What Do Men and Women Focus On When They Watch Porn? The Answer Will Probably Surprise You
Dr. Justin J. Lehmiller Posted on Monday, June 18, 2012 at 6:00AM 
When someone watches pornography, what is it that first captures their attention? Most people would probably guess the actors’ bodies and/or genitals, especially if they’re talking about male porn viewers. Although this would seem to make intuitive sense, is it really the case? According to research, not necessarily.
In a recent study, heterosexual male and female participants viewed a series of sexually explicit images downloaded off of the Internet.1 Each image consisted of a male-female couple engaged in either oral sex or intercourse. Before viewing the photos, each participant was fitted with a head mounted eye-tracking device that was able to record the exact section of each image an individual was focused on at any given moment. Thus, not only could researchers measure what first captured people’s attention, but they could also identify the areas participants spent the most time looking at.
Results indicated that the first thing to capture men’s attention and the thing men spent the most time looking at was female faces. Of course, this wasn’t the only thing that men focused on—they also spent a good deal of time looking at genitals. In addition, I should caution that this finding did not apply to every guy--there was a lot of variability in the features they oriented on. However, it’s interesting to note (and contrary to popular belief) that faces really seemed to stand out to men. Why? Perhaps men want to know how excited and "into it" the woman really is.
What about female participants? What they focused on depended upon whether they were taking “the pill” or not. For naturally cycling women (i.e., women who were not taking hormonal contraceptives), the thing that first caught their eye and what they looked at most were genitals, followed by the female body. In contrast to men, naturally cycling women spent relatively little time looking at anyone’s faces.
For women who were taking oral contraceptives, they spent comparatively less time looking at the sexual features of the images. The first thing these women noticed and spent the most time viewing were contextual features of the situation (e.g., the actors’ clothing and the background imagery). These women also spent a fair amount of time looking at female bodies and faces, but they spent less time looking at genitals than did naturally cycling women.
You’re probably wondering two things about the female results—why did the focus of women’s attention depend upon their method of birth control, and why were heterosexual women looking at the female body more than the male body? We can’t answer either question definitively, but let me give you the researchers’ reasoning. The difference in focus between the two groups of women is likely hormonal. Birth control pills keep women’s hormone levels relatively constant, whereas naturally cycling women experience natural fluctuations. This suggests that the amount of hormones in the body may affect how women perceive sexual stimuli. As for why heterosexual women seemed so interested in other women, it’s probably not because they were all secretly lesbians—rather, it’s probably just another sign that women have more erotic plasticity than men. What this means is that women can be turned on by a wide range of erotic stimuli (much wider than men), regardless of their sexual orientation.
Based upon these findings, the logical conclusion seems to be that not everyone sees the same thing when they’re looking at porn.
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1Rupp, H. A., & Wallen, K. (2007). Sex differences in viewing sexual stimuli: An eye-tracking study in men and women. Hormones and Behavior, 51, 524-533.
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Reader Comments (11)
Unfortunately, plasticity has little to do with the attentive direction of the women. Most are comparing their own body to that of the female actors.
That's certainly another possible explanation for why women paid more attention to female bodies, and I don't dispute that. I simply focused more on what the authors of the original article discussed, which emphasized the plasticity interpretation. Unfortunately, the results of this study don't tell us anything about why men and women paid attention to what they did.
Was there any control for the fact that men might look at the women's faces more simply so that they appear like less of a 'pervert' in the researchers eyes.
I mean wearing a head set, in an experimental environment, I would know what you were looking for. I probably wouldn't react to pornographic images in the same way that I would naturally.
Alternatively, empathy. The women were perhaps projecting themselves into the scene, and looking at the female bodies/faces to get an understanding of the experience.
I can only confirm what "Me" said. It's exactly what I do too (and I'm a woman not taking any birth control pills). To me it's exciting because I can imagine being in her place. If the man squeezes the femals boob for instance I instantly imagine that being done to me. So I'm guessing it has something to do with mirror neurons. Would love to see a follow up study on that! :)
A thought--your criticisms could be applied to many sexuality studies. Most of them don't capture sexual behavior in naturalistic settings and there's always the potential for socially desirable responding. However, I would argue that anyone who would be willing to participate in a study where they'd be watching porn probably wouldn't care that much what the experimenters thought (especially if they were assured anonymity of their results and completed the study in private). However, this raises another common concern: selection bias. People who are willing to watch porn in a lab might not necessarily be representative of the general population. So are there limitations of this research? Absolutely--but this is true of most sex research and it's very hard to get around many of these issues given the inherently private and personal nature of sex.
The more true to life reason that the women paid more attention to female bodies is because they were comparing. Trying to see what it is that makes a man so hot for that type of body. Trying to see where it is they compare to the image on screen or where they lack. It has been imbedded in our heads that anything less than a size zero with tremendous breasts is "fat", "gross", or "disgusting".
I know for me, that I why I always check out other womens bodies. Now, "Anazlye That".
Men in porn movies are almost always unattractive--the women are very attractive. If the women had something attractive to watch, they would have.
Well, given that they downloaded those images from the Internet, I can imagine how they were: a woman putting on a ridiculous over-the-top orgasm face, with pumped breasts the size of watermelons, and a plain-looking man, with a plain-looking face. No wonder then that the areas they focused more were women's faces and bodies (apart of genitals, of course). What was in the male body to look at? The back? The stomach? Also, male nipples aren't hypersexualized in the same way that Western culture has created a fetish around female breasts (for no good reason, because they're there to feed babies, nothing more).
Look, I don't find women attractive, but put me a photo of a naked good-looking man with a beautiful body, and a photo of a naked woman with breasts the size of my head, and my attention will be catched by the breasts, no matter how unattractive I find them. Why? Because they're taboo, because we learn that female breasts are pornographic and forbidden.
On the other hand, the male genitalia wasn't included in the male body zone, either. They were included in the genital zone. I guess that both men and women spent a lot of time looking at the penis, but this was recorded as "genital area", not "male body area".
Also, taken from the research (here: http://www.kinseyinstitute.org/publications/PDF/Rupp_HB_2007.pdf):
"When the genitals were included in the male body look zone in the Lykins et al. (2006) study, women preferentially viewed nude male bodies. Thus our findings may reflect a previously unreported female preference for looking at male genitalia."
So, does that study say anything about erotic plasticity? No way. And the research explicitly says that the reasons of women looking at female bodies may be of a completely different non-sexual nature.
I agree with 'Sam Clay'. Porn is directed for male audiences, so for me it makes sense that the women in the study checked out the women in the porn...the men are oftentimes a turn-off in themselves. =/
Actually with many of the birth control pills, hormone levels are very similar to those not on the pill. Thus I find the "reasoning" for the difference in viewing habits not to be at all convincing.