An assessment of the sexual preferences of exhibitionists and matched non-offenders, revealed greater arousal to scenes of exposing among the offenders but the actual degree of deviant preferences was not marked. Closer analyses of the individual response profiles, using various criteria for deviance, indicated that only a small proportion of exhibitionists displayed deviant arousal. We take these results, along with the findings from previous research, to deny the primacy of sexual motivation in exhibiting behavior. We also consider these results to indicate that there is little value in determining the sexual preferences of exhibitionists when planning treatment or estimating their risk to re-offend.