Our sense of the erotic is more plastic than we think
How fluid is our sense of the erotic? Like neurological plasticity, probably a lot more fluid than we think.
Whether it involves livestock or people, this sexual-imprinting process (in which a highly circumscribed set of erotic targets is stamped early into the individual’s brain) appears to be a decidedly male characteristic. By contrast, the female sheep and goats that were able to “go both ways” after their intensive cross-rearing experiences, equally aroused by both their own biological kind and members of their adoptive species, were exhibiting “erotic plasticity” (in which one can be sexually excited by a wide range of stimuli). Interestingly enough, erotic plasticity is also strikingly more apparent in human females than it is in human males. Another way to say this is that a girl’s developing sexuality is more fluid or labile (and for once that’s not a pun) than a boy’s; it’s less prone to getting locked onto a specific category of erotic target during childhood. —Jesse Bering, Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us
It’s so impossible to get real stats due to the decades/centuries of repression, plus the abysmal state of legit neurological studies on the phenomenon, gendered or no.1 But it makes me curious how much is biological or cultural, and if we can ever separate the two.
- see also: if disgust is a culture-bound syndrome, and pms and other pathologies are culture-bound syndromes, it stands to reason that our sense of the erotic is culturally influenced too
For more on this see Gender and Our Brains, Gina Rippon ↩︎