Exhibitionism and Gender

[Page 518]The term exhibitionism is generally credited to 19th-century French physician Charles Lasègue. At a clinical level, sexual exhibitionism is characterized by the experience of sexual arousal from exposing one’s genitals to a nonconsenting and unsuspecting person, typically a stranger. The arousal may be experienced in the form of urges and fantasies or from actual behavior. The overwhelming majority of perpetrators of reported exhibitionist acts are men, and the vast majority of victims are girls and women, so there is very little research on female exhibitionism at this level of definition. As such, the forensic and clinical literature focuses on men. However, the research on fantasies and behavior in community samples suggests that exhibitionist tendencies are well established in women and that the motivations, response, ...