Has anyone ever made love to you so beautifully that you’ve cried afterward? I’ve done so but never had it done to me. Do you remember your first kiss? Mine was memorable: An Italian boy stuck his tongue in my mouth and swiveled it around for about half an hour. I kept thinking, “Is this supposed to feel good? Could I grow to enjoy this?” Kissing is all about sensitivity. My fiancé is an excellent kisser. I’m an excellent kisser, too. Do you think sometimes we accept what life has to offer because we are afraid something better won’t come along? – Letter to the president
Note that this is possible: Researchers emphasize that genital response ≠ desire or attraction.
The Chivers et al. 2010 meta-analysis found that when shown porn, men’s physical arousal (erections) matched what they said turned them on. Women’s physical arousal (vaginal blood flow) often didn’t match their self-reports—their bodies responded to a wider range of content, including stuff they said wasn’t their preference. Scientists called this “non-specific” arousal. The correlation found between genital response and the self-reported measure was .66 in men and .26 in women. Women do show genital responses to stimuli they don’t report finding arousing, including stimuli that are unappealing, undesired, aversive, and nonconsensual. [via Claude Opus 4.5][this is probably pretty solid but was there is some disagreement mostly on why this happens]
Women seem to be genitally aroused to more things: eg. heterosexual women to both sexes vs. male to only preferred sex; more to primates having sex vs. man less (but Bonobo bit have been contested in a later study showing this might have been about sounds)
Why this pattern exists remains contested. The dominant theory—the “preparation hypothesis”—proposes women have developed a reflexive lubrication response to any sexual cue that could lead to penetration in order to prepare and hence protect the vagina from potential injury.
Power/status/dominance cues: some women report increased attraction/arousal to dominance or high-status signals, especially for short-term contexts, but findings vary a lot by culture, individual preferences, and operationalization (often studied as mate preference rather than moment-to-moment arousal). Link
The results: men showed genital arousal specifically to consensual, non-violent sex. Women showed similar genital responses to all narratives containing sexual activity—regardless of consent or violence—while their subjective arousal was specific to consensual scenarios.