In bed, couple on different planets

Researchers have found that while a man’s body always reacts when he feels aroused, only some women’s bodies do, confirming the longheld belief that when it comes to humans’ natural urges, the genders can be hopelessly out of sync.

For their study, the researchers looked at a series of researches published between 1969 and 2007 involving more than 2,500 women and 1,900 men, the ‘Daily Mail’ reported.
Participants were asked how aroused they felt during and after exposure to a variety of stimuli such as sexual images. Their replies—a subjective measure of arousal—were compared with their physiological responses as measured by blood flow to the genitals.
The men’s subjective and physiological responses matched closely, while there was more often an inconsistency between women’s bodies and minds. Some women reported feeling aroused even though there was no discernible physical change.

Others said they had not been aroused even though the physical signs suggested otherwise. Such a mismatch hardly ever occurred among men.
“We wanted to discover how closely people’s subjective experience of sexual arousal mirrors their physiological genital response — and whether this differs between men and women,” Professor Meredith Chivers, of Queen’s University in Ontario, who led the study, said.

She said the findings, published in the latest issue of the ‘Archives of Sexual Behaviour’ journal, would be useful for future studies on the difference between the sexes and the way they feel about sex.