‘It’s good to have a very small bottle of very bad whiskey for when you think you want to drink whiskey.’ –Malcolm Harris
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 }
