Type keyword s to search. Today's Top Stories. She's in her birthday suit. Do you a try the same played-out sex moves you've been using or b blow her mind and turn her on with these new naughty Cosmo-approved ideas? If your answer is b, start clicking
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Ask a man what the magic formula is for turning on a woman sexually and you're likely to be met with a heaving shrug. For years, scientists have been just as perplexed. And to a large degree, arousal has mystified even women themselves. The only consensus: the female mind, heart, and genitals all need to be in on the effort in order for arousal to occur. But recently, a handful of sex researchers have gotten on the case — and their fascinating findings may help improve your sex life. One of the most intriguing research nuggets to emerge: While male sexuality is fairly predictable — they tend to be aroused by naked women and naked women hooking up with other naked women — female sexuality is stimulated by a surprisingly wide array of turn-ons. Meredith Chivers, Ph. For the guys, the findings were straightforward enough: The straight men in the study were physically aroused by women, gay men were aroused by men, and neither group felt any stirrings for the apes. The men's physical reactions erections were in agreement with what they reported being turned on by.
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This article originally appeared on AlterNet. The question of what women want has been baffling people for years. Many books, papers, irate blogs, pick-up artist seminars, films, art, and music have been devoted to this pressing topic, each one seeming to contradict the last. If we are to believe fan fiction erotica involving characters from books, TV and movies , which is primarily written by women, women want to see Severus Snape from Harry Potter get it on with a Teletubby. Predictably, science has stepped in to provide some more concrete answers than those involving pastries or fuzzy aliens. The following studies set out to discover what turns women on. The results will definitely surprise you.
The belief that men are more likely to get turned on by sexual images than women may be something of a fantasy, according to a study suggesting brains respond to such images the same way regardless of biological sex. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , Noori and his colleagues report how they came to their conclusions by analysing the results of 61 published studies involving adults of different biological sex and sexual orientation. The subjects were shown everyday images of people as well as erotic images while they lay inside a brain-scanning machine. Noori said all participants rated the sexual images as arousing before being scanned. Previously studies based on self-reporting have suggested men are more aroused by images than women, and it has been proposed that these differences could be down to the way the brain processes the stimuli — but studies have returned different results. Now, looking at the whole body of research, Noori and his colleagues say they have found little sign of functional differences. For both biological sexes, a change in activity was seen in the same brain regions including the amygdala, insula and striatum when sexual images were shown. However, activity was more widespread in the case of explicit pictures than video, and there were some small differences in the regions activated linked to sexual orientation. The team also analysed more than 30 published studies to explore whether there were differences between the biological sexes in the volume of grey matter in the insula and anterior cingulate — a previous study had suggested this may be linked to levels of sexual arousal. However, the vast majority of the studies considered did not find any difference in the volume of grey matter in such regions between the sexes.
