LONDON - Women enjoy looking at naked female bodies just as much as male ones, a study suggests.
Experts found that while the attention of red-blooded males was drawn to images of women, their female counterparts were more flexible.
Some experts say this is because women are innately more ‘fluid’ than men when it comes to their sexuality.
For the experiment, Cardiff University psychologists showed 57 men and women a series of sexy images and asked how attractive they found the people in them.
The volunteers then sat in front of a computer screen and watched as the pictures flashed up in pairs – one female and one male.
The images stayed on the screen for just one-fifth of a second – less time than it takes to blink – before one was replaced with a faint dot.
The more quickly the participant spotted the dot, the more attention they were thought to have been paying to the preceding picture.
The male volunteers noticed the dots that followed the pictures of female bodies most quickly, suggesting they found these more appealing. However, the women’s attention was equally drawn to both the male and female images.
This was the case even though the women said they preferred the pictures of the men when asked.
In a second, similar experiment, a different group of women actually responded more quickly to female images than male ones.
This suggests women who consider themselves heterosexual are more fluid when it comes to sexuality than men.
Some experts claim this trait evolved to reduce tension among co-wives in early polygamous marriages. The findings come as bisexual women are gaining more visibility in the media, with growing numbers of female celebrities discussing their same-sex relationships.
Hollywood star Angelina Jolie – who is now married to actor Brad Pitt – once dated Japanese-American model Jenny Shimizu. Mother-of-six Miss Jolie once said that, in different circumstances, she would ‘probably have married Jenny’.
Supermodel Cara Delevingne has spoken out about dating musician Annie Clark, while actress Amber Heard had a long-term relationship with a female photographer, Tasya van Ree, before her ill-fated marriage to film star Johnny Depp.
The Cardiff psychologists’ results are echoed in recent research from the US, which found that women were more likely to describe themselves as bisexual than men.
Researcher Elizabeth McClintock, from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, said that ‘male eroticisation’ of same-sex female relationships allows women to experiment – for instance by kissing other women at parties – without being stigmatised.
Her analysis also showed that attractive women were more likely to think of themselves as purely attracted to men.
Daily Mail