(L) Watching porn can leave women sick: Study (2014)

Do not try to force your lady to watch porn movies or explicit images as viewing porn out of context can make her feel sick, a Dutch study has revealed.

A woman’s body immediately goes on the defensive when seeing porn out of context.

It can immediately induce nausea, the study added.

“It is just like when you see disgusting food. The emotion that is triggered by for example the smell, ensures that you do not want to eat it,” said Charmaine Borg from Groningen University in the Netherlands.

To reach this conclusion, researchers used an MRI scanner to measure neurological responses in 20 healthy women to a variety of images.

These included nausea-inducing as well as images of explicit sexual penetration. No faces were shown.

“The results showed a strong overlap in the areas of the brain that became active while viewing the nausea-inducing images and those depicting pornographic scenes,” the researchers were quoted as saying.

The response could be explained by women’s higher susceptibility to sexual infection in comparison to men, the study, reported by British newspaper Independent, noted.

 

Subcortical BOLD responses during visual sexual stimulation vary as a function of implicit porn associations in women

  1. Janniko R. Georgiadis3

+ Author Affiliations

  1. 1University of Groningen, Department of Clinical Psychology and Experimental Psychopathology, Grote Kruisstraat 2/1, 9712 TS Groningen, The Netherlands, 2Department of Behavioural and Cognitive Neuroscience (BCN), Ant. Deusinglaan 1, 9713 AV Groningen, The Netherlands, and 3Department of Anatomy, University Medical Centre Groningen (UMCG), Antonius Deusinglaan 1, 9713 AV, Groningen, The Netherlands
  2. Correspondence should be addressed to Charmaine Borg, Department of Clinical Psychology and Experimental Psychopathology, (Room 303) Grote Kruisstraat 2/1, 9712 TS Groningen, The Netherlands. E-mail: [email protected]
  3. Received March 17, 2012.
  4. Accepted September 30, 2012.

Abstract

Lifetime experiences shape people’s attitudes toward sexual stimuli. Visual sexual stimulation (VSS), for instance, may be perceived as pleasurable by some, but as disgusting or ambiguous by others. VSS depicting explicit penile–vaginal penetration (PEN) is relevant in this respect, because the act of penetration is a core sexual activity. In this study, 20 women without sexual complaints participated. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging and a single-target implicit association task to investigate how brain responses to PEN were modulated by the initial associations in memory (PEN-‘hot’ vs PEN-disgust) with such hardcore pornographic stimuli. Many brain areas responded to PEN in the same way they responded to disgust stimuli, and PEN-induced brain activity was prone to modulation by subjective disgust ratings toward PEN stimuli. The relative implicit PEN-disgust (relative to PEN-‘hot’) associations exclusively modulated PEN-induced brain responses: comparatively negative (PEN-disgust) implicit associations with pornography predicted the strongest PEN-related responses in the basal forebrain (including nucleus accumbens and bed nucleus of stria terminalis), midbrain and amygdala. Since these areas are often implicated in visual sexual processing, the present findings should be taken as a warning: apparently their involvement may also indicate a negative or ambivalent attitude toward sexual stimuli.

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