New study reveals 10% of Americans have history of bisexual behavior

— There are three times more people reporting partners of more than one gender than in the 1990s.

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A recent study revealed a substantial increase in the number of Americans who either identify as bisexual or have a history of bisexual behavior. 9.6% of respondents reported having both male and female partners, over three times more than what was reported in the 1990s.

The study, published by researchers Martin A. Monto and Sophia Neuweiler in The Journal of Sex Research, utilizes the General Social Survey dataset, a nationally representative sample of over 32,000 participants. The survey aims to carefully represent each demographic of the United States, and follows up with participants across each successive decade in order to assess how responses may change over time. An additional 2,300 participants were added in the 2021 wave.

The study used a variety of tools to try and measure sexual orientation and prior sexual behavior. This includes a question that asks respondents to reply with their sexual orientation – either gay/lesbian/homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual/straight.

For sexual behavior, the study asked participants to recall whether their past sexual partners were of the same or a different sex, with additional questions asking about whether their partners were male or female. These responses were narrowed down by the researchers to those who had multiple sexual partners in the past year.

Using a method called regression analysis, the researchers determined what the relationships were between their measures of sexual orientation and behavior with gender, assessing how these relationships changed over time. They found that not only were participants more likely to identify as bisexual than in previous years, but that there were more participants identifying as bisexual than gay or lesbian.

However, they found the reverse trend for sexual partners, with more respondents being exclusively of the same sex than those who had both male and female sexual partners. The authors also note that women were more likely than men to report being bisexual or having a history of bisexual behavior, with men being more likely to report exclusive same-sex behavior.

In addition, this study also found that young people were more likely to identify as bisexual, with 10% of those below 29 and 12% of those in their 30s identifying as such.

This study reflects the changing landscape of Americans identifying as LGBTQ+. Previous studies have suggested similar trends, with more Americans identifying as LGBTQ+. In those prior studies, bisexuality was also the most frequent orientation behind heterosexuality.

The authors detail how this demographic shift showcases a “loosening of the social norms and institutional enforcement that have privileged heterosexuality over other sexual orientations,” with modern demographics being more accepting of LGBTQ+ individuals than in the past few decades.

They suggest that a reason there may be a discrepancy between identification and behavior in their results is due to how behavior may capture those simply exploring their sexuality before coming to a new identity.

In addition, they also point out how “sexual orientation can be fluid, with some people changing their sexual behavior and/or their sexual orientation identities over time.”

Finally, they detail that “even persons who have more recently had partners of both sexes may not consider themselves bisexual, and the term may not fit their understandings of themselves and their sexual behavior.”

The authors conclude by calling for more research that “can better recognize that the terms with which we identify ourselves are social and that there is some degree of choice about how to identify our sexual orientation, particularly among individuals with histories of both male and female partners”

Complete Article HERE!

What Is “Natural” for Human Sexual Relationships?

— A biological and anthropological researcher explains how humans’ diverse ways of mating might have evolved.


Members of a pro-polyamory group march in Toronto’s 2018 LGBTQ Pride Parade.

By Rui Diogo

Marrying more than one person constitutes a crime across most of the Americas and Europe. But in countries including Mali, Gambia, and Nigeria, more than a quarter of the population lives in polygamous households.

Survey the sex lives of Homo sapiens, and you’ll find couples, throuples, harems, and other arrangements of lovers. Fidelity, adultery, and ethically non-monogamous unions. How could one species have evolved myriad ways to mate? Concerning sex, what is natural for us humans?

A green book cover features two images at the top: a painting of a person and a photo of two adults and two children gathered in a forest. Beneath the images, large white text reads, “Meaning of Life, Human Nature, and Delusions.” Smaller blue text reads, “Rui Diogo” and “How Tales About Love, Sex, Races, Gods, and Progress Affect Our Lives and Earth’s Splendor.”

As an evolutionary biologist and anthropologist, I am often asked that question. The answer is complex. It also goes to the heart of the nature versus nurture debate, a topic that I have been discussing for several years, including in my latest book, Meaning of Life, Human Nature, and Delusions.

As discussed in that book, the scientific and historical evidence suggests that our earliest human ancestors, after we split from the chimpanzee lineage some 7 million years ago, were mainly polygamous. Individuals had various sexual partners at the same time. Fast forward to today, and humans exhibit diverse mating arrangements due to a greater influence of culture and tradeoffs between sexual desire, comfort, and jealousy.

how humans mate

Numerous lines of evidence contribute to my understanding of human mating habits.

As a biologist, I turn to the sex lives of nonhuman primates: Most species appear polygamous, including our closest relatives, chimpanzees. For these apes, both males and females have several hetero- and homosexual partners.

Fossils indicate the earliest hominins—the evolutionary branch leading to humans after its split from chimps—resembled upright walking apes. Considering these first human ancestors looked and acted like apes in many ways, it’s likely they mated polygamously.

But putting on my anthropologist’s hat and observing humans today, I notice a considerable variety of mating systems. Different cultures enforce or reinforce very different sexual practices. For instance, in some regions of Tibet, a woman can live with several husbands (polyandry). In countries such as Pakistan, men typically live with more than one wife (polygyny).

Across dozens of Indigenous Amazonian societies, pregnant women and those trying to conceive have sex with different men based on the idea of “shared or partible paternity.” According to people who hold this belief, semen from multiple fathers contribute to a developing fetus. A woman might have sex with the community’s fastest runner and best hunter to pass on these desirable traits to her child.

So how did mating habits evolve from our polygamous primate past to our variable human present?

Cultural differences can overtake biological foundations, as numerous historical cases evidence. For example, ancient texts indicate that men imposed monogamy upon women—but not necessarily on themselves—when agriculture emerged in several regions around the globe. As historian Stephanie Coontz has argued, farming lifestyles created notions of private property, which extended in some places to greater subjugation of women. In the early farming societies of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, wedding rings, worn by the wife, symbolized that she was owned by her husband. Patriarchs from the Bible’s Old Testament such as Jacob and David had multiple wives.

TRADEOFFS AND CULTURE

This brings us to the nature versus nurture debate, which is crucial for understanding love, sex, and marriage. A person’s natural biological drives may differ from behaviors they’ve absorbed through nurture, or their upbringing in a particular culture. (The nature/nurture debate itself proves to be problematic because, for social animals like humans, biology and culture intertwine.)

But, as I see it, monogamous marriage is mostly a cultural imposition, associated with three conflicting drives: sexual desire, comfort, and jealousy.

Sexual desire, grown from our polygamous primate roots, makes people want many partners or at least sexual novelty. I suggest that is why some married partners try to introduce novelty by wearing sexy underwear or otherwise changing routines. Providing a somewhat quantitative measure, studies have shown that changing sexual partners in swing clubs or while watching pornography often reduces a penis’ recovery (“refractory”) period between orgasm and the next erection.

However, two other emotions also play key roles in shaping our mating habits. One is jealousy, which derives from territoriality, a trait observed in most primates. Monogamy can diminish jealousy but may leave one sexually desiring more.

In some cases, those with power have enjoyed reduced jealousy and many sexual partners. For example, certain rulers have maintained harems with dozens of wives, but those women were expected to only sleep with their shared husband. Similarly, sexist religious narratives have been used to justify men keeping several wives but not the opposite.

The third critical emotion is comfort or familiarity. If, say, you develop cancer at age 70, you probably would want someone by your side who loves you—a monogamous mate. That desire for familiarity may not be met in cases of polygamy, in which one person has several sexual partners without love necessarily being involved.

A person wearing an ornate red headpiece and cape stands beside a balding person in a plaid suit jacket and gray pants. Other people wearing decorative beaded head and waist bands hold umbrellas and dance behind them.

Recently, it seems polyamory has gained steam in countries such as the U.S. and Canada. This arrangement recognizes that people may have a desire for many partners but concedes to some religious and philosophical narratives: for instance, Plato’s argument that sex without love is a sin or less noble. With polyamory, the idea is, “yes I do have sex with many, but I love them all.” And those partners also love others.

I see polyamory as an evolutionary rare and historically recent form of mating. Those who partake probably satisfy their desires for multiple mates and comfort/familiarity. But they may still suffer jealousy when their beloveds openly love others.

When it comes to love and mating, there are no perfect solutions. Each type of relationship balances sexual desire, comfort, and jealousy in different measures, subject to cultural influences. Some trends indicate that monogamous marriage is falling out of fashion for younger people in places such as the U.S. But there’s no reason to think that loveless polygamy, or love-flush polyamory, will overtake other arrangements.

Likely, humans in diverse societies will continue to love and mate in many different ways.

Complete Article HERE!

Female Orgasmic Disorder Could Become a Qualifying Condition for Medical Cannabis in Four States

— Science confirms what many of us discovered on our own.

By Sophie Saint Thomas

Four states—Ohio, Illinois, New Mexico, and Connecticut—are now looking into adding female orgasmic disorder (FOD) to the list of qualifying conditions for medical cannabis. There’s mounting research that suggests that cannabis can help women have more orgasms. For those with FOD, defined by the Merck Manuel as a “lack of or delay in sexual climax (orgasm) or orgasm that is infrequent or much less intense even though sexual stimulation is sufficient and the woman is sexually aroused mentally and emotionally,” medical marijuana could not only make having an orgasm easier, but more satisfying. 

Diagnosis criteria and scientific research aside, stoners have been boasting about the sexual properties of cannabis, probably since the herb was first smoked. Now, we know that cannabis, as a vasodilator, can increase blood flow to the genitals. Because it can also aid in anxiety, using some weed before sex can help people relax into the moment, which can be especially beneficial to those whose sexual dysfunction stems from trauma. After all, we know that cannabis has a well-documented ability to treat PTSD. It even enhances the senses, often making touching and even checking out your partner more fun. And as cannabis can also aid in creativity, it can help you consider and explore more variations in your sex life. 

“Women with FOD have more mental health issues, are on more pharmaceutical medication,” Suzanne Mulvehill, clinical sexologist, and founder and executive director of the nonprofit Female Orgasm Research Institute told Marijuana Moment. “They have more anxiety, depression, PTSD, more sexual abuse histories. It’s not just about pleasure, it’s about a human right,” adding that: “It’s a medical condition that deserves medical treatment.”

Ohio is currently evaluating a proposed amendment to add the condition. Earlier this month, the State Medical Board declared that both FOD and autism spectrum disorder are advancing to the stages of expert assessment and public feedback, following online petition submissions. Public comments will be accepted until Thursday.

In Illinois, regulatory officials are scheduled for a meeting next month to discuss the inclusion of FOD as an eligible condition. New Mexico plans to address the matter in May, as per the nonprofit Female Orgasm Research Institute. The organization also noted that Connecticut is exploring the possibility of adding FOD to its list of qualifying conditions, although a specific date for a meeting has not yet been determined.

Suzanne Mulvehill plays a leading role in the initiatives advancing the therapeutic advantages of cannabis for individuals with FOD. She says that this condition impacts as many as 41% of women globally. She filed a petition last year aiming to include this disorder among Ohio’s list of conditions eligible for medical marijuana.

Present studies suggest that approximately one-third of women who consume cannabis utilize it to enhance sexual experiences—a statistic Mulvehill notes has remained relatively consistent over the years.

She’s aware of the understanding surrounding cannabis’s ability to enhance sex. “It’s not new information,” Mulvehill said in her interview with Marijuana Moment. 

The novelty lies in the readiness of government bodies to address the matter. According to Mulvehill, Ohio appears to be the first state to evaluate FOD as a condition warranting medical marijuana. Moreover, she noted that Ohio’s meeting earlier in the month marked the inaugural instance, to her knowledge, of a public government entity discussing female orgasmic disorders.

A 2020 article published in Sexual Medicine discovered that frequent cannabis use among women correlates with improved sexual experiences. Additionally, various online polls have highlighted a positive correlation between cannabis consumption and sexual satisfaction. There’s even research indicating that the enactment of marijuana legislation correlates with a rise in sexual activity.

And research published last year in the Journal of Cannabis Research revealed that over 70% of adults surveyed reported an increase in sexual desire and enhanced orgasms when using cannabis before intercourse, and 62.5% noted improved pleasure during masturbation with cannabis use. Given previous data showing that women who have sex with men often experience orgasms less frequently than their male counterparts, the researchers suggested that cannabis might help bridge this orgasm equality gap.

For some people, having an orgasm is a challenge in a way that counts as a disorder that deserves treatment, and access to medical marijuana is paramount. For others, this new legal push is just a reminder that weed can make sex better and a reminder that you don’t need a diagnosis to have hot, stoned sex.

Complete Article HERE!

Gay, lesbian and intersex whales

— Our queer sea has much to teach us

The sighting near Hawaii in 2022 of a male humpback whale penetrating another male has been confirmed in a new study.

The first documented sex between two male humpback whales is just the latest challenge to our presumptions about sexuality

By

Whales are extraordinarily sensuous creatures. Those blubbery bodies are highly sensitive, and sensitised. At social meetings, pods of sperm, humpback and right whales will roll around one another’s bodies for hours at a time. I’ve seen a group of right whales engaged in foreplay and penetration lasting an entire morning.

I have also watched a male-female couple so blissfully conjoined that they appeared unbothered by our little fishing boat as they passed underneath it. And in what may sound like a career of cetacean voyeurism, I have also been caught up in a fast-moving superpod of dusky dolphins continually penetrating each other at speed, regardless of the gender of their partner.

That’s why this week’s report of the first scientifically documented male-to-male sexual interactions between two humpback whales off the coast of Hawaii is not surprising.

The remarkable image of a two-metre whale penis entering another male “leaves little room for discussion that there is a sexual component to such behaviour”, as one whale scientist, Jeroen Hoekendijk at the Wageningen Marine Research institute in the Netherlands, notes drily.

In fact, one of the whales was ailing and there has been speculation that the encounter may not have been consensual or that the healthy whale was actually giving comfort to the other. Whatever the truth, such “flagrant” acts also expose many of our human presumptions about sexuality, gender and identity.

Off the north-west Pacific coast of the US, male orcas often leave family pods to rub their erections against each other’s bellies. But females have also reportedly been seen engaging in sexual contact with one another, too.

Indeed, the graphic accounts of male-to-male behaviour may mask many “unseen” female-to-female sexual interactions.

Dr Conor Ryan, an honorary research fellow at the Scottish Association for Marine Science, notes: “It’s easy to visibly identify male ‘homosexual’ sex when an extruded penis can be two metres long.” It is less easy to diagnose when female sperm whales are seen “cuddling”, as Hoekendijk observes.

A humpback whale’s penis entering another male. Same-sex behaviour has often been observed in cetaceans.

Ryan has often witnessed same-sex behaviour between whales and dolphins. “I am interested in the things that we miss,” he says. He has recorded competitive behaviour by humpback whales in groups that seemed to be typically male, such as pursuing other whales.

But they proved, from DNA samples, to be genetically female. He speculates that humpback females may even use whale song – hitherto thought to be the province of mating males.

“If I were a female being harassed by horny males, maybe I would sing too,” says Ryan. “To attract more females, to take attention off me, while masquerading as a male.”


These observations throw up new ideas about the way these animals behave. Whale society is almost overwhelmingly matriarchal. Female sperm whales, for example, travel in large groups – sometimes thousands strong – in which males are only “useful” for their sperm, visiting the groups briefly, then leaving the females to their own society.

Male-oriented science has in the past made various judgments regarding sexual behaviour. But the idea of lesbian whales should not be surprising. Ryan even cites the case of a “non-binary” beaked whale, which was discovered to have both male and female genitalia.

Even identifying as a species can be fluid for cetaceans. In 2022, near Caithness in Scotland, a bottlenose dolphin was found to be identifying as a porpoise, swimming with a pod of porpoises and using their vocalisations. In one of the great queer pairings of the 20th century, Virginia Woolf referred to her lover, Vita Sackville-West, as “my porpoise”.


We cannot know how whales and dolphins themselves regard genital interactions. But in most cases they appear to enjoy them – without, perhaps, the preconceptions we humans as a species have historically projected upon such behaviour. They may make great clickbait on social media, but they have an important relevance for us, too.

When the Canadian biologist Bruce Bagemihl published his book Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity – listing 450 species exhibiting such behaviour, including whales and dolphins – it was used in evidence in a US supreme court case in 2003 that struck down, as unconstitutional, homophobic “sodomy” laws being used in Texas.

It is telling, too, that the best-known work of literary fiction written about whales, Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick, is a decidedly queer book. Melville conflates the queerness and diversity of his characters – his narrator, Ishmael, is declared married to his shipmate, the multi-tattooed Queequeg, based on a Māori warrior – with the mysterious sensuality of the whales he is describing. He even spends an entire chapter describing a whale’s foreskin, with joyful innuendo.

The sea itself seems to be a queer place, where gender is at best a slippery notion at times. Slipper shells stuck together on the beach, which you might find when beachcombing, are in fact changing sex, from female at the bottom to male at the top. Cetaceans’ genitals are concealed, in any case, in genital slits. Sleek and streamlined, it is as if bothersome sexual definitions were overtaken by the sheer beauty of wondrous hydrodynamics.

So much of what we project on to whales and dolphins is about our own complexes. They seem to lead a free and easy life. They may not possess hands to manipulate, but they have the biggest brains on the planet, and highly sensual bodies to match. Having been around for millions of years, it is tempting to imagine their long-evolved existence as one that is beyond all the things that seem to hold us humans back.

Complete Article HERE!

​​Study reveals the weird connection between sex and why we get FOMO

— They’re more related than you think

BY Mia Erickson

Are you ever plagued by a nagging sense of anxiety watching your friends have fun without you? A new study claims to explain the science behind why we experience the phenomenon known as FOMO.

Most people are more than familiar with the all-consuming feeling of FOMO (fear of missing out), constantly comparing their surroundings, choices and plans with alternative scenarios.

But feeling like the grass is always greener elsewhere goes beyond missing your friends on a night in. FOMO is also rife in the current dating climate, with the never-ending stream of swiping, liking and matching fuelling the idea that something– or someone– better is out there.

But the connection between physical intimacy and experiencing FOMO goes deeper than we may think, according to a new study by Nipissing University in Canada, with findings suggesting the former may indeed be the cause of the latter.

Understanding the study

The phenomenon known as FOMO is hardly new, with many finding the nagging feeling follows them constantly– regardless of their surroundings. More often than not, people experience FOMO watching their friends enjoying an experience without them, which in today’s era of smartphones and social media, can be a never-ending ordeal.

The latest research into what causes our FOMO draws on the understanding that humans are naturally quite a social species.

But, knowing that like most mammals, we are generally guided by an instinct to connect and seek out a partner, the study set out to prove there’s more driving our FOMO than just innate competitiveness.

Determined to understand the relationship between FOMO and romantic relationships, 327 consenting adults between the ages of 19 and 60 were surveyed by the research team at Nipissing University.

Using a 10-item scale, participants were asked to respond to a series of statements measuring their inclination to experiencing FOMO, such as, ‘I fear others have more rewarding experiences than me’ and, ‘It bothers me when I miss an opportunity to meet up with friends.’

Based on their answers, researchers then rated each participant on things like their short-term mating effort, degree of social support, status-seeking, and competition among genders.

Each participant was also asked to divulge the number of sexual partners outside of a committed relationship they’d had. This, as well as their responses for the other sections, were combined and converted into a score by the research team.

What the results reveal

Comparing the results, the team found a correlation between the participants who experienced FOMO often and their attitudes towards seeking out sexual opportunities and romantic relationships.

What does this mean? The ingrained sense of ‘what if’ many modern daters experience while swiping for ‘the one’ inevitably impacts their desire to actively seek out social opportunities. In other words, their nagging FOMO.

More Coverage

“FOMO might alert people to the threat of not participating in these important social activities, which could motivate them to seek out and compete for social and sexual opportunities,” says professor of social sciences at Canadore College and study author Adam Davis.

According to the study’s findings, the participants who stated having high levels of FOMO were inevitably the ones who recorded having a high number of sexual partners and frequently sought new partners.

“Among American adults, we found that higher levels of FOMO were associated with a greater desire to seek out short-term sex partners,” adds Davis, who found other factors, such as each participant’s social support were not as influential.

Complete Article HERE!

How to Explore Your Sexuality, according to Science

— Some researchers say that the standard definition of sexual orientation is incomplete—and offer a tool for expanding it.

By

Stacy Watnick: The first thing that I do with clients is I tell them that we’re going to go slow—because there are three things that most clients … do not talk about in therapy, and those are religion, politics and sex.

[CLIP: Intro music]

Kate Klein: There’s this, like, whole world underneath people’s clothing that no one talks about.

Sari van Anders: Our science, in some ways…, is…catching up with people’s existences.

Meghan McDonough: I’m Meghan McDonough, and you’re listening to Scientific American’s Science, Quickly. This is part one of a four-part Fascination on the science of pleasure. In this series, we’re asking what we can learn from those with marginalized experiences to get to the bottom of BDSM, find the female orgasm and illuminate asexuality. In this episode, we’ll discuss new ways to question your sexuality, according to science that draws from feminism and queer theory.

But first, let’s get real basic.

Stacy Watnick: Tell me, when I say the word sex or sexuality to you, what comes up?

McDonough: That’s Stacy Watnick, a clinical psychologist based in San Diego, California. She specializes in relationship issues and sexuality. She’s noticed certain patterns in her clients when she asks this question.

Watnick: First, surprise—that there’s such a range of experiences in their body and in their mind about it…. Frequently, I get some shame and discomfort. They’re not sure what words they’re supposed to use: “Are those bad words?”

A little lean forward…. they’re sort of excited and there’s some tension in wanting to tell me—or a little lean back because they’re not sure it’s safe.

McDonough: Stacy asks her clients if they’ve heard of gender and orientation. They talk about the words they know. And then she brings up the zine.

Zine is short for “magazine.” But zines are different from traditional magazines. They tend to be self-published and not typically what you’d find in an academic setting.

This particular zine invites readers on a “journey through the landscape of your sexuality.” The front cover features a drawing of five people on a path leading into the horizon. Each is holding a map labeled “SCT.” SCT stands for sexual configurations theory, a term coined by Sari van Anders, a gender, sex and sexuality researcher at Queen’s University in Ontario.

>Sari van Anders: I was doing some work about multipartnering and things like polyamory…, I was at a conference where there was … a session about asexuality…. And I started thinking about the way these two … identities claimed by different people might come together.

McDonough: Here’s Sari, the creator of this theory. She and her team created the zine as a more accessible offshoot of her 2015 academic paper on the topic.

Van Anders: It was the most exciting piece of work I’ve ever done. I’ve never really done work where it just felt like it had to come out, and it was sort of bubbling out of me.

I think we can maximize our pleasure when we understand what it is that we’re wanting, what the options are, who we are. We can think through some things that we might never have had prompts to do before.

McDonough: Oxford Languages defines sexual orientation as “a person’s identity in relation to the gender or genders to which they are typically attracted.” Sexual configurations theory asks: What if this sort of definition is incomplete?

Sari’s theory basically complicates the idea that sexual orientation is only based on gender. She built it on the existing academic literature and on what people shared about their sexualities.

Van Anders: And it was really important to me to include not just diverse sexualities and genders and people with diverse sexualities and genders but people with marginalized experiences, and so on …

McDonough: Such as people who are LGBTQ+, disabled, into kink or BDSM, asexual or non-monogamous.

Van Anders: Our science, in some ways, is, if anything, sort of, like, catching up with people’s existences…. I think many women know that, like, not all women who are attracted to men, maybe including themselves, that means they’re attracted to, like, penises or that’s the thing only that turns them on. And, and so there’s sort of an assumption that gender/sex sexuality, or what people typically call sexual orientation, is about, like, genital match-ups, like, “I have these genitals, and I’m attracted to people who have those genitals.” But really, like, we rarely see people’s genitals until we’ve already decided we’re attracted to them, right…. Usually there’s so much else going on.

McDonough: Sari uses the term “gender/sex” to mean features that are both socialized and biological and considers it to be just one aspect of sexual orientation.

>Van Anders: You know, it’s not always bodies; there’s also ways of being in the world or clothes, appearance, presentation, the way people talk, how someone treats you. And research on attraction is pretty clear that a lot of other things are rated pretty high up, like kindness or sense of humor or things like that.

McDonough: Sari refers to this as “sexual parameter n”—all the other things that make us attracted to a person.

The way she visualizes these aspects is through cone-shaped diagrams where people can pinpoint their preferences.

Aki Gormezano: As an example, you could think about the tornado for gender/sex sexuality…. So there’s a space on top where there’s a ring going around the outside that SCT calls the binary ring.

McDonough: This is Aki Gormezano, a sexuality researcher who did his Ph.D. with Sari at Queen’s. The ring he’s describing represents what most people know as the sexuality spectrum.

Gormezano: And then there’s a whole space beyond that, falling inside of the binary ring, completing that circle, where you’re not just thinking about women and men, you’re thinking about gender/sex-diverse folks who are occupying spaces outside of that binary ring.

McDonough: This is called the “challenge area.”

Gormezano: That circle I described is on the top, but then it moves all the way down to a point forming what kind of looks like a cone. And there’s a little meter ranging from zero to 100 on the far left of that, and that’s to indicate the strength of your attractions.

McDonough: In lay terms, if gender/sex was an important part of your attraction to people, you’d mark a place higher up on the tornado. If it wasn’t, you’d mark a place farther down. There are also tornadoes for partner number—one, multiple or none—as well as for sexual parametern, representing the other factors Sari mentioned, such as kindness and sense of humor.

Gormezano: Growing up, I was, like, pretty uncritical of my sexuality for the most part… Like I identified as straight by default. And a lot of my attractions, you know, as a cis boy at the time, or, like, now a cis man, were to cis women.

McDonough: In case you don’t know, “cis” here refers to cisgender, when a person’s gender identity matches their sex assigned at birth.

Gormezano: I had a point in high school where I realized … I did have attractions to people who were not cis girls or cis women…. I think I was just, like, confused and upset and didn’t really feel like it was something I could talk about. You know, especially as someone who played sports and was known as an athlete, where that was a big piece of my identity—like, I played soccer all the way through and still do…. I think, for me, the hardest part about realizing that I had interests and attractions that didn’t fit with being straight was that it challenged a lot of my identity around being a man or, like, wanting to be.

McDonough: Aki says that studying sexuality as an adult has helped him see that this isn’t a problem and that sexual orientation, identity and status don’t necessarily line up perfectly. Sexual configurations theory calls this “branched.”

Van Anders: Orientations have to do with, like, attractions, interests, arousals, desire [and] pleasure, and those might be different, or they might be the same. Like, you might really enjoy the thoughts or have fantasies about being with a man. And then when it comes to the actual sex you do, you find people of any gender are really enjoyable…. And status refers to, like, what you’re kind of actually doing, have done or will do…, who you’re actually with, for example.

McDonough: In a 27-country survey conducted by the market research company Ipsos in 2021, for example, 80 percent of self-identified heterosexual people reported that they were only attracted to the opposite sex, and 12 percent of them said they mostly were. Meanwhile 60 percent of self-identified lesbian and gay people said they were only attracted to the same sex, and 24 percent of them said they mostly were. These “branches” of sexuality can all be mapped on separate “tornado” diagrams. If you’re still struggling to picture them, you’re not alone. Between gender/sex, partner number, and other factors—plus identity, orientation and status—it’s a lot. But portraying sexuality as complex is also kind of the point.

McDonough (tape): To what extent do you think sexuality labels are limiting or expanding? If you could imagine your ideal world of how people conceive of sexuality, would everyone have a label?

Gormezano: I think when you just have identities and you just have labels, especially when identities and labels are really narrow…, you might not have the language to articulate the ways in which you don’t perfectly fit with that identity or label…. And I think the more people … who are able to understand the ways in which they might branch from their label or, like, perfectly coincide with it, the more open everyone will be around, you know, just like understanding that, like, around each identity is, like, a collection of people who might vary from that in different kinds of ways.

McDonough: Stacy, the therapist we heard from earlier, commonly meets clients who are working through their sexualities.

McDonough (tape): How do you help them kind of figure that out?

Watnick: We kind of try labels on like clothes…. I’m gonna try this sort of sweater on and see: Does that feel snuggly? Do I feel comfortable? Is there, like, a resonance in my body and in my mind and my heart and my genitals, all over me, that this feels true…? And much like the sweater I put on, I don’t have to wear it all the time…. There’s a very flexible return policy on this kind of content: if they decide they don’t want it; they don’t have to keep it. But we’re trying it on. Let’s see how it feels.

McDonough: Stacy first saw Sari speak at a virtual conference during the pandemic.

Watnick: And my whole brain lit up.

McDonough: The two of them have since formed a working group to bring sexual configurations theory into more clinical settings.

Van Anders: Those of us with marginalized or minoritized or oppressed genders, sexes or sexualities are often not given the tools from science or scholarship to make sense of ourselves. And so this can be helpful in that way. But also people who are majorities…, our culture tells everyone…, you’re just a cisgender man; that’s that; there’s nothing more complex; the complexity is for, you know, the other “complicated,” quote, unquote, people. But our research finds that the majorities actually have a lot of complexity and often have had even less prompt to think about it.

McDonough (tape): I’m wondering if you’ve had any pushback from the scientific community or otherwise?

Van Anders: We get a fair bit of skepticism from academics that what people might call laypeople, just you, people on the street, could actually do SCT diagrams because they are a bit more complex than “What is your attraction…?”…. So we sometimes get people who say, “This is pretty hard” or “I’m kind of confused.” And then we’re like, “Okay, can you describe yourself?” And then we look at the dot, and it matches. So people are actually able to do it anyway.

Van Anders: And we sometimes get pushback, too, from majorities who get, like, a little bit angry, who are like, “Okay, well, here, I can locate myself, but, like, I don’t believe in all these other locations….” You know, they’re usually seeing questions that have heterosexual first if there’s a checklist. And here it’s, like, you know, if you’re interested in women, that’s just one little dot in this whole diagram, and that can be a bit disorienting for people who are used to being with the center.

McDonough: Sari thinks that accounting for this complexity is not only helpful for individuals but also for future scientific research.

Van Anders: People sometimes forget that every measure we use is sort of telling a story about what the world is…. They’re kind of almost like a sieve that you sieve the world through. And depending on what that sieve looks like—whether it’s SCT, whether it’s a one-word question with a checkbox or answer or something—is going to let kind of different kinds of things through…. What is empirical in science is to try to measure the world as it is.

Complete Article HERE!

Self-Love Is Important, but We Mammals Are Stuck With Sex

— Some female birds, reptiles and other animals can make a baby on their own. But for mammals like us, eggs and sperm need each other.

Parthenogenesis could be the future for this California condor species, but not for any mammals you know.

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If Galentine’s Day had an animal mascot, it would have to be one of the species whose females can reproduce without a mate. Nearly all animals make more of themselves the traditional way, by combining eggs and sperm. But some have an alternative called parthenogenesis: no males needed.

No matter how many romantically frustrated mammals have wished they could truly go it alone, though, a genetic quirk means we still need sexual reproduction. For now, parthenogenesis is for the birds (and the bees), the fishes and the reptiles.

One of the most famous recent cases of parthenogenesis involved California condors, an endangered species. In 2013, Leona Chemnick, then a researcher at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, discovered that two male chicks in the condor breeding program had DNA that didn’t match that of the fathers in their cages — or of any other male. The chicks’ DNA only matched their moms’.

Ms. Chemnick caught Oliver Ryder, the zoo’s director of conservation genetics, on the way to his car and asked him about the odd data she was seeing. He explained to Ms. Chemnick that any such condor chicks must have come from eggs that were not fertilized by sperm.

“We were literally walking out to the parking lot and had this eureka moment,” Dr. Ryder said. “We didn’t have time to dance or anything.”

By the time the two scientists and other colleagues published their parthenogenesis finding in 2021, the two unusual chicks, or parthenotes, were long gone. They’d both died young, at almost 2 years and almost 8. Their mothers both had many other offspring, though, conceived with their mates in the usual way (despite headlines declaring virgin births).

A condor swoops through the air in front of a partly cloudy sky.
Since researchers started to pay attention, they have found at least four California condors with no father.

Every condor conception is a miracle of another kind. In 1982, when only 22 California condors remained on the planet, conservationists began trapping every bird and bringing them into captivity in a desperate bid to save the species. In 2022, the birds numbered 561, most of them free in the wild.

A crucial part of growing that healthy condor population has been tracking the birds’ genetics, which allowed the discovery of the parthenote chicks. Since finding the first two, Dr. Ryder said, his team has discovered two more, although they died before hatching.

How their moms made them is a bit murky.

Condors, like most animals, carry two copies of every gene — one copy from each parent. To make a sperm or egg cell, an animal must divide its genetic material in half. When egg and sperm meet during sexual reproduction, they combine their genes to create one complete new genome.

To make chicks without any sperm, the condor moms must have doubled the DNA from an egg. There are a few ways this could have happened, Dr. Ryder said, and his team is conducting a deeper analysis that should resolve the mystery.

Other birds, including chickens and turkeys, have also accomplished the feat. Then there are the reptiles, including Komodo dragons and other clever girls, that have been found to reproduce this way. Last year, scientists reported parthenogenesis in an American crocodile. There are even some snake and lizard species that reproduce only through parthenogenesis and have given up sex entirely.

A crocodile’s eyes and rear ridges poke out from water.
American crocodiles are among the “clever girls” in nonmammalian species who have pulled off parthenogenesis.

Many insects and other invertebrates can reproduce without males. Certain sharks and other fishes can, too. One captive whitespotted bamboo shark bore several parthenotes, and one of those grew up to have her own fatherless offspring.

At Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, a female zebra shark named Bubbles had two parthenote pups in 2016, though both died shortly after hatching. Like the California condors, Bubbles surprised scientists with her quasi-virgin birth because she wasn’t alone at the time. She was living with two male sharks, which presumably wouldn’t have minded sharing their sperm.

No one knows whether a female can choose to reproduce on her own — say, if her current breeding options are unsatisfying — or whether parthenogenesis happens outside her control.

“It would be fascinating if they could willfully decide to do that,” Dr. Ryder said.

Humans have only noticed parthenogenesis when solo females had young or when researchers were monitoring a population’s genes. Given how many different branches of life have demonstrated the ability, though, many more kinds of female animals could be secretly reproducing on their own.

“It’s probably much more widespread than we think,” Dr. Ryder said.

Scientists are confident, though, that no mammal mother is having fatherless babies. We’re hampered by something called genomic imprinting.

To understand imprinting, recall that animals divide their paired genes in half to make a sperm or egg cell. Mammal parents add one more flourish to this process: They put chemical tags onto certain clusters of genes. The tags make those genes unreadable, as if the genetic instructions were struck through with a black marker.

After a mammal’s sperm and egg cells combine, those marked genes will stay silent. That means even though the offspring still has two copies of every gene, it may only use the copy from its mother or from its father, because the other copy is unreadable.

We can see imprinting in action when, for example, a lion and a tiger breed together in captivity. The resulting big cat looks different — a bulky liger or a petite tigon — depending on which species is the mom and which is the dad. At the imprinted sites, the hybrid is either all lion or all tiger.

“It’s really difficult to understand why this process evolved,” said Anne Ferguson-Smith, a developmental geneticist at the University of Cambridge.

Scientists have suggested that imprinting reflects a kind of evolutionary battle between the parents. That’s because many imprinted genes affect growth. The father’s modifications to the genome generally make his offspring grow bigger, while the mother’s changes keep the babies a more manageable size.

Baby turkeys cluster in a group, most in shadow but some in the dark.
How turkeys and other animals pull off reproduction without a male animal’s sperm is a bit murky.

However, Dr. Ferguson-Smith suspects the true story is more complex. Some imprinted genes affect the offspring’s brain and behavior, or even how they’ll care for their own young in the future.

Regardless of why we imprint our genomes, the result is that mammals’ sperm and eggs need each other.

If a mammal mom tried to make a baby the way Bubbles the shark did, by doubling the genes from her own egg, her offspring wouldn’t develop. Genes that she silenced would be totally absent. Other genes would be present at twice the usual dose, because the offspring would be missing the usually silent copy from a father. This can also cause serious problems, Dr. Ferguson-Smith said.

Mammals, then, are stuck with sex. But some scientists are experimenting with ways to rescue endangered animals whose dating pools are small or nonexistent.

Dr. Ryder at the San Diego Zoo, for instance, is involved in efforts to create embryos using frozen cells and then put the cloned embryos into surrogates of closely related species. So far he has helped to create a black-footed ferret clone named Elizabeth Ann and two Przewalski’s horses. The younger cloned foal was born last year and named Ollie, in Dr. Ryder’s honor.

Two rhinos walk along a path.
While mammals can’t use parthenogenesis, scientists are trying to find ways to save species with limited or non-existent dating pools, like the northern white rhinoceros.
Researchers at San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance turned northern white rhino stem cells into beating cardiac cells.

Dr. Ryder’s colleagues are also using genetic technology to try to save the northern white rhinoceros, a subspecies in dire trouble — only two are alive. A few years ago, he said, researchers at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance took a step in that direction.

They coaxed frozen cells from northern white rhinos to become stem cells. Ultimately, those stem cells could be turned into eggs and sperm. But first, as a test, the researchers told the cells to become heart muscle.

When Dr. Ryder saw northern white rhino heart cells beating in a dish, it was as good as a valentine.

Complete Article HERE!

The science of sex

— What happens to our bodies when we’re aroused?

Sex helps with sleep and allows the brain to switch off

It’s good for our mental and physical health, lowering blood pressure and boosting the immune system

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Sex is the most talked-about, joked about, thought-about topic in our culture. Every grown adult is expected to know how to do it, but beyond the basic mechanics we’re not taught about it and fiction is coy. We are not short of information on sexual practices – thank you, Fifty Shades of Grey – but there is a general absence of accurate detail of what happens to our bodies during, and as a result of, the act.

Yet sex is good for our mental and physical health. It lowers the heart rate and blood pressure. It may boost the immune system to protect us against infections and it certainly lowers stress. The NHS even recommends it, in a section tucked away on its website, where few are likely to find it, that advises: “Weekly sex might help fend off illness.”

The consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist Dr Leila Frodsham thinks we should be better educated about it. She’s even supporting a project to open a Vagina Museum in Camden, London – after all, there is a Penis Museum in Iceland. More information could make us healthier, happier and save the NHS lot of money, she believes.

“People who have difficulties with sex are much more likely to present with other problems,” says Frodsham. She would like to see more investment in sexual health as preventive medicine.
When hooking up is working out

Sex can be good exercise, although that rather depends on how energetically you go at it. A study in the open-access journal Plos One in 2013 found that healthy young heterosexual couples (wearing the equivalent of a Fitbit) burned about 85 calories during a moderately vigorous session, or 3.6 calories a minute. It’s unlikely to be enough. The NHS says: “Unless you’re having 150 minutes of orgasms a week, try cycling, brisk walking or dancing.”

Tales of men having heart attacks and expiring on the job are much exaggerated. Sex raises the heart rate, which is generally a good thing. A study in the British Medical Journal of 918 men in Wales in 1997 found that sex helped protect men’s health. Men who (admittedly from their own report) had more frequent orgasms had half the risk of dying over the 10 years of the study compared with those who had the least orgasms. As a general rule, if you are able to walk up two flights of stairs without chest pain, you are probably safe to have sex, experts say.

The key to many of the health benefits of sex is the love hormone – oxytocin. Also sometimes called the cuddle hormone, it can even be released when petting your dog. The same hormone causes contractions in childbirth and is in the pessaries given to induce labour. It’s even in sperm. It’s not a myth that sex can help an overdue baby get going. When she was working as an obstetrician, Frodsham says, male partners used to “leave grinning from ear to ear because I’d suggest having sex on all fours to make labour come on”. There’s plenty of oxytocin around when people have sex or even just get friendly. “Any touch releases oxytocin,” says Frodsham. Keeping up physical activity affects libido, she says. “If you don’t use it, you lose it.”

She doesn’t often see people with intrinsically low libido, she says. “But we do see people who kind of get into a sexual rut and it sort of disappears. I often encourage people to schedule sex. A lot of couples feel that it is not natural and it is forcing things, but sometimes you need to get them to become habitual so they can become spontaneous.”

Sex helps with sleep, and allows the brain to switch off. “If you are having sex, you should be getting into a zone where your brain is not in overdrive,” she says. It’s like mindfulness. “I don’t think there are many people who actually give themselves time to relax any more,” she says.

Prof Kaye Wellings, at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, blames our busy lives for a decline in sexual activity in Britain. Her large recent study of 34,000 men and women, in the British Medical Journal, suggests we are having less sex than we were a decade or more ago. Half of the women and two-thirds of the men told researchers they would prefer to have sex more often. Wellings says the digital age is partly to blame. “We are bombarded with stimuli. I can see that the boundary between the public world and private life is getting weaker. You get home and continue working or continue shopping – everything except for good old-fashioned talking. You don’t feel close when you are on the phone.”

The sexual response, step by step

The best explanation of what actually happens during sex is still credited to two scientists who started work in 1957 – William Masters and Virginia Johnson – although later researchers have criticised parts of their work.

Masters and Johnson worked at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. Masters convinced Johnson to have sex with him in the interests of research while he was married to someone else. He eventually divorced and they married in 1971, splitting up 20 years later. Together they founded the Masters and Johnson Institute where they carried out their research and trained therapists.

In a book called Human Sexual Response, published in 1966, they described a four-stage cycle in heterosexual sex. First is the excitement or arousal phase in response to kissing, petting or watching erotic movies. A small study by Roy Levin in 2006 found that almost 82% of women said that they were aroused by their nipples being fondled – and so did 52% of men.

Half to three-quarters of women get a sex flush, which can show as pink patches developing on the breasts and spreading around the body. About a quarter of men get it too, starting on the abdomen and spreading to the neck, face and back. Men quickly get an erection but may lose it and regain it during this phase.

Women’s sex organs swell. The clitoris, labia minora and the vagina all enlarge. The muscles around the opening of the vagina grow tighter, the uterus expands and lubricating fluid is produced. The breasts also swell and the nipples get hard.

Masters and Johnson say there is then a plateau phase, which in women is mostly more of the same. In men, muscles that control urine contract to prevent any mixing with semen and those at the base of the penis begin contracting. They may start to secrete some pre-seminal fluid.

The third stage is orgasm, in which the pelvic muscles contract and there is ejaculation. Women also have uterine and vaginal contractions. The sensation is the same whether brought about by clitoral stimulation or penetration.

Frodsham says about a third of women easily have orgasms from penetrative sex, a third sometimes do and a third never do. “I have never seen anything that could be a G-spot,” she says. But the clitoris is much larger than some people assume. “The clitoris actually surrounds the vagina. The protuberance is only 5% of the clitoris.”

Women can quickly orgasm again if stimulated, but men cannot. Last is the resolution phase, when everything returns to normal. Muscles relax and blood pressure drops. But, says Cynthia Graham, a professor in sexual and reproductive health at the University of Southampton, “we still don’t understand everything about what happens even though research has been going on since Masters and Johnson’s early lab studies”.

Take the female orgasm, for instance. “Women report so many different sensations. Some women describe orgasm in a much more focal way. Some describe it in a diffuse way with, for instance, a tingling down their legs. Some women describe losing consciousness.”

And then there is the male erection. A healthy man may have three to five erections in a night, each lasting around half an hour. The one many wake up with is the last of the series. The cause is unknown, but there are suggestions of a link with REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, when people are most likely to dream. Even in the daylight hours, erections are not necessarily under conscious control. Usually they are associated with sexual arousal, but not always.

There is an assumption that sexual desire and libido are strongest in the young and fade out as we age. But there is plenty of evidence of people wanting sex and having sex at older ages. For women, the menopause can be a real obstacle. The loss of oestrogen leads to vaginal and vulval dryness. Frodsham points out that hormonal treatments, from oestrogen tablets in pessaries delivered locally into the vagina to creams and gels, are safe and effective. But so is having regular sex, she says. It’s like exercising a muscle.

“There is very good evidence, particularly in menopausal women, that the more they have sex, the better their physiology is,” she says.

But she cautions against the current enthusiasm for promoting the health benefits of sex for all ages. “There can be a kind of pressure on older adults who don’t want to. A lot of older adults do, but not everybody. There’s no norm about sexual desire.”

However biologically similar we may have been at birth, the one thing that is certain is that sexual desire and preference – as well as means of achieving satisfaction – differ from one individual to the next. Frodsham, for one, thinks enhanced understanding could boost our mental and physical health. And, she believes, it needs to start early.

“Many schools present sex as something that is going to cause STIs and pregnancy,” she says. They’re missing something important, she adds: “They don’t talk about the very natural reason to want to have sex, which is pleasure.”

Complete Article HERE!

Psilocybin, LSD And Other Psychedelics Improve Sexual Satisfaction For Months After Use, New Study Finds

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Psychedelic substances, including psilocybin mushrooms, LSD and others, may improve sexual function—even months after a psychedelic experience, according to a new study.

The findings, published on Wednesday in Nature Scientific Reports, are based largely on a survey of 261 participants both before and after taking psychedelics. Researchers from Imperial College London’s Centre for Psychedelic Research then combined those responses with results of a separate clinical trial that compared psilocybin and a commonly prescribed selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRIs) for treating depression.

Authors say it’s the first scientific study to formally explore the effects of psychedelics on sexual functioning. While anecdotal reports and and qualitative evidence suggest the substances may be beneficial, the study says, “this has never been formally tested.”

“It’s important to stress our work does not focus on what happens to sexual functioning while people are on psychedelics, and we are not talking about perceived ‘sexual performance,’” said Tommaso Barba, a PhD student at the Centre for Psychedelic Research and the lead author of the study, “but it does indicate there may be a lasting positive impact on sexual functioning after their psychedelic experience, which could potentially have impacts on psychological wellbeing.”

“Both studies and populations reported enhanced sexual functioning and satisfaction following psychedelic use.”

Authors noted that sexual dysfunction is a common symptom of mental health disorders as well as a common side effect of certain medications, such as SSRIs.

“On the surface, this type of research may seem ‘quirky,’” Barba said in a statement, “but the psychological aspects of sexual function—including how we think about our own bodies, our attraction to our partners, and our ability to connect to people intimately—are all important to psychological wellbeing in sexually active adults.”

Co-author Bruna Giribaldi said that while most studies ask whether depression treatments cause sexual dysfunction, this study attempted to go further.

“We wanted to make sure we went deeper than that and explored more aspects of sexuality that could be impacted by these treatments,” Giribaldi added. “We were interested in finding out whether psychedelics could influence people’s experiences of sexuality in a positive way, as it appeared from existing anecdotal evidence.”

The team’s analysis found that respondents typically experienced improvement in sexual function for as long as six months after a psychedelic experience, observing upticks in reported enjoyment of sex, sexual arousal, satisfaction with sex, attraction to their partners, their own physical appearance, communication and their sense of connection.

“Naturalistic use of psychedelics was associated with improvements in several facets of sexual functioning and satisfaction, including improved pleasure and communication during sex, satisfaction with one’s partner and physical appearance.”

The most striking improvements were around seeing sex as “a spiritual or sacred experience,” satisfaction with one’s own appearance and one’s partner as well as the experience of pleasure itself.

“Sexuality is a fundamental human drive. For example, we know that sexual dysfunction is linked to lower well-being in healthy adults, can impact relationship satisfaction, and is even linked to subjective happiness and ‘meaning in life,’” Barba said.

The only marker of sexual function that did not go up significantly was “importance of sex,” which could be read to mean that psychedelics did not cause hypersexuality or an excessive focus on sex.

In the clinical trial portion of the study, which compared psilocybin therapy to the SSRI escitalopram, authors found that while both treatments showed “similar reductions” in depressive symptoms, “patients treated with psilocybin reported positive changes in sexual functioning after treatment, while patients treated with escitalopram did not.”

Barba said that’s especially significant because “sexual dysfunction, often induced by antidepressants, frequently results in people stopping these medications and subsequently relapsing.”

David Erritzoe, clinical director of the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, said the findings “shine more light on the far-reaching effects of psychedelics on an array of psychological functioning” but said more study is still needed, especially in light of the currently illicit nature of psychedelics.

“While the findings are indeed interesting, we are still far from a clear clinical application,” Erritzoe said in a release, “because psychedelics are yet to be integrated into the medical system. In future, we may be able to see a clinical application, but more research is needed.”

As the study itself says, “These findings highlight the need for further research utilizing more comprehensive and validated measures to fully understand the results of psychedelics on sexual functioning. However, the preliminary results do suggest that psychedelics may be a useful tool for disorders that impact sexual functioning.”

“Use of psychedelic drugs might foster an improvement in several facets of sexual functioning and satisfaction, including experienced pleasure, sexual satisfaction, communication of sexual desires and body image.”

The new study comes just a few months after a study published by the American Medical Association reported the apparent “efficacy and safety” of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy for treatment of bipolar II disorder, a mental health condition often associated with debilitating and difficult-to-treat depressive episodes.

Both studies are part of a growing body of research demonstrating the potential of psilocybin and other entheogens to treat a range of mental health conditions, including PTSD, treatment-resistant depression, anxiety, substance use disorders and others.

A recently published survey of more than 1,200 patients in Canada, for example, suggested use of psilocybin can help ease psychological distress in people who had adverse experiences as children. Researchers said the psychedelic appeared to offer “particularly strong benefits to those with more severe childhood adversity.”

And in September, researchers at Johns Hopkins University, Ohio State University and Unlimited Sciences published findings showing an association between psilocybin use and “persisting reductions” in depression, anxiety and alcohol misuse—as well as increases in emotional regulation, spiritual wellbeing and extraversion.

A separate study from the American Medical Association (AMA) came out in August showing that people with major depression experienced “clinically significant sustained reduction” in their symptoms after just one dose of psilocybin.

As for other entheogens, a separate peer-reviewed study published in the journal Nature recently found that treatment with MDMA reduced symptoms in patients with moderate to severe PTSD—results that position the substance for potential approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Another study published in August found that administering a small dose of MDMA along with psilocybin or LSD appears to reduce feelings of discomfort like guilt and fear that are sometimes side effects of consuming so-called magic mushrooms or LSD alone.

A first-of-its-kind analysis released in June, meanwhile, offered novel insights into the mechanisms through which psychedelic-assisted therapy appears to help people struggling with alcoholism.

At the federal level, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) recently started soliciting proposals for a series of research initiatives meant to explore how psychedelics could be used to treat drug addiction, with plans to provide $1.5 million in funding to support relevant studies.

As for other research into controlled substances and sex, a report last year in the Journal of Cannabis Research found that marijuana could also enhance sexual enjoyment, especially for women—findings authors said could help close the “orgasm inequality gap” between men and women.

A 2022 study out of Spain, meanwhile, found that young adults who smoke marijuana and drink alcohol had better orgasms and overall sexual function than their peers who abstain or use less.

An earlier 2020 study in the journal Sexual Medicine also found that women who used cannabis more often had better sex.

Numerous online surveys have reported similar positive associations between marijuana and sex. One study even found a connection between the passage of marijuana laws and increased sexual activity.

Yet another, however, cautioned that more marijuana doesn’t necessarily mean better sex. A literature review published in 2019 found that cannabis’s impact on libido may depend on dosage, with lower amounts of THC correlating with the highest levels of arousal and satisfaction. Most studies showed that marijuana has a positive effect on women’s sexual function, the study found, but too much THC can actually backfire.

Complete Article HERE!

Debunking Love Myths

— A New Look at Romance and Science

“Based on our findings, we think it’s less ‘Happy Wife, Happy Life,’ and more ‘Happy Spouse, Happy House.”

 

Summary: A new study challenges popular romance myths, debunking the Five Love Languages with evidence-based research. The work, proposes a ‘balanced diet’ metaphor for expressing love, emphasizing the need for diverse and evolving expressions of affection in relationships.

The findings, including critiques of concepts like “Happy Wife, Happy Life” and the appeal of unplanned sex, underscore the importance of mutual satisfaction and novelty in maintaining desire.

The research calls into question widely held beliefs, advocating for a more nuanced understanding of relationship dynamics.

Key Facts:

  1. Amy Muise’s research contradicts the Five Love Languages, suggesting a need for multiple expressions of love rather than one primary language.
  2. Studies led by Muise found that both partners’ perceptions are equally important in a relationship, challenging the “Happy Wife, Happy Life” notion.
  3. Muise’s work emphasizes the importance of planned intimacy and novel experiences in enhancing relationship satisfaction and desire.

Source: York University

From the Five Love Languages to the concept of “Happy Wife, Happy Life,” popular culture is riddled with ideas of how sex and relationships are supposed to work, but does the science back these ideas up?

According to Faculty of Health Assistant Professor and Research Chair in Relationships and Sexuality Amy Muise, the answer is frequently no. 

Ahead of Valentine’s Day, Muise, also director of the Sexual Health and Relationship (SHaRe) Lab, can offer alternative theories that are supported by her research and other literature in the field.  

Muise’s latest research debunks the Five Love Languages, offers ‘balanced diet’ metaphor as alternative 

The Five Love Languages is the invention of Gary Chapman, a one-time Baptist minister who provided marital counselling to couples in his church and wrote a book based on his experiences.

The theory goes that each of us has a primary love language – words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service and physical touch – and problems arise in relationships when partners are speaking different languages.

Online dating sites encourage you to share your love language, 50 million people have taken the online test, and videos with the hashtag have half a billion views on TikTok – clearly, the concept has deeply ingrained itself in the popular imagination, but according to Muise’s latest review paper in collaboration with researchers from the University of Toronto, the theory doesn’t hold up. 

“His work is based on a very religious traditional sample of monogamous, heterosexual cisgendered couples and it is all anecdotal. We were pretty skeptical of the claims made so we decided to review the existing evidence, and his idea that we all have one primary love language really isn’t supported,” says Muise.

“His measure pits the love languages against each other, but in research studies when they’ve asked people to rate each of these expressions of love independently, people tend to rate them all highly.” 

Still, Muise sees why the concept has taken off. “It’s something people can really grab onto in straightforward way and communicate something about themselves to their partner. But we would suggest that love is not a language that you need to learn how to speak but it’s more akin to a nutritionally balanced diet, where partners need multiple expressions of love simultaneously, and that these needs can change over time as life and relationships evolve.” 

Other research Muise has done similarly questions pop psychology concepts, exposing flaws along the way: 

Happy Wife, Happy Life? 

Muise and a group of international collaborators looked into the idea that it is women’s perceptions that are the barometer for the relationships, carrying more weight than men’s. In two studies looking at mixed gender couples, one examining daily diaries and the other looking at annual reports over five years, they found instead that both partners conceptions of the relationship were equally important. 

“Based on our findings, we think it’s less ‘Happy Wife, Happy Life,’ and more ‘Happy Spouse, Happy House.” 

Is unplanned sex hotter? 

Not necessarily, says Muise. In research done last year with a York graduate student, Muise found that while many people endorsed the ideal of spontaneous sex, the researchers did not find evidence that people’s actual experience of sex was more enjoyable when not planned. If you are planning on sex this Valentine’s Day, Muise advises it might work out better to plan to have it before a big meal. 

Is too much closeness bad for sexual relationships? 

“In the research, we find couples who grow closer have more desire for each other, but we argue that what’s also needed for desire is otherness or distinctiveness,” she says. 

“It’s important to bring new things into the relationship, find ways to see a partner in a new light. Novel experiences have been shown to increase desire in long-term relationships, so when making plans for Valentine’s day, doing something together that’s broadening or expanding can increase desire.” 

About this psychology and relationships research news

Author: Emina Gamulin
Source: York University
Contact: Emina Gamulin – York University
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News

Original Research: Open access.
Popular Psychology Through a Scientific Lens: Evaluating Love Languages From a Relationship Science Perspective” by Amy Muise et al. Current Directions in Psychological Science


Abstract

Popular Psychology Through a Scientific Lens: Evaluating Love Languages From a Relationship Science Perspective

The public has something of an obsession with love languages, believing that the key to lasting love is for partners to express love in each other’s preferred language.

Despite the popularity of Chapman’s book The 5 Love Languages, there is a paucity of empirical work on love languages, and collectively, it does not provide strong empirical support for the book’s three central assumptions that (a) each person has a preferred love language, (b) there are five love languages, and (c) couples are more satisfied when partners speak one another’s preferred language.

We discuss potential reasons for the popularity of the love languages, including the fact that it enables people to identify important relationship needs, provides an intuitive metaphor that resonates with people, and offers a straightforward way to improve relationships.

We offer an alternative metaphor that we believe more accurately reflects a large body of empirical research on relationships: Love is not akin to a language one needs to learn to speak but can be more appropriately understood as a balanced diet in which people need a full range of essential nutrients to cultivate lasting love.

 

Let’s Talk About Sex

— The Science, the Script, the Human Right

Why do we do ’it,’ fundamentally—have sex? Sex researchers, locally and abroad, are trying to drive home that it’s about a basic human right: pleasure.

By and

Elbow-to-elbow, Minnesotans are filling up a large side room in Fulton Brewery on a Tuesday night to listen to three experts talk about sex.

Drifting through the crowd, eyeballing the room for an unclaimed seat, one could feel awkward retreating to the bar, straining to hear the three Ph.D.s as they peppered the hour-long sex talk with research- and experience-backed wisdom: about how a low libido isn’t necessarily a problem if it doesn’t bother you, about how sex doesn’t need to involve penetration, about the false idea that heterosexual women have a smaller sexual appetite than men.

“Who ordered food?” University of Minnesota sex researcher Dr. Kristen Mark asked as a hot little sandwich emerged from the kitchen. Some giggled.

The vibe at November’s “Sex Science Happy Hour” felt progressive, even perky.

Stacked on a table beside Mark were copies of “Desire: An Inclusive Guide to Navigating Libido Differences in Relationships.” Mark described the book, released in August, as radical for its wide parameters around sex: not just between heterosexual, cisgender men and women, and not only within “normative” relationship structures.

She and the co-authors of “Desire”—Dr. Lauren Fogel Mersy, who owns a private practice in Minneapolis, and Dr. Jennifer Vencill, of Mayo Clinic in Rochester—made the happy hour feel as though we were delicately cracking through a layer of widely agreed-upon silence. The topic was unevenness, when one partner wants more sex. Such a discrepancy is a given, they agreed. It’s a feature, not a bug. When the bimonthly forum reconvenes in March—again with Mark, again at a brewery—the topic will be masturbation. (You can sign up and find more information here.)

Is it awkward? Attendance seems to declare, “I have sex! Or want to!” Which is generally unsurprising yet somehow close to taboo. It’s refreshing, too, because aren’t we all, culturally and societally, over that puritanical type of embarrassment? Perhaps. Perhaps not really.

“I know how interested the public is in sexual and gender science,” Mark says, explaining by email her inspiration for launching the happy hours. In September 2021, the first featured well-known sex columnist Dan Savage at St. Paul’s BlackStack brewery. “I also know how inaccessible accurate information about sexual health can be to the public and how difficult it is for some people to talk about it in a comfortable way.”

The past few years, reports have been flying that Americans—especially young Americans—aren’t having as much sex. The so-called “sex recession” may amount to “one-time reactions to all the upheavals of the past few years,” suggests the Institute for Family Studies. The year of 2020 was, after all, unprecedented. In 2021’s General Social Survey, which polls American adults, 26% of respondents said they had not had sex in the past 12 months, which figured into a pattern of decline: In 2010, 21% of respondents had not had sex in the last year. In 2000, that number was closer to 18%. In 2022, we saw a slight rebound. Still, Americans seem to be having less sex than they were when the survey started three decades ago. (The survey has its limits, as pointed out in a 2020 study published through the American Medical Association. It’s subject to “response and reporting bias,” for instance, and with “sexual activity” left undefined, respondents had to interpret what counted.)

Why the dip? Researchers have flagged many reasons. Millennials and Gen Z are getting into relationships later, and living single may mean less sex. There are also digital distractions thanks to social media.

Sex will never not be a hot topic. And with reports of a modern-day “loneliness” epidemic, the media has, in some cases, treated the decline in reported sex with concern. Sex, after all, comes with a range of benefits. In the context of relationships, the experts at the Fulton event, on the other hand, framed frequency of sexual activity in neutral terms. On the individual level, not having sex does not have to raise any alarms, they said. Nothing is wrong if nothing is wrong.

Illustration by Lisa Seitz

Presenting these Sex Science Happy Hours is the University of Minnesota’s Eli Coleman Institute for Sexual and Gender Health. Minnesotans may not realize the institute is a big deal in sex research. “It’s world-renowned,” says Mark, who is director of education at the institute. Maybe because of Minnesotans’ humble nature, she says, “people here don’t know we exist. We have this amazing institution. I’ve always been aware of this place that is so well-known nationally and internationally but not locally.” Readers likely know the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University for its headline-grabbing decades of sex research, but the U of M’s institute is equally prestigious and a rising star in gender studies and clinical access.

Bringing some of that reputation to the community, Mark modeled the happy hours after other casual, educational hangouts—Suds n’ Science, Brainy Brews. “Breweries are notorious for having a laid-back atmosphere. That’s what is most important about this.” 

At one point, an attendee took the mic to ask about consensual non-monogamy. With partners openly dating multiple people, what happens when a newcomer begins to enjoy a “honeymoon” phase and starts soaking up the sexual attention? (One answer: Those who have been in the relationships longer can learn to cultivate “responsive” desire, as opposed to “spontaneous.”) Other audience questions came up anonymously, on notecards.

Some takeaways from that night:

  • Assuming a common “sexual staircase” exists, along which everybody moves up the same graduating levels of intimacy—with penetration, perhaps, inevitably at the top—may trip up the many who “have a different pathway to pleasure.” 
  • In relationships, libidos will likely never match. The notion that one partner—typically the one with a lower sex drive—needs “fixing” or is “the problem” isn’t fair.
  • Whereas “spontaneous” desire stirs up seemingly at random, “responsive” desire depends more on stimuli and context. Sometimes we exemplify one more than the other.
  • A study released last year found women’s desire appeared to have more ups and downs throughout their lives, but men and women have similar desire fluctuations throughout the week. So, the notion that women generally have lower sex drives than men? It doesn’t hold up.
  • Research has shown that some approaching retirement are having the most satisfying sex of their lives. Hormones are not the end-all, be-all.

Ultimately, sex is personal. Within the bounds of consent, you are your own authority on what feels good. But for those who have felt stifled by dominant “scripts”—which may reduce sex to what’s seen in the media, or what’s described by parents and friends—there can be liberation in taking sexual pleasure as a fundamental right.

Illustration by Lisa Seitz

The Right to Sexual Pleasure

Why do we do “it,” fundamentally—have sex? Because it feels good.

Sex reduces pain, relieves stress, improves sleep, lowers blood pressure, and strengthens heart health, according to multiple medically reviewed studies. And it’s enjoyable.

“That’s what it comes down to: Sex gives us pleasure,” Mark says.

This sex-positive focus is emerging as a popular way to think about the universal and natural act. Instead of focusing on pregnancy prevention, consensual concerns, and other “negatives” around sex, researchers and others are working to recognize and enhance the benefits.

Mark and her colleagues say sexual pleasure is so important that it should be considered a human right, something along the lines of the right to a fair trial, free speech, and freedom from torture.

Pleasure is a fundamental part of sexual response, which happens in four phases and is called the “sexual cycle,” as coined in 1966 by researchers at the Kinsey Institute.

The first phase is excitement. The second is a continuation and intensity of first-phase changes—a faster heartbeat, heavier breathing, increased blood flow to sexual organs. Phase three is the orgasm stage, a series of intense muscle contractions. Then breathing calms, the sexual organs return to their original size and color, and resolution is reached.

This linear, four-stage model revolutionized sexual research for decades, but since then, “we’ve learned much more,” Mark says. In fact, the four-phase order is not always accurate: Not every sex act leads to orgasm, some people have sex without feeling any excitement, and others have multiple orgasms in a row and don’t reach resolution.

Sex therapist Helen Singer Kaplan added the concept of “desire” to the cycle in the late 1970s, arguing that humans need to be “in the mood” to get aroused and have an orgasm. She also emphasized the potential emotional impact of sex.

About two decades ago, during the rise of post-modern and non-linear thinking, sex researcher Rosemary Basson introduced the circular sexual response model. She posited that humans have sex for multiple reasons, not just excitement.

As the research on human sexuality continues to expand to include gender norms and societal perceptions, Dr. Annelise Swigert, an obstetrician and gynecologist at Southdale ObGyn, adds that good sex needs to involve feelings of safety—and, obviously, consent. For instance, maybe contraceptives free you from worry about pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases.

“You should be able to enjoy sex, however you define ‘pleasurable,’” Swigert says. She adds, “Sex should not be painful.” That’s a concern many menopausal and post-menopausal women have.

By reframing sexual pleasure as a human right, Mark says, her work as a sex educator becomes about creating a common ground. “There’s an assumption that when you say, ‘sex education,’ you’re teaching kids how to have sex. That’s not it at all. Actually, we see strong support for sex education that focuses on pleasure”—whether that means self-stimulation, oral sex, vaginal sex, or some other method. “It’s doing a good job with community building. When educators learn about the pleasure, they usually buy in.”

She adds, “There has been so little funding poured into understanding the physiology of human sexual pleasure—another issue that is totally related to people’s lack of comfort talking about it or seeing it as important—but that is changing.”

And that’s something else we feel good about.

Illustration by Lisa Seitz

Sex Survey Results

According to the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior:

  • Men and women both were likely to report sexual satisfaction if they also reported frequent kissing and cuddling, sexual caressing by the partner, higher sexual functioning, and if they had sex more frequently. On the other hand, for men, having had more sex partners in their lifetime was a predictor of less sexual satisfaction.
  • Frequent kissing or cuddling predicted happiness in the relationship for men but not for women. Both men and women reported more happiness the longer they had been together.
  • Over 50% of respondents ages 18-24 indicated that their most recent sexual partner was a casual or dating partner. For all other age groups, the majority of study participants indicated that their most recent sexual partner was a relationship partner.
  • 28% of Americans over age 45 report they had sexual intercourse once a week or more in the last six months, and 40% report having intercourse at least once a month. More than one in five Americans over age 45 (22%) say they engage in self-stimulation at least once a week.
  • For women aged 50 and older, older age is related to a decline in all sexual behaviors: 5% per year of age for penile-vaginal intercourse; 7% per year of age receiving or giving oral sex.
  • About 85% of men report that their partner had an orgasm at the most recent sexual event; this compares to the 64% of women who report having had an orgasm at their most recent sexual event.
  • Men are more likely to orgasm when sex includes vaginal intercourse; women are more likely to orgasm when they engage in a variety of sex acts and when oral sex or vaginal intercourse is included.
  • Women are much more likely to be nearly always or always orgasmic when alone than with a partner. However, among women currently in a partnered relationship, 62% say they are very satisfied with the frequency/consistency of orgasm.

A note about the survey: The National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior (NSSHB) is the largest nationally representative probability survey focused on understanding sex in the United States. It is an ongoing multi-wave study with data collected in 2009, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2018. More than 20,000 people between the ages of 14 and 102 have participated in the NSSHB.

Complete Article HERE!

From the ‘Third Date Rule’ to Sex Ed

— Boomer Sex and Dating Trends

Getting married again is not popular. But getting intimate after a few dates is, says a new Kinsey/Match study

By Ellen Uzelac

Most single boomers say they’re ready to get intimate with a new partner by the third date – a practice so common that it’s been dubbed “The Third Date Rule.”

​​That’s just one of the many trends in dating for older adults found in the latest “Singles in America” study, released by Match in conjunction with the Kinsey Institute, an esteemed educational research institute that is part of Indiana University. ​​

Among other key data points for adults ages 59-77: an overall preference for sexual monogamy, a desire to know more about consent and, for many, a sex drought.

​​“Regarding the new data, I’m kind of hopeful,” says Justin Garcia, an evolutionary biologist and sex researcher who is executive director of the Kinsey Institute and also a professor with Indiana University’s Department of Gender Studies. “These are things we can think critically about and implement to make our romantic and sexual lives more fulfilling.” ​​

Here are the chief takeaways for older adults:​​

The third date rule. Sixty-six percent of singles said they were amenable to cuddling by the third date and 58 percent were up for a make-out session. Roughly one-third reported being comfortable with getting naked, touching each other’s naked bodies, performing and receiving oral sex, having vaginal or anal sexual intercourse, and discussing their sexual likes and dislikes. ​​

“Many people give themselves self-imposed rules to guide their behavior in dating,” says Garcia, who coauthored the book Evolution of Sexual Behavior and has served as a scientific adviser for Match.com since 2010. “We are freer than ever to date and love and be intimate with whomever we want, but that freedom and openness can lead to a lack of clarity. I think having rules is a good thing. People, especially in dating, can be nervous, anxious, scared, excited. It gives you a rough goalpost.” ​​

Sex education. Forty-three percent of boomers say more sex ed in their younger years would have helped them have healthier and happier relationships today. Two key missing pieces are that 45 percent said they never learned about how to give or get consent and 49 percent never learned how to talk about sex in general. ​​

“The goal is to make sure people of all ages have the tools to engage in sex in ways that are safe, consensual and fulfilling,” Garcia says. “It’s never too late to invest in learning about the role of sexuality in our lives. For older populations, this information is still so important.” ​​

Garcia suggests talking to a medical professional about sex or accessing academic lectures on aging and sex. “People underestimate the value of stories and articles,” he adds. “If you look for the information, you’ll find it. Don’t be afraid to read the article. Stay informed about how to make sure sex is still pleasurable and satisfying.” ​​

Sexual relationship styles. Just over half of boomers say that traditional sexual monogamy is their ideal sexual relationship and that the three most important factors in a healthy romantic relationship are trust, mutual respect and effective communication. ​​

Few, around 2 percent, identified their ideal relationship as multiple committed partners in an open or consensual nonmonogamous relationship; and 4 percent say uncommitted sexual partners (e.g. hookups, one-night stands) are their ideal. Only about 1 percent want sex via internet or in a virtual reality environment. And 9 percent said their preference was a “friends with benefits” mode.

Nearly 60 percent said they felt empowered and comfortable asking a sexual partner for what they want. ​​

Only 10 percent of single boomers who have been married want to marry again. ​​

Sex drought. A majority of older singles, 74 percent, reported having had no sex in the last 12 months, and 28 percent said “no sexual relationship” was their preferred status. (By comparison, 21 percent of the 5,000-plus U.S. singles age 18-77 identified no relationship as their ideal.) ​​

Although the frequency of sexual activity has declined in a lot of national samples, Garcia says that doesn’t necessarily translate into a lack of interest in having a sexual partner. ​​

He attributes the sex drought in large measure to the stresses in people’s lives today – financial challenges, concern about infectious diseases, recovering from the global trauma of COVID, the loneliness epidemic.

​​“That’s a lot of weight,” he adds. “The psychological and social stress that people feel is not conducive to sexual desire. It’s a good reminder that when we’re stressed, we might lose our sexual desire.” ​ ​​​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​​ ​

Complete Article HERE!

Women’s sex lives were a mystery to men. Then along came Shere Hite

— A new documentary celebrates the life of the feminist pioneer who shocked the world – and about time too

‘Clever, spikey, ethereal’: Shere Hite in 2006.

By

In a society in which nine-year-olds watch pornography and song lyrics are more explicit than The Kama Sutra, the revolution that Shere Hite helped to bring about in the 1970s, employing the words vagina, clitoris and masturbation, on primetime television for a start, is easily forgotten – which is exactly what has happened.

The Disappearance of Shere Hite, a documentary made by Nicole Newnham and produced by Dakota Johnson, and released in the UK this weekend, charts Hite’s rise in the 70s and her decline by the 1990s. “It’s just as simple as know yourself, not your role,” she says as advice to herself. “It’s hellish hard.”

In 1976, The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality was published. By the time of the author’s death in 2020, it had sold 48m copies in many countries and was banned in almost a dozen.

The documentary charts how, over a period of four years, Hite had sent out thousands of questionnaires asking detailed questions that probably hadn’t even been asked at the consciousness raising sessions then emerging in the second wave of the women’s movement and at the gatherings in which participants equipped with mirrors took at a look at their own vulvas, aghast or overjoyed with what they spied. It was a fun time to be alive.

“Does your partner realise you come when you come?” Hite asked her anonymous respondents. She received thousands of replies to dozens of detailed questions. One woman was in her 10th week as a cook with an all-male crew on a freighter in the North Sea. “I enjoy sex,” she wrote, in itself a challenge to the prevailing stereotype that nice girls thought it an unpleasant but necessary business. “I enjoy sex… but never have I experienced a more concentrated dose of chauvinism than being the only woman on a freighter with young men I am unwilling to fuck.”

In the documentary, Shere (pronounced “share”, born Shirley Diana Gregory) Hite talks coolly about the shocking revelation (at least to many men) that women had orgasms easily when they masturbated and that they preferred clitoral stimulaton to vaginal penetrative sex, a challenge to what the sexologists Masters and Johnson had asserted.

Whether you agreed with her or not – and plenty of feminists such as the redoubtable Lynne Segal in Straight Sex rightly took her to task for her oversimplification – Hite was trying to point out that the lack of words to portray the female sexual experience was an example of the patriarchy in action. The clitoris, whose only role is to provide pleasure, might have been discovered and illustrated in medical journals in the 17th century but by the early 20th century its value had been eroded.

In 1987, Hite published Women and Love: A Cultural Revolution in Progress. Her responses this time told her that women were fed up, they wanted intimacy and emotional connectedness with men. I interviewed her at the time. As the documentary portrays very accurately, Hite was unique: clever, spikey, ethereal with almost see-through alabaster skin, a cloud of curls, white eyelashes and a soft, baby voice. As an interviewee in the documentary says, Hite had made herself a brand. In the 1970s and 80s, it still wasn’t acceptable to be female with a brain, beauty, wit and a publicly viewed vulva (Hite had hers photographed often by the German photographer Iris Brosch in later years); a scholar and a slut.

The joy of the documentary is that it provides a history of the women’s movement in which Hite felt at home. Bisexual, she was an advocate for gay rights at a time when it was dangerous to do so. She had featured in Playboy, and, as a model, in an ad for Olivetti typewriters: ”The typewriter that’s so smart she doesn’t have to be.” Sexism was that bad, and worse.

Hite confessed to her modelling past and the liberationists took her to their heart. On one occasion, she asked those in the room to raise their hands if they masturbated; nobody moved. The idea for the first Hite report was born.

Hite, whose 16-year-old mother dumped her with her grandparents, had two history degrees. When she and her fellow activists picketed Washington’s National Museum of Natural History – “the Unnatural History Museum – women were only portrayed stirring a pot and holding a baby. I was studying the past,” Hite says in the documentary. “Because I couldn’t understand the present… why couldn’t everyone have an equal chance?”

Hite wrote half a dozen books; her report on women’s sex lives was followed by The Hite Report on Male Sexuality, published in 1981 and drawn from 7,239 questionnaires. Reading some, her editor, Bob Gottlieb, said: “I haven’t had many sadder experiences as an editor in my life.” Men said they were lonely, some were afraid. Other men reacted angrily. The backlash had already begun because Hite called herself a social scientist.

In a letter to the New York Times in 1981, she noted that “science” comes from the Latin root “to know”. Hite had employed percentages in her books – but percentages of what, her critics asked? Seventy per cent of 10 or 1,000? Regardless of the numbers, as Oprah Winfrey says in the documentary, “Nobody can deny there’s a problem.”

By the 1990s, Hite was in financial trouble and couldn’t get her books published in the US. In 1996, she became a German citizen, having married Friedrich Höricke, a couple of decades her junior in 1985. She developed Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s and died aged 77. In her New York Times review of The Hite Report, Erica Jong quotes a character in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962): “Women of any sense know better, after all these centuries, than to interrupt when men start telling them how they feel about sex.” Shere Hite deserves to be remembered.

Complete Article HERE!

A Bird Sighting Just Reaffirmed That Nature Is Queer

— The half-male half-female Green Honeycreeper joins the ranks of genderqueer lionesses, the “Leaping Lesbian Lizard,” and other “drag queens in the sky.”

By Ananya Singh

Hamish Spencer, zoologist and Distinguished Professor at the University of Otago, was on holiday in Colombia when ornithologist John Murillo drew his attention to a striking bird at a bird-feeding station in a nature reserve. Save for a few feathers here and there, this Green Honeycreeper seemed to be neatly divided down its middle with brilliant blue plumage – resembling males of the species – on its right side, and green plumage – observed in females – on its left. The two watched this bird between the end of 2021 and mid-2023, observing its behavior in relation to other members of its species. As their report notes, this bird is only the second example of “bilateral gynandromorphism” in this species – a trait where animals present with both male and female characteristics in species that usually have distinct sexes.

This “extremely rare,” half-male and half-female bird soon made headlines. After all, it was the first record of this phenomenon in this species in over a 100 years. But this sighting also reiterated what some scientists have long been pointing to – that our understanding of sex as a biological binary of male and female may, in fact, be a simplistic reduction of a far more complex reality.

“Many birdwatchers could go their whole lives and not see a bilateral gynandromorph in any species of bird,” Spencer said in a statement. While considered rare, this trait has previously been observed in spiders, bees, butterflies, lizards, and stick insects among others. Scientists have also found these seemingly gender binary-defying individuals in other bird species, such as the northern cardinal (a non-binary icon, according to X) and the rose-breasted grosbeak. The northern cardinal even inspired Pattie Gonia, an environmental drag activist, to create a look based on it. “We see queerness and gender queerness demonstrated in birds like the [chimera] cardinal so vividly… Birds are drag queens in the sky,” Gonia told Audobon Magazine.

In its most simplistic form, sex in humans seems to hinge upon the presence or absence of the Y chromosome, which determines the reproductive organs one possesses. Sex, according to this understanding, casts individuals as either male or female and is one of the foundational pillars upon which our society has been constructed – prescribing roles, granting opportunities, and determining whose rights are championed and whose sidelined. But several scientists have pointed out that sex as a binary is false. Arthur Arnold, a biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Scientific American in 2018, “The main problem with a strong dichotomy is that there are intermediate cases that push the limits and ask us to figure out exactly where the dividing line is between males and females… And that’s often a very difficult problem, because sex can be defined a number of ways.” That is, sex in humans (as in animals) is far more complex.

Agustín Fuentes, a professor of anthropology at Princeton University, pointed to emerging research data that shows how binary explanations of human sex “are either wholly incorrect or substantially incomplete.” Biology has been wielded as a tool to exclude queer people. Fuentes writes, “Given what we know about biology across animals and in humans, efforts to represent human sex as binary based solely on what gametes one produces are not about biology but are about trying to restrict who counts as a full human in society.”

Look to the natural world and countless examples emerge to challenge the fallacies around sex, gender and sexuality. These examples call into question what humans have long considered “natural.” It is an idea inherent in the field of queer ecology that draws upon the ecofeminist movement and expands it beyond binary thinking, instead championing a more fluid and diverse understanding of the world, and our relationship with it. Nature, as countless species show, is queer.

Take the clownfish, for instance. They live in groups where only two – the dominant male and female are mates. When the female dies, the male changes its sex to become female before selecting the next male from the group to become its mate. Male bearded dragons, meanwhile, reverse their sex under warm temperatures to become female while still within the egg. Banana slugs are “simultaneous hermaphrodites” – they possess and use both their male and female reproductive organs to mate with a partner or even themselves. In Botswana, five gender-queer lionesses alarmed scientists when they grew a mane and developed male-like behaviors, including a deeper roar and mounting other females. Then there is the New Mexico lizard, which is a species that entirely comprises females. They mate, lay eggs and reproduce like others. According to scientists, this is a form of asexual reproduction known as parthenogenesis. Just like the “non-binary” cardinal, this lizard – also referred to as “Leaping Lesbian Lizard,” also became a queer icon, inspiring not only art, but even a Pokémon and the name of a college frisbee team.

A key way in which nature challenges the heterosexual ideal is through the sheer prevalence of same-sex behavior. Homosexuality, reports say, has been documented in 1500 species – from dolphins and giraffes to penguins and starfish. It’s ironic when viewed historically, where the supposed absence of homosexuality in animals has been used time and again to fuel homophobia and deem homosexuality a “crime against nature” itself. The emperor penguin, for instance, was lauded by American conservatives as upholding traditional family values after a film depicted them in monogamous relationships. Penguins, however, may be socially monogamous, but aren’t so sexually, Eliot Schrefer, author of “Queer Ducks (and Other Animals): The Natural World of Animal Sexuality,” wrote in The Washington Post. Some may even be bisexual, Schrefer noted. Just last year, a pair of male penguins successfully fostered an egg at the Rosamund Gifford Zoo in New York, while in 2019, another pair of male penguins at the Berlin zoo co-parented an abandoned egg after having attempted to hatch stones and even a dead fish.

Same-sex behavior across species also challenges the prevailing notion that sex in the natural world only occurs for the goal of reproduction. Instead, there are many reasons for same-sex behavior – from building social bonds and resolving conflict to simply gaining pleasure. Recently, a lot more research has emerged on same-sex relationships in nature, perhaps due to changing gender norms. In the past, observations of same-sex behavior had scientists either decrying it as “depravity” or avoiding publishing findings, due to their own biases or to prevent disapproval from the scientific community, noted Schrefer.

As Ingrid Bååth wrote in Climate Culture, “Not only does our understanding of nature become the baseline for what we believe to be natural, but also what we believe to be moral or good behaviour… We interpret nature based on our inherent biases and use our biased understanding of nature to defend and justify those societal biases we have.”

These biases stem from predominantly Western notions of gender and sexuality that have been imposed upon the human and nonhuman worlds, Willow Defebaugh noted in Atmos. It creates dualities of “opposing” categories – pitting humans against nature, man against woman – separating one from the other in a power hierarchy. “Binary thinking, in any form, is rooted in a Western colonial view of the world in which one must always be subjugated by the other,” Katy Constantinides wrote for Climate Policy Lab.

A queer ecological framework, on the other hand, shows us that there is no one way to be masculine or feminine and that these categories may not exist in nature as we know it. It positions humans as a part of nature rather than distinct from it, leveling the power dynamics from an extractive to a community-oriented one. Nature is fluid, queer, and resists categorization as per human cultural perceptions and biases. As queer ecologists point out, acknowledging that may be the first step to repairing our relationship with the natural – as well as human – world.

Complete Article HERE!

Understanding The Science Of Attraction

— The sensation of attraction in those who experience it can feel powerful and mysterious, but researchers have learned some illuminating things about how it works.

By BetterHelp Editorial Team

The feeling of being attracted to someone involves your physical senses, your hormones, your nerves, and even your immune system. It can be sparked by a wide variety of cues, from the shape of another person’s face to the particular way they smell. Keep reading for a more detailed look at what science can tell us about the factors that may draw two people who experience romantic and/or sexual attraction together.

The Science Of Attraction: The Basics

To start, let’s take a closer look at what’s actually happening in your body when you feel that first rush of attraction to someone else. The initial surge of excitement appears to involve a complex balancing act between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. The sympathetic system is the “fight-or-flight” mechanism, and it’s what makes your heart race and your pulse pound when you’re looking at someone you desire.

Research suggests that a moderate amount of sympathetic nervous activity may be necessary for the initial stages of arousal, but that too much or too little can suppress desire. This might explain why watching a scary movie when you know you’re safe can be a fun date night, or why activities that make your heart race can increase feelings of attraction. The parasympathetic system, then, is more associated with relaxation and pleasure. It’s involved in many of the physical changes in the body during sex, such as genital swelling and releasing of sexual fluids.

The early stages of arousal also often cause your blood to pump faster and your pupils to dilate. They may increase your skin’s conductivity too, which is perhaps why attraction can feel so electric. Then, as two people become better acquainted and their intimacy deepens, dopamine-mediated pathways in their brains may become more active. These systems are associated with rewards, habit formation, and even addiction, and they may be what prompts people who are falling in love to obsess over their partners and feel a rush of pleasure just from being near them.

Specific Factors Involved In Attraction

Extensive research has been done into why people are more attracted to some individuals than others. While there’s still plenty to learn, you can read on for an overview of some key research in this area.

The Role Of Immediate First Impressions

We’ve all seen cartoons or movies where a person spots someone they find good-looking and their jaw drops and eyes widen, conveying instant attraction. Though it doesn’t normally happen quite like this, research suggests that our brains do make very rapid judgments about who we find attractive.

In a study conducted at Trinity College in Dublin, researchers briefly showed participants images of possible dating partners. Later, they were given the opportunity to actually interact with the people in the photos during a speed-dating event. Their snap judgments during the four seconds they spent looking at the photos turned out to be good predictors of who they would go on to click with in conversation.

Brain scans pointed to two areas that seemed critical for making these judgments about attractiveness. One is a structure called the paracingulate cortex, which appears to be involved in social evaluation. It tended to light up when viewing photos of people that the majority of participants rated as attractive. Another area, the rostromedial prefrontal cortex, seemed to activate more for people that weren’t attractive to the majority but sparked a particular viewer’s interest.

The Role Of Eye Contact

While a quick glance at another person’s face may be enough to spark attraction, a long, soulful gaze may be important for deepening it. Prolonged eye contact can provoke an experience of intimacy and vulnerability that may be important in forming interpersonal bonds. In a pair of studies conducted in the 1980s, one found that those who exchanged a mutual, unbroken gaze with a participant they didn’t know for two minutes reported a “greater liking” of them than any of the other subjects. The other indicated that existing romantic partners who were assigned the same task reported a “significant increase in feelings of passionate love, dispositional love, and liking for their partner”.

In a related study, researcher Arthur Aron developed a series of 36 increasingly intimate questions that a pair of strangers could ask one another to generate a sense of closeness, which they were to follow by four minutes of prolonged, silent eye contact. His goal was to figure out how to craft the sense of intimacy that can make strangers fall in love. In this initial study, participants left with more positive feelings for each other—and one pair famously went on to get married.

The Role Of Scents

There seems to be a lot more to the science of attraction than visual appeal; smell appears to be another important piece of the puzzle.

Research suggests that, while humans were long considered to have an underdeveloped sense of smell compared to many animals, pheromones may actually play “an important role in the behavioral and reproduction biology of humans”.

Pheromones are chemicals humans naturally secrete that may serve as a form of “olfactory communication”, especially when it comes to attraction.

For instance, androstadienone, a compound present in male sweat, seemed to improve the mood, emotional focus, and sexual arousal of heterosexual women in some experiments. Meanwhile, chemicals called copulins that are found in vaginal secretions seem to provoke higher ratings of female attractiveness to heterosexual males. Copulins also caused men to rate themselves as more attractive to women, suggesting that they might play a role as confidence boosters.

>Another potential component of scent-based attraction may be the immune system. Some studies have indicated that heterosexual women may be more likely to be attracted to the body odor of men whose genes for certain types of immune cells are different from their own. There could be an evolutionary advantage in this behavior, because a child with more diversity in their immune system may be able to fight off a greater variety of diseases.

Attraction And Fertility

From an evolutionary perspective, all sexual behavior is aimed at producing offspring. That may be why studies have found that people of multiple genders find women’s faces more attractive when they’re ovulating. There appear to be subtle changes in appearance associated with this part of the menstrual cycle that can be detected even in photos. Another experiment showed a similar effect on body odor, with men preferring the smell of women’s clothes during the most fertile part of their cycles. Even women’s voices may shift during ovulation, sounding more attractive to heterosexual men.

Similarly, experiments suggest that women’s preferences for more masculine facial shapes and their corresponding body odors change with their cycle. Heterosexual women might be more likely to feel attraction in response to symmetrical faces and masculine-coded looks when their fertility is at its peak. However, these preferences appeared to be strongest when considering people for short-term relationships; fertility didn’t appear to have an effect on perceptions of possible long-term partners.

If the menstrual cycle can affect perceptions of attractiveness, however, can birth control pills do the same? There is some evidence that by changing the body chemistry of ovulation and menstruation, hormonal birth control can affect a person’s preferences for romantic partners. Scientific evidence on the topic includes:

  • Its effects on facial feature selection: A study of 170 heterosexual couples found that women taking birth control pills were more likely to pair up with men whose faces were less stereotypically masculine
  • Its effects on selection for body odor: Other experiments found that heterosexual women’s preferences for male body odor depended on whether they were using hormonal contraception. 
  • Its effects on sexual satisfaction: There’s even evidence suggesting that some women who start or stop using birth control pills during a relationship could be more likely to become less sexually satisfied and less attracted to their current partner.

Getting Support For Your Romantic Life

If you’re facing challenges in dating or in your romantic relationships, you may benefit from professional support. Many people find that meeting with a therapist is a helpful way to uncover patterns of attraction, sort through emotions related to a partner, and develop useful dating and relationship skills such as boundary setting and conflict resolution. A cognitive behavioral therapist in particular can also help you unearth any distorted thoughts you may have about your own attractiveness or ability to form relationships and shift them in a healthier direction for better potential outcomes.

If the thought of meeting with a provider in person for support with your romantic life seems awkward or intimidating, you might consider seeking guidance virtually instead. With a virtual therapy platform like BetterHelp, you can get matched with a licensed provider who you can meet with via phone, video call, and/or in-app messaging from the comfort of your home. Since a comprehensive analysis of past studies including more than 10,000 participants concluded that there was “no difference in effectiveness” between face-to-face and web-based counseling, you can feel confident in whichever method you choose.

Takeaway

Romantic and sexual attraction may involve countless subtle factors, from the sound of a person’s voice to the makeup of their immune system. The initial spark can happen in a matter of seconds, while lasting intimacy and compatibility take more time to develop.

Why do I feel so drawn to someone I barely know?

Although “love at first sight” may not always happen in real life, scientific research has found that we tend to judge people’s attractiveness quickly based on first impressions. For example, in the Trinity College study mentioned earlier in this article, scientists led an experiment to study the role of first impressions in attraction. They briefly showed participants pictures of potential partners before letting them interact at a speed dating event. They found that people’s brain activity from seeing the photos for just four seconds tended to predict who they would connect with during the actual date. This may explain why it’s possible to feel instantly attracted to someone you don’t know very well.

What causes strong physical attraction?

Certain features of people’s bodies, like facial symmetry and youthfulness, can play a role in physical attraction, but physical beauty is not the only component. Chemicals like sex hormones, pheromones, and neurotransmitters can also cause you to become physically attracted to someone. Although these factors may not be consciously noticeable, they can play a large role in sexual desire and perceptions of physical attractiveness.

Can you sense when someone is attracted to you?

Although there may not always be an easy way to tell if someone finds you attractive, a few physical cues that may be signs of interest include:

  • Using open body language
  • Maintaining eye contact
  • Seeking physical touch
  • Smiling
  • Asking you about yourself
  • Looking for ways to spend more time with you

That said, it can be important to avoid making assumptions about someone’s interest, as different people may show attraction in different ways.

How do you know if you’re actually attracted to someone?

Some common physical signs that you may be attracted to someone include:

  • Jitters or restlessness
  • Blushing
  • Sweating
  • A rise in body temperature
  • Rapid breathing or a rapid heartbeat

If you’re attracted to someone, you may also experience feelings of anticipation or excitement. You might notice a desire to spend more time with them or find yourself thinking about them often. Spending more time with them can also provide insight into your level of attraction. That said, not everyone may experience attraction the same way.

What happens in your brain when you are attracted to someone?

When you’re attracted to someone, certain brain regions, like the hypothalamus, the nucleus accumbens, and the ventral tegmental area, tend to activate. This can cause the release of oxytocin, the so-called “cuddle hormone,” and other chemicals related to physical desire and sexual gratification. Growing closer to someone can also trigger dopamine release, leading to feelings of pleasure and making you want to spend more time with them. Serotonin and norepinephrine, two other chemicals, may be responsible for the sense of well-being and excitement you might feel when you’re together.

These are just a few examples of the role the brain can play in attraction.

Why do we fall in love scientifically?

A complex set of factors can contribute to feelings of romantic love.

It may be worth remembering that humans originally evolved to find romantic partners to reproduce and raise offspring with. Therefore, initial attraction is often tied to a partner’s fertility and the survival chances of their potential offspring.

Through spending time with a possible partner and getting to know them better, other factors may come into play, such as personality traits, interests, and common principles. Hormones, pheromones, cultural norms, and timing may also play a role over the course of a romantic relationship. That said, love can be highly individual, and not all these factors may affect people the same way.

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