Sexology is hardly the exact science it’s made out to be

“Women’s orgasm frequency increases with the income of their partner,” according to Dr Thomas Pollet, a psychologist from Newcastle University who was quoted in a Sunday Times story on January 18. Dr Pollet and his co-author Professor Daniel Nettle had a look at data from the Chinese Health and Family Life Survey. This gave “in-depth interviews” to 5,000 Chinese, including 1,534 women, asking them about their sex lives as well as income and other things.

Dr Pollet said: “Increasing partner income had a highly positive effect on women’s self-reported frequency of orgasm.” Which makes sense as far as it goes, but is the inference he draws - “More desirable mates cause women to experience more orgasms” - reliable? How on earth can he know this on the basis of a “self-reported” finding? When everyone knows people lie to sex researchers?

This is supposed to demonstrate an instance of “evolutionary adaptation” whereby women’s behaviour is driven by ruthless pursuit of their genes’ best chance of survival. “The study is bound to be controversial,” observes Jonathan Leake, Sunday Times science correspondent, “suggesting that women are inherently programmed to be gold-diggers.”

Another study was reported by Daniel Bergner in a long article in the New York Times magazine last on January 25. Here, scientists used more rigorous-sounding techniques to test women’s (and men’s) sexual response, including the good old plethysmograph (an instrument which tests genital blood flow).

Merideth Chivers, the author of the study, is 36 and a professor of psychology at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. She did her research at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto. She strikes me as a typical sexologist. She “favours high boots and fashionable rectangular glasses” and decorates her office with pictures of an orgy and a man copulating with a horse. “She has been pondering sexuality… since the age of 5 or 6”.

Professor Chivers’s findings are genuinely interesting. She strapped her participants up to the plethysmographs and sat them in a brown vinyl La-Z-Boy reclining chair. Then she screened film showing bonobo apes mating, as well as varied clips of human males and females either having sex, not having sex, doing calisthenics or walking along a beach and measured the reaction. At the same time she asked the respondents to write down what they felt.

The fascinating thing is that men - boringly - reacted just as you’d expect, their self-reported arousal matching the machine’s measurements. But women were just the opposite. “Mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person,” Bergner says. For example, women said they were completely uninterested in watching the bonobos. Yet their blood flow rose “quickly” and “markedly” when watching the apes. Among the explanations proposed are that the apes represent sexual arousal and resemble humans. Another scientist, Professor Marta Meana of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, speaks of “fantasies of submission” and summarises: “Women want a caveman and caring”. If she had to pick an actor who embodied these qualities, it would be “Denzel Washington”.

Whatever the truth is, Professor Chivers’s study confirms the pointlessness of asking questions as a means of finding out about an area of human behaviour the whole point of which is that it’s private.