The North American sexologist Alfred Kinsey asserted in 1940 that in sexual matters “men are stimulated visually by preference, more than women”, and also that “the preferential form of female stimulation is tactile stimulation”. In looking for the biological and/or social roots of this supposed difference, my hypothesis is that the excitatory response to visual and tactile stimulation in men and in women is directly linked to culture; that culture takes it upon itself to develop sensitivity or to repress its development, and to educate men and women to adapt to it, imprinting, upon a relatively stable phylogenetic model, a pattern that varies, on the one hand according to the period, as historical changes determine it, and on the other hand between men and women.

a) The pioneering survey

From the end of the 1940s to the beginning of the 1950s, Kinsey questioned 12,000 male subjects of various ages, from the youngest to the oldest. These men declared that looking at naked women, at female genitals, at breasts or at thighs in drawings, photographs, reproductions and films aroused them more than caresses received on any part of their body, with the exception of direct stimulation of their genitals. Kinsey’s conclusions consisted of a description of the results, characterising men as “visual” and women as “tactile”, without grounding the difference between the visual and the tactile in men, nor that between the visual and the tactile in men and in women.

b) Some later experiments

On the basis of what Kinsey had stated, several research teams presented visual erotic material to men and to women. The studies of the 1960s and 1970s showed that a far greater number of men became aroused watching films with naked women, compared with the women who became aroused watching films with naked men with an erection. But it was found that, before films in which caresses and kisses appeared, male and female responses did not differ: the men became aroused to the point of erection, and the women to the point of vaginal lubrication. The experiments also recorded an increased blood flow in the genitals of both. All of this was reported by the people themselves and set down on verbal scales. Faced with the change in the results compared with Kinsey’s survey, some studies attributed this change to the fact that the liberation of morals after the Second World War had brought pornographic material closer to women. Another possible cause of the change would be that Kinsey had prepared his material for men; the new experiments, by contrast, included romantic and erotic films that proved more stimulating for women. It was also supposed that the women in the earlier experiments may not have wanted to acknowledge their arousal verbally, possibly because they had learned to speak of such material only in a negative way.

c) The relation between the visual and the tactile in men

Doctor Fernando Bianco, a Venezuelan sexologist, submitted a group of men to the following experiment: the subjects were to be caressed either by men or by women, in two sets of trials. In one set, their eyes were covered; in the other, their eyes were uncovered. The results obtained were as follows.

• Caresses, both male and female, produced an erection in the man being caressed when his eyes were covered.
• When the man being caressed had his eyes open, the erection was produced by the caresses of women, but not by those of men.

It would seem that the sight of the man being caressed functioned as a selective control of pleasant sensations, conditioning them upon the sex of the person stimulating him. Visual censorship acted as a barrier to any sensation coming from another man.

d) The prohibitions on contact

In The Hite Report on Male Sexuality, the author asked 7,239 men for a written and anonymous testimony. One of the questions concerned the past relations between sons and their fathers. The majority did not remember a close physical relationship. One of them recounts that he learned very early that boys do not make displays of affection and that he therefore stopped, very young, being affectionate, including with his mother; today he sees physical contact as a sign of security, but he feels uneasy about it and dreads making the first move, so out of place, so feminine, so ridiculous does it seem to him. Another explains that, in his childhood, before puberty, he always wanted more physical contact than he received — embraces, caresses, other displays of affection —, but that his family was little given to demonstrations of tenderness and that as he grew up he asked for less and less.

Shere Hite defines the male “sexual drive” as an “ideological construct”. In it, sexual play involving skin contact is devalued in order to overvalue coitus, in which men are “those who do” and women “those to whom it is done”. Only a few men, among them several of the third age (set aside by society as insufficiently virile), can go beyond the stereotypes mentioned and show themselves more receptive with their partners. In Western society, male education generally prepares individuals for success, and for maintaining it, through an aggressive control that requires the physical distance from the rival to be constant and the emotions to be contained so as not to lose power. Sexual relations are often “the moment of truth”, since in order to enjoy himself a man must trust his partner, come close, give himself over and feel pleasure. The obsessional and rational mechanisms that govern professional life are a burden that sexual therapies have to deal with. Part of what is sought there is the relearning and the recovery of the sensory-perceptual experiences lived in childhood through maternal contact (Money: the haptic phase, or the phase of caresses and embraces). “Educated” skin opens to pleasure at birth and should go on developing throughout life.

e) Male fears and fantasies linked to tactile sensitivity

In the “Hite report”, many men acknowledged what happened to them with their partner.

• The fear that, when caressed on the back, the groin, the thighs and the anus, someone might enter them and “subdue” them, because they might like it (fantasies of homosexuality).
• The fear of losing power by not being themselves the direct “producer” of pleasure, but disposing themselves to feel it (fantasy of submission).

Many homosexual and heterosexual men fear feeling “passive”, because for them it means losing status before their partner, suffering or, quite simply, accepting the other in their difference and their autonomy. In evading this risk, the sexual relation becomes stereotyped for lack of fluidity. The traditional male way out is to seek a prostitute, so as to secure a relation in which the bond can be controlled.

f) Physical contact in stable homosexual couples

Masters and Johnson, in Homosexuality in Perspective, stress that in stable male homosexual couples, gestures of caress and of tenderness are far more frequent than in stable heterosexual couples. For its part, visual perception does not serve only for a lesbian to win over her partner: the gaze is among the erotic resources frequently drawn upon.

It might perhaps be legitimate to conclude that, not answering to the social demands to which heterosexual couples are subjected, these groups allow themselves more freedom in sexual interaction.

g) The contributions of anthropology

Margaret Mead, in Cultura y sociedad, shows that male and female present a variability of social behaviours that stops only before the biological: giving birth, carrying, begetting, breastfeeding, ejaculating, menstruating. Men and women, we learn to perceive the world differently because access to the means of education differs according to whether we are a boy or a girl. In the non-systematic sexual education that begins at birth from the attitudes of the parents, the child learns to use their sight to seek the approval of their behaviour from adults. Parents define early the gender identity of their children (being a boy or a girl) on the basis of their genitals, and expect boys and girls to behave according to their expectations. But the variability of what the function of man and that of woman are to be marks each culture. Bronislaw Malinowski, in The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia, transcribes the male and female songs of young people and of adults that refer to the shape and the size of the genitals of suitors. Courtship behaviours show the young women engaged in the frontal conquest of their chosen one, to whom they express their desire through bites, pinches and scratches that the beloved proudly shows to the tribe, having been favoured by the young woman. In social organisation, the genetic appears as one factor more among the many factors that configure a complex system.

h) Biology and the eyes-hands connection

Gérard Zwang considers that walking upright exerted an influence on human beings by granting human vision a privileged place. The anterior and close-set position of the eyes allowed them to have visual precision and, the genitals remaining highly exposed to possible attack, the hands took on the function of a system of aggression and of defence of the anterior zone of the body. It is also through the eyes that desire enters, for it is with them that the male can grasp the conformation of the female. In a frontal view, he sees her breasts, her mound of Venus, her hips; in the posterior view, the buttocks reproduce, like a gigantic signal, the design of the vulva. For her part, the female will appreciate the frontal genital protuberance and the breadth of the male’s shoulders. Zwang speaks of a solicitation of sexual hunting in man, through which his visual sensations would be richer than in woman. Hunting would develop distance vision, whereas domestic tasks — cooking, spinning, and so on — would favour in woman a close, static vision, richer in small details. In all human activities of individual survival, the hand perfects the contact of what sight brings near.

On the sexual plane, the hand fulfils three functions: auto-erogenous exploration, bodily exploration and the sexual stimulation of the other person; and, in men in particular, that of guiding the penis.

i) Conclusion

Biologically, sight provides the information that allows a man to choose his sexual companion. Once in coitus, he may stop looking at her and fall back on his tactile sensations, in which a central place is occupied by the contact of large bodily surfaces: the chest, the back, the buttocks, the forehead and the cheeks of his partner. Through this contact, he returns to the most primitive needs of his nature, to which he must respond so as not to suffer disturbances in his erotic life. In women, sight expresses satisfaction before the male’s courtship; during coitus, it fulfils the function of regulating penetration and of slowing it with the hands, should it be painful.

j) Epilogue

From the literature cited, I have come to the conclusion that, to this day, neither neurobiology nor any other biological research can conclusively show that it is organic determinations that differentiate male erotic perception from female erotic perception. I consider that the fullest explanations come from the field of social psychology, of sociology and of anthropology. They have shown that with historical and social changes there also change the possibility of gaining access to erotic images and, consequently, of enjoying them. Let us recall that in the past the learning of enjoyment was encouraged in men and forbidden in women. Since we think that these changes will increase as morals and the social controls of sexuality are liberalised, it is likely that women and men will find in shared visual stimulation a valuable resource for the enrichment of their sexual life. We have cited the personal experiences of several men that sum up the traditional difficulty in enjoying non-genital caresses. The main reasons for this limitation arise from the severe childhood education they received and that they reproduce in their adult behaviour. The woman of the 20^th century too, heir to the Victorian era, learned to repress the pleasure of looking and claimed to replace it with the pleasure of being looked at. We shall be able to contribute to enriching sexual behaviour only by unravelling the web of prohibitions, myths and beliefs that have indiscriminately guided so many men and women.