What grabs my attention here is that the study hasn’t factored in the way that straight women aren’t trained to appreciate male bodies. Society constantly presents the idea that “sexy” equals “female” and this is drummed into all of us from a young age.

OMG, I couldn’t agree with you more!! This is a, ahem, big beef of mine!

And to piggyback this to my comment on your “Weird Critique,” I think this is more reason that we need to increase exposure to non-typical sexuality. The Time article’s conclusion is exactly what feeds the porn industry’s ignoring women and allows them to continue in sexism: women apparently like it, after all. But we need non-sexist imagery, we need real lesbians having hot sex, we need vulnerable male representations, we need sex positions that are not all about displaying women’s vaginas, etc…

and women (or men) will likely not embrace these kinds of imagery until they enter into sex culture in a meaningful way.

Beyond that, the research does back up the idea that straight women can get turned on by anything.

I think men absolutely have the capacity to be turned on by anything too…but just like you say above that it’s Pavlovian that women will be turned on by women when women’s eroticization is shoved down our throats, it’s also Pavlovian that when homophobia is so much a part of men’s sexuality and when the eroticization of male bodies is all but nonexistent and when it is, it is targeted primarily for gay men, that men would not be turned on by male bodies. In fact, the men I know tend to recoil even from man ass in movies!

Therefore, I conclude that representing men as sexual for a hetero female audience would benefit both heterosexual women and men…although it won’t benefit sexism (and maybe that’s why it has yet to materialize).