Naomi Andrews

So we went into this big database, books database, the Ngram Google book database, and did some interesting, I think, research looking at feel-sexy phrases tied to male pronouns versus female pronouns.

And what we found was on average,

that female pronouns were much more associated with the feel sexy phrase than male pronouns.

And so we thought, wow, that's an interesting gender difference.

Although there was evidence that both males and females were at times tied to these feel sexy phrases.

Well, again, we thought this idea of being an object of desire and how it links up to people's way of thinking about their sexuality really hadn't been studied in the context of these kinds of phrases before.

And we thought, you know, these phrases really do link up really strongly to sexuality.

object of desire kinds of perceptions.

So we thought, you know, this kind of phrase is probably the perfect phrase to look at and see if there were some interesting gender differences.

And there was.

Sure.

Well, a script is like a mental guide for how events are supposed to unfold.

So it's basically a guide that we have in our brains or our minds about what's supposed to come first, what's supposed to come second, what's supposed to come third, and so on and so forth in terms of a social situation.

And it becomes kind of incorporated into the way we think in a very unconscious, implicit way, so we don't actually have to think about it.

We just kind of know, this comes first, then this, then this, then this.

Well, for object of desire self-consciousness, if that's incorporated into our sexual scripts,

For women, it may be something that comes kind of first, and then what ends up happening is a kind of arousal trigger, and then ultimately women may become more interested in sexuality because a first event in their script has been triggered, and then they may end up becoming aroused and interested in sex.

What about for men?

Sometimes it's feeling desired is also a first event.

But sometimes for guys, it may be just, for example, noticing someone who is very visually interesting and attractive.