Nine Things We Now Know About What Turns Us On

1. Porn isn’t going to screw up your sex drive.
You’ve likely heard that pornography can be destructive for real-life relationships. Too much porn, the thinking goes, desensitizes the viewer to erotic images and makes it more difficult to become aroused in real-life sexy situations. Some have even claimed that men who frequently watch online porn are more likely to struggle with erectile dysfunction. Earlier this year, however, a pair of studies were published that found no correlation between porn viewing and erectile dysfunction. Other research has even suggested that both men and women with a casual porn habit report having more frequent and higher-quality sex compared with people who don’t watch porn.
2. Bisexual men tend to be more sexually adventurous over all than gay or straight men.
Previous research had suggested that bisexual men’s bodies respond more strongly to erotic images of men than to those of women, a finding that contributed to the (unfair and outdated) skepticism over whether bisexuality is a distinct sexual orientation. But a 2013 study highlighted a key characteristic that may explain why some bi men get turned on by women and some don’t: sexual adventurousness. Bisexual guys who are drawn equally to men and women tend to score higher in sexual curiosity — in other words, they show more interest in a wider range of sexual acts. The authors argue that this means that, even within the seemingly discrete category of “bisexual men,” there is a fair amount of sexual fluidity.
3. As viewers of The Kids Are All Right may remember, some lesbians like to watch gay-male porn.
In case you needed more proof that human sexuality is an often unpredictable thing, there’s a study by Irish and Canadian researchers in which they interviewed lesbians about their porn preferences. Most of the women quoted didn’t care for girl-on-girl porn, saying they found the films unrealistic and clearly made by and for straight men. (“For the guys, it’s like, Oh, make them both cute and femme, because they don’t want to have this masculine dyke in there,” said one woman after watching a clip from Lesbian Cheerleader Squad 2.) Instead, many lesbians are drawn to erotic films depicting two guys getting it on. That’s partially because women tend to have more erotic plasticity than men — that is, they’re turned on by a wider variety of things. Sex researcher Meredith Chivers has found, for example, that while men tend to show physical arousal only in response to erotic films depicting their stated sexual orientation, women show similar arousal patterns when watching clips from gay-male, lesbian, and straight pornography, regardless of their orientation. (Plus, with guy-on-guy porn, you don’t have the associated ickiness of women performing for a male audience.)