LOS ANGELES — April Lampert and Amy Baldwin, hosts of the weekly "Shameless Sex" podcast, have weighed in on a recent study that suggested men’s and women’s responses to sex and sexual imagery are essentially the same.
While popular theories of the past have positioned men as more ardent consumers of porn and more easily turned-on by visual stimuli than their female counterparts, a recent study published in the scientific journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), reports otherwise.
According to the report titled, "Neural Substrates of Sexual Arousal are not Sex Dependent," the findings confirm just that: that women are equally aroused by much of the same stimuli as men.
Baldwin shared her thoughts on the matter. “April and I started our podcast exactly because of this study’s findings—which we already knew. 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 article, "What Can Brain Scans Tell Us About Sex," where its author, Kim Tingley, articulates what "Shameless Sex" feels "most ladies have known all along."
“The science of sex is inherently paradoxical," says Tingley. "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,” she concluded.
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