What is it about men and women that make them sexually attractive to those people who find them attractive? Which parts of the body? Which sexual acts? We address this question empirically through a factor analysis of people's ratings of the attractiveness of women's and men's body parts, and of particular sex acts with men and women. Participants of a wide variety of sexual orientations (including a rich sample of bisexuals) rated body parts (by sex) and sex acts (by sex) on 1-to-5 scales. We factor-analyzed answers to these 50 questions to reveal the factor structure of people's attractions as a function of their sexual orientation (itself derived from a previously reported cluster analysis of the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid), then calculated average responses of the male and female clusters on the factors that had emerged. The data showed: (1) The factor structure of men's and women's attractions to women were remarkably similar. (2) The factor structure of men's and women's attractions to men's bodies were remarkably different, identifying an attraction to adult masculinity that differed from attraction to adult boyishness. (3) Lesbian group variability was usually much higher than in any of the other groups. (4) Even though our sample was intentionally diverse, many of our participants only reported attractions to members of one sex. (5) Bisexuals were neither consistently intermediate between homosexuals and heterosexuals nor consistently similar to homosexuals and heterosexuals. (6) Bi-heterosexuals (one of 3 bisexual subgroups) seemed to be more sexually adventurous than might be expected from their position in the progression from pure heterosexual to pure homosexual, especially with regard to anal sex (albeit moderately so). (7) Homosexual men were not intrinsically attracted to anal sex per se. (8) Among men, nonsexual body parts and non-sexual acts were picked out in factor analyses and explained somewhat more variance between men of different sexual orientations than explicitly erotic variables do. (9) Among female respondents, the biggest differences in attractions to men by sexual orientation pertained to specifically erotic differences, not affectionate or bodily stimuli. (10) Although oral-anal contacts generally received low ratings by all the groups of women, ratings of oral-anal contacts were particularly low among lesbians. We believe that this is the first empirical study to report what it is about women and men that forms the basis for attractions to them, and the first to identify significant subgroups among men who are attracted to men.
Keywords: anal intercourse; bisexuality; erotic preferences; sexual intercourse; sexual orientation.