Women's Nonspecificity: A Measurement Artifact?

Uncovering category specificity of genital sexual arousal in women
The critical role of analytic technique
Pulverman et al. (2015)

Pulverman et al. (2015) posit that women's nonspecificity of sexual response could be a methodological artifact. 

We propose that the reported lack of category specificity observed in women is an artifact of the analytic approaches used to evaluate this construct. To our knowledge, all previous studies testing category specificity in women have used some variant of average genital arousal for analyses. Average genital arousal is an oversimplification of vaginal photoplethysmograph data, which is typically recorded at 80 to 200 times per second, resulting in hundreds of thousands of data points per subject. Viewed in that con text, the average is the most basic statistical index, is easily skewed by outliers, and fails to reflect variability in data. More sophisticated analytic approaches that take all data points into account and model data over time might shed new light on the specificity of women’s genital sexual arousal. 

When using smoothing regression splines, they were able to detect gender-specific responses in 19 "heterosexual"-identified women, but not in 14 "lesbian"-identified women. While this is an intriguing finding for heterosexual women, it is possible that this research team did not recruit a good sample of lesbians.

In addition to smoothing regression splines, Pulverman et al. (2015) also analyzed genital response using "traditional methods" (mean VPA). Under Results, Pulverman et al. (2015) state: "Similar to previous studies (Chivers et al., 2007), we failed to detect category specificity of lesbian women’s genital sexual arousal using change in mean VPA statistics." This is a misrepresentation of the previous studies on lesbian women's sexual responses.

Heterosexual and homosexual women's mean genital response
Chivers et al. (2007)

"Homosexual women showed greater vaginal responses to female stimuli than to male stimuli and, therefore, exhibited category-specific genital responding to these films." (Chivers et al., 2007)

"For gynephilic women, sexual responses are typically gender-specific at most stages of sexual response." (Chivers, 2017)

The fact that Pulverman et al. (2015) were unable to replicate this gives reason to question the sample of "lesbian"-identified women.

The 14 "lesbians" were recruited by self-reported sexual identity. "Women were required to identify as exclusively or predominantly lesbian on the Kinsey Scale to qualify for this study.  Bisexual-identified women were excluded from the study." The sample included "14 lesbian women aged 18 to 47, with an average age of 26.07 (SD58.38). Seven women identified as exclusively lesbian and seven identified as predominantly lesbian." 

Lesbianism is not one thing, and women identify as "lesbian" for different reasons. Given the "lesbian until graduation" phenomenon, self-reported sexual identity is not always reliable, especially among women in their early 20s. When individual subjects are reviewed, it is doubtful that Pulverman et al.'s (2015) "Lesbian Subject B" was gynephilic as opposed to androphilic or ambiphilic. 

In the future, it is recommended that researchers rely on more than self-reported sexual identity for the inclusion criteria of lesbian subjects. 

Related Blog Posts

References

Chivers, M. L. (2017). The specificity of women’s sexual response and its relationship with sexual orientations: A review and ten hypotheses. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 46(5), 1161-1179. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-016-0897-x

Chivers, M. L., Seto, M. C., & Blanchard, R. (2007). Gender and sexual orientation differences in sexual response to sexual activities versus gender of actors in sexual films. Journal of personality and social psychology, 93(6), 1108. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.93.6.1108

Pulverman, C. S., Hixon, J. G., & Meston, C. M. (2015). Uncovering category specificity of genital sexual arousal in women: The critical role of analytic technique. Psychophysiology, 52(10), 1396-1408.

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