Sexuality is seen as a crucial aspect of one’s identification and sexual desire is perceived as the core of one’s identity. Therefore, the emergence of an asexual identity constitutes a radical disruption of approaches to identity and epistemology in social science. This study explores a virtual community of asexual individuals who engage in discussions about contradictory processes of identification, the instability of sexual identities, gender relations and possi- ble representations of asexuality.

{ Graduate Journal of Social Science | PDF }

The average bicycle police officer spends 24 hours a week on his bicycle and previous studies have shown riding a bicycle with a traditional (nosed) saddle has been associated with urogenital paresthesia and sexual dysfunction. […]

The objective of this study was to assess the effectiveness of the no-nose bicycle saddle as an ergonomic intervention and their acceptance among male bicycle police officers. Bicycle police officers from five U.S. metropolitan areas were recruited for this study. […]

After 6 months, 90 men were reassessed. Only three men had returned to a traditional saddle.

{ International Society for Sexual Medicine | PDF | via Improbable }

images { 1. Charles Ray | 2. Dietmar Busse }

Every month, during each menstrual cycle, there is a very small window in which women can conceive. Most estimates are between five to six days, with the peak ovulatory window being a few hours at the end of the fertile window. The onset of a woman’s period is actually at the beginning of the ovulatory cycle, not the end. Though the exact length varies from woman to woman, the average menstrual cycle lasts about twenty-eight days. During the length of a woman’s overall cycle, she goes through three phases: menses, follicular, and luteal. Ovulation occurs between the follicular and luteal phases. The term “peak fertility” refers to a small window (usually thought to be anywhere between two to six days) when a woman’s conception rate goes up. Though technically every woman only ovulates one day a month, the chemistry of the vagina during this time facilitates sperm life (whereas in other phases, the chemistry produces a spermicidal effect). Sperm can actually retain the capacity to fertilize ova after five days at room temperature. However, unlike in many other species, human females are continuously proceptive and receptive to sex regardless of where they are in their monthly cycle.

Thus, Thornhill and Gangestad (2008) propose that women possess dual sexuality – estrous sexuality and extended sexuality – and that these two distinct forms of sexuality function during different periods of the menstrual cycle. Estrous sexuality (i.e., conceptive or reproductive sexuality) occurs within the fertile period of the menstrual cycle and female sexual preferences and motivations function to obtain “good genes” for offspring through mating with high-quality males. Extended sexuality (i.e., non- conceptive or non-reproductive sexuality), is complementary to estrous sexuality, functioning during unfertile periods to obtain non-genetic material benefits from mates in exchange for sexual access.

{ Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology | PDF }

All kinds of things go into a woman’s vagina. Some are friendly (like sperm and vaginal microbes), and some are very bad (STDs). The immune system in the vagina has to be able to tell the difference and react appropriately. As you can imagine, the system isn’t perfect and sometimes things go terribly wrong.

An article published earlier this month in the journal Frontiers in Immunology reviewed the current state of knowledge of the vaginal immune system. […]

if a woman should become pregnant, her immune system has to know that it can’t attack the growing fetus, even though it’s technically a foreign object. […] When sperm enter the vagina, it sets off a rapid response in the cervix called the leukocyte reaction. A whole slew of immune cells rushes to attack and kill the invading cells, also known to the future baby as ‘dad’. This might be partly why millions of sperm are needed in order for just one to fertilize an egg.

{ nitty gritty science | Continue reading }

To determine whether “folk myths” regarding the relationships of penile size to body height and foot size have any basis in fact, 63 normally virilized men were studied. Height and stretched penile length were measured; shoe size was recorded and converted to foot length. Penile length was found to be statistically related to both body height and foot length, but with weak correlation coefficients. Height and foot size would not serve as practical estimators of penis length.

{ Annals of Sex Research, 1993 }

Gary and members of his law firm filed a lawsuit late Monday in federal court in Fort Pierce on behalf of Chubby Checker, the 71-year-old singer known for “The Twist,” against Hewlett-Packard and its subsidiary Palm Inc. over the use of Checker’s name on a software application that claims to estimate the size of a man’s penis based on his shoe size…

{ via Improbable | Continue reading }

photo { Leon Levinstein }

{ List of the shortest-reigning popes | ‪List of sexually active popes‬ }

and { Resigning Pope No Longer Has Strength To Lead Church Backward }

{ This paper presents a new approach on nipple detection for adult con- tent recognition. […] This method first locates the potential nipple-like region by using Adaboost algorithm for fast processing speed. It is followed by a nipple detec- tion using the information of shape and skin color relation between nipple and non-nipple region. […] The experiments show that our method performs well for nipple detec- tion in adult images. | Institute for Infocomm Research | PDF }

Interest in sensations from removed body parts other than limbs has increased with modern surgical techniques. This applies particularly to operations (e.g., gender-changing surgeries) that have resulted in phantom genitalia. The impression given in modern accounts, especially those dealing with phantoms associated with penis amputation, is that this is a recently discovered phenomenon. Yet the historical record reveals several cases of phantom penises dating from the late-eighteenth century and the early-nineteenth century. These cases, recorded by some of the leading medical and surgical figures of the era, are of considerable historical and theoretical significance. This is partly because these phantoms were associated with pleasurable sensations, in contrast to the loss of a limb, which for centuries had been associated with painful phantoms. We here present several early reports on phantom penile sensations, with the intent of showing what had been described and why more than 200 years ago.

{ Taylor & Francis | Continue reading }

related { Study of a rare disease making people look like a woman but having male genitals under study }

Men who were born without a sense of smell report having far fewer sexual partners than other men do, and women with the same disorder report being more insecure in their partnerships, according to new research.

The researchers don’t know why romantic difficulties could be tied to smell, but they say one possibility is that people with anosmia, or no sense of smell, are insecure, having missed many emotional signals all their life.

{ LiveScience | Continue reading }

photos { Sarah Pickering, Fuel Air Explosion (L), Land Mine (R) }

Explicit communication involves the deliberate, conscious choosing of words and signals to convey a specific message to a recipient or target audience. […] Much of human communication is also implicit, and occurs subconsciously without overt individual attention. Examples include nonverbal communication and subconscious facial expressions, which have been argued to contribute significantly to human communication and understanding. […] Additionally, recent studies conducted by evolutionary psychologists and biologists have revealed that other animals, including humans, may also communicate information implicitly via the production and detection of chemical olfactory cues. Of specific interest to evolutionary psychologists has been the investigation of human chemical cues indicating female reproductive status. These subliminally perceived chemical cues (odors) are often referred to as pheromones.

For two decades, psychologists studying ovulation have successfully employed a series of “T-shirt studies” supporting the hypothesis that men can detect when a woman is most fertile based on olfactory detection of ovulatory cues. However, it is not known whether the ability to detect female fertility is primarily a function of biological sex, sexual orientation, or a combination of both.

Using methodologies from previous T-shirt studies, we asked women not using hormonal contraceptives to wear a T-shirt for three consecutive nights during their follicular (ovulatory) and luteal (non-ovulatory) phases. Male and female participants of differing sexual orientations then rated the T-shirts based on intensity, pleasantness, and sexiness.

Heterosexual males were the only group to rate the follicular T-shirts as more pleasant and sexy than the luteal T-shirts. Near-significant trends also indicated that heterosexual men and non-heterosexual women consistently ranked the T-shirts, regardless of menstrual stage, to be more intense, pleasant, and sexy than did non-heterosexual men and heterosexual women.

{ Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology | PDF }

Study authors found that approximately 44% of emerging adults who had been in a romantic relationship in the past two years had experienced at least one reconciliation with an ex romantic partner and 53% of those who reported reconciliations also reported having sex with their ex. Additionally, racial minorities in particular were even more likely to experience reconciliation or sexual relationships with previous romantic partners.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

Artists, creative writers, and musicians have long been interested in the complex motives that spark passionate love, sexual desire, and sexual behavior. Recently, scholars from a variety of disciplines have begun to investigate two questions: “Why do men and women choose to engage in sexual liaisons?” “Why do they avoid such encounters?” Theories abound. Many theorists have complained that there exists a paucity of scales designed to measure the plethora of motives that prompt people to seek out or to avoid sexual activities. In fact, this observation is incorrect. Many such scales of documented reliability and validity do exist. The reason that few scholars are familiar with these scales is that they were developed by psychometricians from a variety of disciplines and are scattered about in an assortment of journals, college libraries, and researchers’ desk drawers, thus making them difficult to identify and locate. This paper will attempt to provide a compendium of all known sexual motives scales, hoping that this will encourage scholars to take a multidisciplinary approach in developing typologies of sexual motives and/or in conducting their own research into the nature of sexual motives. […]

Until recently, American sexologists generally assumed that young people engage in sexual activities for one of three reasons (the Big Three): love, a desire for pleasure, and/or a desire to procreate. […] Take a foray into the worlds of culture, art, and literature, however, and suddenly one becomes aware of how narrow the perspective of the Western scientist has been. There are a multitude of reasons why men and women might wish to engage in sexual activities. As Levin (1994) observed: “Coitus is undertaken not only for pleasure and procreation but also to degrade, control and dominate, to punish and hurt, to overcome loneliness or boredom, to rebel against authority, to establish one’s sexuality, or one’s achieving sexual competence (adulthood), or to show that sexual access was possible (to “score”), for duty, for adventure, to obtain favours such as a better position or role in life, or even for livelihood.”

{ Interpersona | Continue reading }

photo { Man Ray, Prayer, 1930 }