Vaginal Photo Plethysmography

She sits in the chair with the television just a few feet away. Her left hand is free; her right hand holds a lever that can be forced forward, like the throttle on a motorboat. A probe about four inches long is sitting in her vagina, attached to a clear cord that dangles between her legs like a plumber’s snake.

Lisa and Barbara never told me Northwestern U was so… interesting.

There are so many things wrong with this particularly sticky version of operationalizing psychology. It demonstrates American psychology’s techno fetishism (how could a “vaginal photo-plethysmograph” possibly be wrong?), it selects from within a small, homogenous group that then self-selects for porn non-aversion, it has no control group that test reactions to other visual stimuli, it has no control that tests people’s reactions and feelings about embodied phenomena, and it does not classify the porn to which the women are subjected according to its deployment and presentation of power relations. What a crock.