U-M researchers Amy Kiefer, Diana Sanchez and Oscar Ybarra conducted four studies to reach the conclusions in the paper, "Sexual Submissiveness in Woman: Costs for Sexual Autonomy and Arousal," scheduled to appear in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin next year.
Key findings show that women implicitly associate sex with submission and that this leads to a submissive sexual role, which in turn leads to lower arousal and difficulty becoming aroused. This association appears to lower their arousal by reducing their sexual autonomy.
Researchers tested subjects by showing target words associated with submission on a computer screen, preceded by subliminal primes (words with a specific connotation, in this case sex primes and neutral primes. For instance, sex and oven).
Women's responses were on average faster when submissive words were preceded by a sex prime than by a neutral prime. This faster response indicates the two concepts are related in women's minds, said Kiefer, a recent doctoral graduate in the psychology department.
Further, on average the quicker the response, the more likely the women were to report engaging in submissive sexual behavior.
The priming results indicate that women may have unconsciously picked up the message that they should be sexually submissive, raising the possibility that women have internalized societal pressure, said Sanchez, a recent doctoral graduate in the psychology department and women's studies.
Previous research suggests that social norms promote deference to men, and this extends to intimate relationships. This message is constantly repeated by the media in magazines, television and movies that "commonly display male sexual dominance over women and female sexual submission to men," the paper states.