Significant Differences for Gender and Age in Scaling Sexual Attitude

Variations in perception occur differentially in men and women, ranging from sensory stimuli to complex stimuli such as spatial location and body shape. Considering the different roles adopted in sexual behavior, our hypothesis is based on the principle that sexual stimuli also differ between genders. We perform a quantitative assessment of sexual stimuli that enables interpretation of implicit relations in sexuality, searching for comprehension of metric distortions inherent and specific to each gender. Sixty-eight subjects evaluated eight sexual words (tickle, smell, touch, kiss, nudity, grab, rub, and moan) by pairwise judgment in a forced-choice method. Thurstone’s Case V of the Law of Comparative Judgment was used to compute the subjective distance of each descriptor. Results showed they judged moan as having the greatest sexual content (1.784) and tickle as having the least (0.000), followed by smell (0.570) and touch (0.908). Gender differences appeared in the order of kiss, nudity, grab, and rub, and in the overall scale amplitude. The study showed that men need less sexual content to perceive words with sexual intention compared to women, for whom words have more variable sexual content. We conclude that men and women show differences in representing the sexual intention of descriptors and that the method used was very effective in measuring those differences on an interval scale.