The study presents evidence that sexual arousal in women temporarily reduces the disgust eliciting properties of sexual stimuli and weakens the hesitation to actually approach these stimuli.
Due to this effect, women are able to experience body odors, sweat and semen as pleasant during sexual engagement, which in a non-sexual aroused state probably would elicit disgust.
related { New study finds clients want real love from sex workers }
This study finds that women who read sex-related magazine articles from popular women’s magazines like Cosmopolitan are less likely to view premarital sex as a risky behavior. Additionally, the women who are exposed to these articles are more supportive of sexual behavior that both empowers women and prioritizes their own sexual pleasure.
I experience pleasure at work in the mainstream sex industry that I certainly perceive as ‘real’. This pleasure comes from physical sensations (lactic acid, endorphins, sweat, carpet burn, whipping hair, a double ended dildo angled against my g spot, real orgasms) but also from the thrill of voyeurism (exhibitionism, cameras, being naked in front of thousands of people).
In general, talking about sex with your partner may improve sexual satisfaction. But new research suggests that during sex it’s better to shut up and switch to non-verbal communication of pleasure.
photo { Larry Clark }
Around 60,000 years ago, modern humans left Africa, the cradle of our species. As we spread across the face of the Earth, we discovered that we weren’t the first or the only humans to make that sojourn. From Central Asia to Europe, we met our distant cousins the Neanderthals, descendants of a 500,000 year old migration; further east were the Denisovans, ranging from Sibera to Southeast Asia. Although these other humans died out around 30,000 years ago, some comfort can be found in the knowledge that a part of them lives on in us. Genetic evidence uncovered in the past few years suggests that our migrating ancestors may have mated with these other humans during their encounters. Not everyone was convinced, though, launching an ongoing debate about whether the genetic similarity might not be due to common ancestry rather than inbreeding.
still { Jean Seberg and Geoffrey Horne in Otto Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse, 1958 }
The death of an autoerotic asphyxiation fan ended up providing science with some valuable observations of what happens during choking.
On Twitter recently, I’ve been highlighting some really bad ideas courtesy of the medical literature. From injecting vaseline into your own penis, to pumping compressed air up your rectum for a joke, people have tried it and they’ve ended up on PubMed as a result.
Then?
He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.
A team of organizational behavior scientists recently examined nonharassing sexual behavior at work and its consequences for employees. They based their predictions on theories of power and gender and systematically examined men’s and women’s experiences of sexual behavior at work without imposing a positive or negative lens on the behavior. No prior studies had done this. The results show that workplace sexual behavior is enjoyed by some women and many men but it is generally associated with negative work-related and psychological outcomes, regardless of whether it is enjoyed or disliked.
Some may think it is “fun” or “good” or argue that sexual behavior at work is “typically harmless.” Others may suggest that sexual banter and sexual jokes may provide a fun and jovial atmosphere at work, or that workplace sexual flirtation can be flattering and lead to love or romance. But, these and other sexual behaviors in the workplace correlate with serious and substantial mental and psychological harm, even to those workers who said they enjoyed the experience. The researchers also found no evidence to support any positive evaluation of the effect of sexual behavior in the workplace or that it provides any benefit to employees who enjoy it.
related { Sexual Consent as Voluntary Agreement: Tales of ‘Seduction’ or Questions of Law? }
This study focuses on the relative frequencies of various sexual activities and the ways in which those activities are portrayed in homosexual and heterosexual pornographic films. Many anti-pornography arguments are based on the alleged oppression and degradation of women in pornography. Others (Salmon & Symons, 2001) have suggested that the main focus of pornography is not about contempt for women and that if it was, gay pornography should differ dramatically from heterosexual pornography. This paper tests that hypothesis. Sixty films that ranked amongst the most popular heterosexual and homosexual DVDs were examined with regard to the types of sexual activities that occur and the interactions between the participants. We found few major differences in pornography aimed at a homosexual versus heterosexual male audience, other than those that reflect the different anatomy involved, and none that reflect an anti-female agenda.
{ Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology | Continue reading }
photo { Juergen Teller }
A decade ago a study made an extraordinarily bold claim: that semen has antidepressant properties in women. Although widely-reported, there seems to have been a lack of critical response to this study and apparently no follow up studies have been done to test whether this claim is actually valid […] A well-known research principle is that correlation does not imply causation, and there are plausible alternative explanations that the authors of the study did not take into consideration.
What the study actually found was that women who did not use condoms during sex had lower levels of depressive symptoms compared to women who usually or always used them, and to women who abstained from sex altogether. The authors argued that vaginal exposure to semen was the causal mechanism underlying this effect, arguing that semen has components including various hormones, particularly prostaglandins, that are readily absorbed into the woman’s bloodstream and that these have an antidepressant effect. […]
Subsequent research has found that frequency of intercourse is positively correlated with both satisfaction with mental health and satisfaction with life in general, but this would not explain why condom use would seem to be related to depression. Brody (2010) has argued that sex with condoms is not real intercourse but something ‘akin to mutual masturbation’. I confess to finding this statement rather baffling but it is possible that for some women at least, sex with a condom may be less satisfying than without. One survey found that 40% of women reported decreased sensation associated with condom use and that some women associate condoms with a number of ‘turn-offs’ such as discomfort. Therefore, it seems possible that sexual enjoyment has an antidepressant effect that may be reduced by condom usage. […]
Another possibility, although it may sound strange, is that it is depression itself that leads to condom usage.
illustration { Adrian Tomine }
Mating can be dangerous. At least 100 years ago, biologists began to speculate that sex in the animal kingdom could be a very risky business. The noises can attract predators, the male is distracted and he has less energy to fight off an attacker or to run away. Perhaps that is why males almost always attempt to finish so quickly. Surprisingly, however, there has been little evidence to support this hypothesis until recently. Two lab studies and one in the field have shown that mating increases the risk of predation in freshwater amphipods, water striders and locusts.
Now a new study shows very strong evidence of the effect in flies.
images { 1. Sanne Sannes | 2. Ciler }
related { Women in love less likely to initiate sex, finds study }
Arousal, the researchers contend, actually affects our perception of time. […]
The researchers presented 116 males with images from an online Victoria’s Secret catalog and gauged their response to receiving one of two fictitious Amazon.com promotions: a gift certificate available that day or one available three months from now. They asked the subjects the dollar value that would compensate for having to wait. Those exposed to sexually charged imagery (versus those in a control group exposed to nature images) were found to be more impatient and expressed that future discounts would have to be steeper to compensate for the time delay.
painting { Willem Drost }
They might say that sex between people who are in love is special (maybe even sacred), but they also know sex is part of the partnership of getting through life together and has to be considered pragmatically as well. Even people in love do not have identical physical and emotional needs, with the result that sex takes different forms and means more or less on different occasions. […]
Part of the mythology of love promises that loving couples will always want and enjoy sex together, unproblematically, freely and loyally. But most people know that couples are multi-faceted partnerships, sex together being only one facet, and that those involved very often tire of sex with each other. Although skeptics say today’s high divorce rate shows the love-myth is a lie, others say the problem is that lovers aren’t able or willing to do the work necessary to stay together and survive personal, economic and professional changes. Some of this work may well be sexual. In some partnerships where the spark has gone, partners grant each other the freedom to have sex with others, or pay others to spice up their own sex lives (as a couple or separately). This can take the form of a polyamorous project, with open contracts; as swinging, where couples play with others together; as polygamy or temporary marriage; as cheating or betrayal; or as paying for sex. […]
Many people, not just professional sex workers, know that the work of sex can mean allowing the other to take an active role and assuming a passive one as well as taking the active role or switching back and forth. Sometimes people do what they already know they like, and sometimes they experiment. Sometimes people don’t know what they want, or want to be surprised, or to lose control.
For some critics, the possession of money by clients gives them absolute power over workers and therefore means that equality is impossible.
photo { Tim Geoghegan }
“Rocket Queen” is the closing song of American hard rock band Guns N’ Roses’ debut studio album Appetite for Destruction. […]
Axl wanted some pornographic sounds on Rocket Queen, so he brought a girl in and they had sex in the studio. We wound up recording about 30 minutes of sex noises. If you listen to the break on Rocket Queen it’s in there.
{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | Thanks Tim! }
One of the worst parts of being pregnant […] is what is commonly referred to as morning sickness.
This term for the nausea and vomiting accompanying pregnancy is something of a misnomer, actually, since such gastrointestinal issues certainly aren’t limited to the morning hours. Rather, for those women who do get green around the gills (and not all do; more on that later) sudden bouts of toilet-hugging can happen morning, noon and night. […]
Why, if it is indeed an evolutionary adaptation, does pregnancy sickness not occur in all (or at least, almost all) pregnant women? […]
So what does Gallup say is the real culprit behind nausea and vomiting in early pregnancy? Semen. More specifically, unfamiliar semen.
Gallup’s evolutionary reinterpretation of pregnancy sickness is quite new—so new, in fact, that it hasn’t been put to a test. But at the 2012 meeting of the Northeastern Evolutionary Psychology Society in Plymouth, N.H., he and graduate student Jeremy Atkinson laid out a set of explicit predictions that, if borne out by data, would support their model and may lead scholarship away from the traditional embryo-protection account.
First, the authors predict that the intensity of pregnancy sickness should be directly proportional to the frequency of insemination by the child’s father. “Risk factors for morning sickness,” they reason, “should include condom use, infrequent insemination, and not being in a committed relationship.” In fact, Gallup and Atkinson believe that lesbians with little (if any) previous exposure to semen who are impregnated by artificial insemination should have some of the worst cases of nausea and vomiting. Also, pregnancy sickness should wane in severity from one consecutive pregnancy to the next, but only assuming that the same man sires each successive offspring. By contrast, a change in paternity between offspring should reinstate pregnancy sickness.
I don’t diagnose people I haven’t met. More importantly, I don’t use the diagnosis of sex addiction. In thirty-one years as a sex therapist, marriage counselor, and psychotherapist, I’ve never seen sex addiction. I’ve heard about virtually every sexual variation, obsession, fantasy, trauma, and involvement with sex workers, but I’ve never seen sex addiction.
New patients tell me all the time how they can’t keep from doing self-destructive sexual things; still, I see no sex addiction. Instead, I see people regretting the sexual choices they make, often denying that these are decisions. I see people wanting to change, but not wanting to give up what makes them feel alive or young or loved or adequate; wanting the advantages of changing, but not wanting to give up what makes them feel they’re better or sexier or naughtier than other people. Most importantly, I see people wanting to stop doing what makes them feel powerful, attractive, or loved, but since they don’t want to stop feeling powerful, attractive or loved, they can’t seem to stop the repetitive sex clumsily designed to create those feelings.
photo { David Armstrong }
Findings from a first-of-its-kind study by Indiana University researchers confirm anecdotal evidence that exercise—absent sex or fantasies—can lead to female orgasm.
While the findings are new, reports of this phenomenon, sometimes called “coregasm” because of its association with exercises for core abdominal muscles, have circulated in the media for years. […]
“The most common exercises associated with exercise-induced orgasm were abdominal exercises, climbing poles or ropes, biking/spinning and weight lifting,” Herbenick said. “These data are interesting because they suggest that orgasm is not necessarily a sexual event, and they may also teach us more about the bodily processes underlying women’s experiences of orgasm.”
{ This surgeon has performed 200 penis enlargement operations in the last year alone. But are men getting what they pay for? | Independent | full story }
A study found that students asked to tell whether someone was gay or straight guessed correctly more often than could be put down to mere chance.
Women had greater accuracy with 65 per cent able to identify someone’s sexuality at a glance, while men were correct 57 per cent of the time.
Evidence suggest it is easier to recognise gay women’s faces than men’s even when photos were shown upside down and with no hairstyle visible.
Researchers in journal PLoS One say the results suggest we may unconsciously make gay or straight decisions when meeting a new face.
still { Manhunter, 1986 }
Put aside your stereotypes about the sex industry and consider that many people, of all sexes and genders, can find the work empowering and healing. Wrenna Robertson is one such person, having worked for 18 years as a stripper. In this piece she talks about her own experiences as well as those of others, including escorts, porn actors, tantric practitioners and erotic masseurs.
photo { Ellen Jong }
