April Lampert and Amy Baldwin, hosts of the popular weekly Shameless Sex podcast, are saying “No kidding!” to a recent study that revealed that men’s and women’s responses to sex and sexual imagery are pretty much the same.
While men and women purportedly view sex differently – men watch the majority of porn and are visually stimulated by sexual content, while women are thought to be less excitable – a recent study by scientific journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) confirms that women are equally aroused by much of the same stimuli as men.
“April and I started our podcast exactly because of this study’s findings – which we already knew,” says Baldwin. “Women are as sexual as men, we do get turned on in many of the same ways as men and we should not be shamed for being our sexual selves.”
The New York Times also reported these findings in an eye-opening article, ‘What Can Brain Scans Tell Us About Sex?’ where its (notably female) author Kim Tingley articulates what most ladies have known all along:
“The science of sex is inherently paradoxical. For centuries, social stigma, prejudice and misogyny have condemned as aberrant sexual pleasures we now know are healthy… to what extent do cultural attitudes toward pornography – historically, women have been shamed for consuming it – influence both our subconscious and conscious responses to sexual images?”
Lampert and Baldwin have long discussed “the differences in the ways men and women regard sexuality, how the brain processes such stimuli and how the proliferation of negative outside social influences – and our responses to it, can lead to buried shame, both physically and psychologically, in certain people,” said Baldwin.
“This is why we continue to talk about this… the more we are open to discussion and open in our desires without being chastened for having such thoughts, the better we can understand each other and feel safer in expressing ourselves and our sexual choices without stigma.”Visit ShamelessSex and follow on social media:
