A new analysis of data from over 50,000 individuals indicates that men exhibit a more exclusive pattern of sexual attraction than women do. The research shows that while men strongly prefer one gender over the other, women tend to display a wider range of potential attractions. These results appear in The Journal of Sex Research. For decades, researchers have attempted to map the differences in how men and women experience sexual desire. Older investigations often relied on measuring physical signs of arousal in a laboratory setting. Those experiments frequently suggested that men are “gender-specific.” This means men typically show physical arousal only when viewing the gender they prefer. In contrast, those same historical studies often found that straight women displayed physical arousal when viewing images of both men and women. This led to a prevailing theory that female sexuality is inherently less specific than male sexuality. However, it remained unclear if this pattern applied to psychological feelings of attraction or fantasies. Sapir Keinan-Bar, Yoav Bar-Anan, and Daphna Joel conducted the current investigation to answer this …