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The Eyes Reveal our Sexual Orientation

Pupil dilation and sexual arousal Post published by Nathan A Heflick Ph.D. on Mar 31, 2015 

Measuring sexual arousal can be a sticky matter. The most basic, and seemingly direct, way to measure sexual arousal is simply to ask people.

But, past research has found that this is problematic. For starters, people might not be the most willing to write down in a study what they are sexually aroused by if they consider it taboo, shameful or embarrassing, or if they are otherwise concerned about making a good impression. Even men who often reported no sexual arousal to—for instance—gay male stimuli often had genital arousal to gay male stimuli. (actually, men who reported being the most anti-gay in studies had the most genital arousal to gay male porn of any group of men who identified as heterosexual).

Another way to measure arousal is to, as just noted, measure actual genital arousal. But, this is a complicated matter as well. One problem is that the way to measure this in women is very different than the way to measure this in men. This makes some findings—like that women tend to show a bisexual preference in genital arousal more so than men—somewhat difficult to interpret. Also, there are likely a LOT of people not willing to sign up for these studies where they have devices attached to their genitals in a laboratory.

Recent research (link is external)headed by Gerulf Rieger (psychology lecturer, University of Essex, United Kingdom) and published in Biological Psychology (link is external), tested if the eyes can reveal our sexual orientation and our sexual desires. Sexual orientation is what sexual preference you identify with (e.g., homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, asexual, etc). Sexual desire is what stimuli you are aroused by. So for instance, a bisexual identified man might show stronger sexual arousal to men than women, or vice versa, or might have no preference.

In this study, men and women of various sexual orientations were exposed to graphic sexual content (e.g., images of men and/or women masturbating naked on a bed). During this whole process, pupil dilation was being assessed via eye tracking software. Genital arousal data was also gathered, as a goal of this research was to compare across these measures of sexual arousal.

The results indicated that, overall, genital arousal, self-reported sexual arousal, and pupil dilation correlated in response to a variety of imagery. This was especially the case for all men, and for homosexual women. 

This suggests that, yes, the eyes can reveal sexual attraction. Pupils dilation is an indicator of sexual arousal.