London - The heyday of girlie calendars and pin-ups may well be behind us, but it may still come as a surprise to know that men are no more obsessed with nudity than women.
At least that’s the conclusion of a scientific review of responses to erotic images.
It said that the brains of men and women reacted in the same way to erotic pictures, suggesting that the cliche that men are attracted by lingerie and nudity, while women need to be wooed to get in the mood, is not true.
While women usually rated the nudes less positively than men in questionnaires, exactly the same parts of their brain "lit up" in MRI scans - those linked to emotional processing, reward and desire.
Researchers led by the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics looked at 61 studies using scans involving 1 850 people shown erotic images or short films.
They conclude that brain scans do not support the theory that men "respond differently to visual sexual stimuli than women". Dr Hamid Noori, who led the study from the German institute, added: "Our study challenges the common public perception that men are more visual than women when it comes to sex."
The results of the review were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.