Of course, the vast majority of women will probably never explore these alleged erotic desires, largely because—assuming we're not drawing incorrect assumptions about Chivers' bonobo sex film study— they don't even know they have them. That mind/vagina disconnect seems to be huge.  Their eyes say no but their vagina says, Yes! Yes! Yes!

I suppose the chivalrous thing to do would be to help them explore these desires, to slowly introduce them to all their inherent paraphilic desires the same way one would carefully introduce a piece of chicken skin on a hook to a tasty bluegill.

I am soooo going to Hell.

Note: This column was inspired by an article titled, "What do Women Want?" that was written by Daniel Bergner and appeared in the New York Times Magazine on January 25^th, 2009.

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