A Northwestern Ph.D. candidate will present results of sexual arousal research she conducted with NU Prof. J. Michael Bailey — which has drawn criticism from the Republican wing of Congress — when she speaks at a federally-funded sexuality conference next week.
The conference, slated for July 16-21 at the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Ind., according to the organization’s Web site, has drawn ire from politicians who do not think taxpayer money should help fund the event.
The National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Child Health and Human Development is providing $26,000 for the conference. The event, which allows experts in the field of sexual arousal to discuss research with each other, also is receiving funding from the National Institute of Mental Health and private assistance from the Social Science Research Council.
Some politicians, including U.S. Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), argued that the government is “out of touch” if it thinks federal money should fund sexual arousal studies.
“The federal government is pretty efficient at wasting money, but this may be a new low,” Flake said in a prepared statement. “If this conference needs funding, they ought to hit up Larry Flynt, not taxpayers.”
But Meredith Chivers, a Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology at NU who will speak about sexual arousal research she conducted with Bailey, said the conference does merit funding.
“Sexuality is an intrinsic part of being human and it’s a major oversight not to encourage research in this area and to support it,” Chivers said.
Bailey, a psychology professor who teaches human sexuality at NU, also defended the need for researchers to study sexuality.
“Sex is an extremely important part of life,” said Bailey, who recently released “The Man Who Would Be Queen,” a book that explores homosexual, heterosexual and transsexual arousal. “We have to know what arouses people sexually to know how people function.”
Like the conference, Bailey and Chivers’ sexual arousal study also encountered criticism for obtaining government funding.
A $147,000 National Institutes of Health grant funded the research, which studied the effect of pornography on females to determine whether sexual arousal is as category specific for women as it is for men. That allocation prompted 20 Republican members of Congress, including Flake, to write to the director of the National Institutes of Health and ask him to explain the “bizarre spending decision.”
Another congressman, Rep. Dave Weldon (R-Fla.), questioned the decision to fund sexuality research and conferences when money could go toward researching other diseases.
“How do we explain to the millions of Americans facing death and severely debilitating diseases and disorders that research to cure their disease was a lower priority for the (National Institutes of Health)?” Weldon wrote in an e-mail July 9.
But Bailey said the funding he received for the research should not be an issue.
“The amount of money spent on (my research) compared to others is tiny, a very small grant for (National Institutes of Health) standards,” Bailey said.
Chivers said she was surprised at the controversy over funding for Bailey’s research and the sexuality conference. Bailey said he thought politicians singled out his and Chivers’ research because “it was easy for them to mischaracterize and make fun of.”
“They used our research to make their argument, but in fact I think our research is important and interesting, and scientists who know about the issues and what we’re doing have found it really cool,” he said.
The arousal study showed that while watching pornography men had a one-sided arousal pattern — straight men were aroused by clips with women, gay men by those with men. But females in the study, straight or gay, were aroused by both male and female sex acts. The results could be published in “Psychological Science” by 2004, Chivers said.
The Summer Northwestern’s Jinna Yun contributed to this report.
