How estrogen and testosterone change your body as you age

By

Every part of your body — from your brain to your heart — needs hormones.

They’re your body’s “chemical messengers,” according to the Hormone Health Network.

“The glands of the endocrine system send out hormones that tell each part of your body what work to do, when to do it, and for how long,” the organization reported.

There are many different hormones and each contributes to different processes over time, including growth, physical development and sexual function.

The key reproductive hormones are estrogen and progesterone for women and testosterone for men. They’re all required for good sexual health and reproduction, but they can also affect things like energy level, weight and mood.

These hormones need to be balanced to work well, but their levels decrease as you age. This often causes many physiological changes.

How estrogen and testosterone work

Estrogen and progesterone are produced mainly by the ovaries “in a cyclical fashion, which results in a monthly period,” said Dr. Caitlin Dunne, an infertility specialist at the Pacific Centre for Reproductive Medicine in Vancouver.

“Beyond pregnancy … estrogen is essential for building and maintaining strong bones and for keeping women’s arteries healthy to avoid heart disease,” she said. “[It] also plays an important role in cognitive functioning, moods, sexuality, breast development and breastfeeding, to name a few.”

However, women are born with a finite number of eggs that decreases over time. As the eggs disappear, so does the source of a woman’s estrogen and progesterone. When she has no eggs left, she enters menopause.

“On average, that occurs at age 51,” said Dunne.

Similarly, the pituitary gland controls the production of testosterone by the testes in men.

As men age, the testes can slow down or stop producing testosterone altogether. This is known as andropause, or male menopause.

How your body could change

For women

The sudden drop in estrogen levels can lead to menopausal symptoms like “hot flashes, night sweats and changes in mental functioning,” said Dunne.

However, it has been known to also cause more subtle side effects.

“Some menopausal women describe difficulty concentrating, memory issues and mood changes,” she said. “Weight and body composition changes can also occur.”

Dunne said menopausal women have a propensity to lose muscle and gain fat tissue, especially around the waist and hips.

For men

Men continue to make sperm for the rest of their lives, but the decrease in testosterone can have other effects.

These can include fatigue, erectile dysfunction, loss of muscle mass, low libido and low sperm production.

It’s not uncommon for men to lose body hair, muscle and strength as they age. Body fat may also increase over time.

Managing the changes

Both men and women are advised to maintain a healthy diet and exercise regimen.

Women should concentrate on “weight-bearing and balance exercises to offset the effects of bone loss and the risk of fractures or falling,” said Dunne.

Calcium and vitamin D can also help to support bone maintenance.

“Heart disease is consistently one of the top threats to women in our society, particularly after menopause,” she said.

“Having a healthy body weight and avoiding high blood pressure and diabetes are some of the most important things we can do to mitigate this risk.”

There’s also the option of hormone therapy for both men and women.

Testosterone replacement therapy can be done several ways, including using gel or patches that you put on your skin.

It can improve “sexual interest, erections, mood and energy, body hair growth, bone density and muscle mass,” according to the Hormone Health Network.

Hormone therapy for women is considered one of the most effective treatments for bothersome hot flashes and night sweats, Dr. Lindsay Shirreff previously told Global News.

“We aim to individualize treatment and offer women the lowest hormone therapy dose to provide relief from her symptoms,” said Shirreff, an obstetrician/gynecologist at the Mature Women’s Health and Menopause Clinic at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto.

She said that as long as a woman has no contraindications to starting hormone therapy and is within 10 years of her last period, this type of therapy is safe and effective.

“Women who still have their uterus are typically prescribed estrogen and progesterone,” she said. “The estrogen is often given through the skin in the form of a patch or gel to decrease the risk of blood clot and heart attack that was previously attributed to hormone therapy.”

The treatment, however, has gotten a bad reputation because of associated breast cancer risks. However, Dunne said these have often been misinterpreted as much scarier than they really are.

“I would suggest that women who are suffering with hot flashes should see their doctor to have an informed discussion,” she said.

“In general, when we use a low dose of hormone therapy for a short duration of time, it carries minimal (if any) increased risk of breast cancer and it can help make women’s lives more manageable.”

Complete Article HERE!

Is Same-Sex Behavior Hardwired in Animals from the Beginning?

Same-sex sexual behavior might have started out on an equal footing with different-sex sex.

Evolutionary scientists have been thinking about same-sex sexual behavior all wrong.

That’s the implication of a new study on same-sex behavior in animals. Instead of asking why animals engage in same-sex behavior (SSB), researchers should be asking, “Why not?” the authors said. 

If they’re right, same-sex sex may not have evolved independently in different animals for adpative reasons. Instead, same-sex sex may have emerged very early in time and could persist simply because engaging in it doesn’t cost animals much, evolutionarily speaking.

“Usually, when evolutionary biologists see a trait that’s really widespread across evolutionary lineages, we at least consider the idea that the trait is ancestral and was preserved in all those lineages,” said Julia Monk, a doctoral candidate at Yale University, who co-authored the new research. “So why hadn’t people considered that hypothesis for SSB?”

In evolutionary science, same-sex sexual behavior has long been viewed as a conundrum: Why would animals spend time and energy doing something sexual that won’t pass along their genes to the next generation? And yet, same-sex sexual behavior has been observed in at least 1,500 species, ranging from lowly squash bugs to humans.

(To avoid anthropomorphizing, the researchers don’t use the terms “homosexual,” “heterosexual,” “gay” or “straight” to refer to animal behavior.)

“We can’t assign sexuality to animals — we’re trying our best to learn about them by observing their behaviors,” Monk told Live Science. “And those behaviors shouldn’t be mapped onto human cultural and societal contexts.”

The assumption that there must be an evolutionary reason for all this same-sex sex has led researchers to search for possible benefits to same-sex behavior. For example, in humans, researchers have found that having a gay son or brother seems to be associated with a woman having more offspring in total. Other studies have posited that same-sex sexual behavior is a side effect of other genes that have reproductive benefits. 

In evolutionary biology, the ability of an animal to reproduce given its environment is called fitness. It’s entirely possible that in some species, same-sex sex could have fitness benefits, Monk and her colleagues wrote in their paper, published Nov. 18 in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. But these evolutionary benefits may not be required for same-sex sexual behavior to exist. 

Imagine, instead, that the earliest sexually reproducing animals simply tried to mate with any and all members of their species — regardless of sex. This might have been a logical pathway for evolution, because all the bells and whistles that distinguish males from females are energetically costly to evolve. So any effort expended on mating with the same sex would be compensated for by not spending energy evolving and maintaining distinctive secondary sex characteristics, like differing colors, scents and behaviors. Those sex-distinguishing traits may have all come later in the evolutionary chain, the authors argued.

In this formulation, same-sex and different-sex sexual behavior would have started out on an equal footing, early in animal evolution. This could explain why same-sex sex is so common throughout the animal kingdom: It didn’t evolve multiple times independently, but was instead part of the fabric of animal evolution from the start.

Same-sex penguin couples keep adopting eggs, and the Berlin Zoo is celebrating

The new hypothesis undercuts old assumptions about same-sex behaviors, said Caitlin McDonough, a doctoral candidate at Syracuse University and a study co-author. Much of the research done on these sexual behaviors assumes that same-sex sex is costly for animals and that different-sex sex is not costly, she said.

“You really need to go through those assumptions and test the costs and benefits of both behaviors in a system,” McDonough said.

If same-sex behaviors go back to the roots of animal evolution, the fact that these behaviors are so common today makes sense, Monk said.

“If you assume a trait like SSB is a new development and has high costs, it’s going to be really hard to understand how it could become more and more common from those low initial frequencies,” she said. “It would have to have really large fitness benefits, or be otherwise impervious to natural selection, for that outcome to be probable.

“On the other hand, if you assume a trait is ancestral and was originally common, and it has low costs, it’s much more likely that it would remain widespread to this day, even if it doesn’t seem to contribute much to fitness.”

One piece of evidence supporting this hypothesis is that some echinoderms, including sea stars and sea urchins, engage in same-sex sexual behavior. Echinoderms evolved early in the history of life, likely in the Precambrian period more than 541 million years ago.

But other evidence is slim, largely because scientists haven’t systematically studied same-sex sexual behavior in animals. Most observations have been accidental, and biologists have often viewed sex between two animals of the same sex as irrelevant or improper to note, Monk said. Sometimes, researchers automatically assume that same-sex behavior isn’t really about sex but instead is about dominance or bonding. And often, if two animals are observed having sex, they’re assumed to be male and female without any confirmatory evidence, McDonough said.

“The science that we do is really informed and influenced by cultural biases,” she said.

Thinking of same-sex sexual behavior as a standard part of the animal repertoire would change how researchers approach the study of the evolution of these behaviors. The next step, Monk said, would be to gather more data on the prevalence of same-sex behavior in animals. Then, researchers could compare species from across the tree of life to determine if all linages show same-sex behavior. If so, it would strengthen the argument that same-sex sexuality was part of life for the ancestors of all of today’s sexually reproducing animals.

Complete Article HERE!

Happy endings

The ins and outs of clinical sexology

By

Sexology is the interdisciplinary scientific study of human sexuality, including sexual behaviours, interests and function. A sexologist is a trained professional who specialises in human sexuality.

There are many different ways a sexologist may work, and many different areas she may work in – in clinical settings, in education, and in research. Here’s the type of couple a clinical sexologist may encounter.

A consultation

Sarah and John have been together for two years and have recently become engaged. Generally, they’re very happy with their lives, with satisfying careers, good relationships with their families, and many shared interests. They’re even hoping to start their own family but the one area of their lives that things don’t work so well in is the bedroom.

Sarah has always experienced pain during penetrative sex. She believes it’s connected to her early sexual experiences when her boyfriend at the time was rough during sex and she didn’t express her feelings. She always saw it as “part of making him happy”.

Now she’s realised that she could have said something, and is more willing to talk about her experiences with John. She wants to have penetration with John, but is fearful that it will hurt and hence avoids doing it.

John was a virgin until he met Sarah. He had “made out” with girls but had never gone further than that. He always wanted to be sexually active but the opportunity did not arise for him to experience sex before he met and fell in love with Sarah.

Although Sarah and John are sexually active together, their attempts at sexual intercourse have been fraught with difficulties. As John is inexperienced sexually, he feels anxious about hurting Sarah and he wants to “get it right”.

This anxiety stops him enjoying himself and being “present” during sex, so he has developed erectile difficulties. He can attain an erection both during masturbation and oral sex with Sarah, but when they begin the penetration he loses his erection.

Sarah and John have heard that they can talk to someone about their concerns and they make an appointment to see a sexologist.

A growing field

Books on sexuality and love, such as the Kama Sutra, the Ars Amatoria, and The Perfumed Garden of Sensual Delight, have been around for centuries. But they’re not framed within a formal field of scientific or medical research.

During the late 1800s – despite the social attitudes of sexual repression in the Victorian era – more liberal attitudes towards sexuality began to be presented in England and Germany. In 1886, for instance, Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902) published Psychopathia Sexualis, which is considered to be the leading work that established sexology as a scientific discipline.

Within a decade or so, English medical doctor and sexologist Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) challenged the sexual taboos of his era, specifically regarding masturbation and homosexuality. His 1897 book Sexual Inversion, described the sexual relations of homosexual males and is considered to be the first objective study of homosexuality. He actually coined this term and, despite the prevailing social attitudes of the time, did not consider homosexuality as a disease, as immoral, or as a crime.

Throughout the following decades, many other scientists expanded our understanding of human sexuality. Some noteworthy names are Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Alfred Adler (1870-1937), Wilhelm Stekel (1868-1940), Ernst Grafenberg (1881-1957), after whom the G-spot is named, Alfred Kinsey (1894-1956), John Money (1921-2006), and the American duo William H. Masters (1915-2001) and Virginia E. Johnson (1925-2013).

Although sometimes controversial, these scientists and practitioners contributed greatly to the development of the discipline of sexology.

A happy couple

In 2015, there are many practising sexologists around the world. Those like the practitioner Sarah and John would access are typically called clinical sexologists because they work with the diagnosis and treatment of sexual concerns and dysfunctions, among other sexual health presentations. But they may go by other titles such as sex therapists, for instance, or psychosexual therapists.

Most use the Ex-PLISSIT model of sex therapy when working with clients. Originally developed by Jack Anon in the 1970s, and later expanded by Sally Davis and Bridget Taylor in 2006, the letters of the model refer to four different levels of possible intervention.

They are Extended (Ex) and Permission (P) – meaning to give permission throughout the work with clients for them to discuss sexual behaviour and sexuality issues, as well as to support the client in their experiences of sexual behaviours (as long as they are not harmful); Limited Information (LI) – clarifying any misinformation, dispelling myths, and providing factual information in a limited manner; Specific Suggestions (SS) – providing specific suggestions relating to the particular issue; and Intensive Therapy (IT) – providing highly specialised therapy for more complex presentations to the individual(s). The key aspects of this model includes being aware of and providing explicit permission throughout the work with the client or clients so the client(s) can work through their personal issues as a core feature of the other stages in Ex-PLISSIT.

This requires the practitioner to be reflective about all interactions with her clients, with the intention of increasing self-awareness by challenging assumptions.

The Ex-PLISSIT model helps practitioners with a framework to help them identify their role in the assessment and conceptualisation of an individual’s sexual well-being needs; not all practitioners are equipped to work with all clients’ issues. The model also highlights that not all clients need to experience each of these levels to resolve their situation.

In order to help Sarah and John, their sexologist would have taken a thorough sexual history for them both, and worked with them to understand their sexual difficulties. It seems likely that they were reinforcing each other’s experiences and unknowingly contributing to each other’s anxiety about sex.

With John, the sexologist would have focused on his “performance anxiety”. They would help both Sarah and him recognise and manage any unwanted thoughts, and help them to be more mindful during their sexual experiences.

Sexologists are specialists in human sexuality and hold specific knowledge and skills. They study people’s sexual behaviours, feelings and interactions, and assist them to reconcile any issues they have about their sexual experiences, with the aim of improving their lives.

Complete Article HERE!

“The onset of artificial lovers will make us question what it means to love, and to be loved in return.”

By

Sex tech, teledildonics, and above all, sex robots are getting more and more public attention. Therefore, it’s not really surprising that the scientific community has also sunk its teeth into these topics. On July 1-2, scientists from various fields will meet for the fourth “International Congress On Love And Sex With Robots” in Brussels. Eleanor Hancock from the University of Liverpool is in charge of the press work for the conference. In our EAN interview, she grants us insights into the main topics that will be discussed at the event, and we talk about the research that is being done in these fields right now.

This (past) summer, the fourth International Congress On Love And Sex With Robots will take (took) place in Brussels. Who will participate(d) in this congress and what will (did) they discuss?
Eleanor Hancock: There will be a range of academics presenting this year, including myself. We are incredibly multi-disciplinary, with paper topics ranging from ethics to engineering. This is something we are incredibly proud of, as both sex robots and sex-technology must be considered from a range of academic perspectives. As Noel Sharkey, roboticist and chair of Foundation for Responsible Robotics suggests, the discussion of technology calls for STEAM. Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math, especially since the implications of sex-tech and sex robots may encompass millions of humans!

In terms of specific speakers and paper submissions for this year at LSR, I cannot give too much away about the papers and the speakers – you will have to catch us at the event!

Why are these interesting and fruitful topics for scientific consideration?
Love, sex and technology are all very interesting talking points, so it’s no surprise that a combination of these concepts arouse considerable scientific consideration. Many of the concepts that are apparent in sex robots, such as emotion, intimacy and desire – may raise some interesting questions not just about technology but also about humanity. The onset of artificial lovers will make us question what it means to love, and to be loved in return. It will also broaden our scope of intimate partners, and even our sexual desires! These are all obviously fantastic talking points.

I also think that people are becoming more aware of how we are utilising technology in the bedroom and with our sexual partners, and sex is an interesting area within technology because it has historically been confounded to private, physical spaces. Sex has also been a particularly ‘taboo’ subject and continues to be so in many, many societies around the world. Topics around sex-tech and sex-robots have the power to push through societal norms and/or taboos, allowing us to consider concepts that we have previously not given much thought.

This topic can be looked at from different angles: philosophical, technical, economic, etc. What will the conference in Brussels focus on?
As I said earlier, the conference will focus on a multitude of academic disciplines, as the -tech and sex-robots incorporates a range of both scientific, ethical and philosophical concepts.

Eleanor Hancock recently graduated from the University of Liverpool with a Masters of Research in the Communication & Philosophy department

The media’s interest in this topic is quite clear. Hardly any product in sex toy market has ever caused such a stir … how do you explain that?
Sex-technology has been widely reported on. However, it does not cause a much of a stir within the media as sex robots. I partly believe this is due to media sensationalism about sex robots. I also believe it is because people are unaware of the technology currently being used to advance sex toys, and the sex industry. I think if we compare sex-tech to sex robots, the current teledildonic devices available far outstrip the technological capacity of sex robots, as well as being more accessible and affordable for all.

If more people were actively aware of sex-technology, I think there would be a much stronger focus on sex-tech in the media and the potential for positive outcome derived from sex-tech. Unfortunately, some webcam broadcasting sites who have adopted sex-tech tend to publicise ‘gimmicky,’ ‘click-bait’ news articles about sex-tech, which is not the concise and clear media-focus I believe sex-tech deserves. For example, Camsoda has commented multiple times on their efforts to offer “Download a BJ” on their website. Whilst it is obvious that the focus on such a technology impedes publicity more so than it does technological development, there are still some exciting concepts that are being explored through virtual BJ’s and remote sex.

The virtual BJ in question is facilitated and reciprocated through haptic technology used in sex-tech. Haptic technology is the term used for any technology that accentuates and creates the feeling of touch, by applying forces, vibrations and movement to the user. Haptic technology allows sex-tech to deliver ‘remote’ touching and stimulation, as well as being able to mimic the vibrations of music and be paired up with visual stimuli, like VR pornography. Of course, when Chatubrate speak about ‘downloading BJ’s’ the technology that facilitates such gimmicks is often overlooked in favour of ‘clicktivism.’

We rarely hear about the technology itself, how it is being developed and how it can have both positive and negative impacts. The reason for this is I think that the sex-tech market is still heavily saturated because it often colludes with the sex industry, where the potential for marketing a product/concept to boost sales through adult industry revenue is considered before the promotion of the technology itself.
If you want to check out more about ‘downloadable’ blowjobs, here are some articles that I found helpful in my own research: inverse.com/article/24080-camsoda-blowcast-blowjobs-teledildonics.

How would you describe the status quo in the development of sex robots? How far along are we in the development of a lifelike sex robot?
It depends what you mean by ‘life-like.’ Some of Matthew Mullen’s sex dolls look erringly familiar to our human-selves. Of course, they cannot move and are technological incapable of reciprocating any kind of human personality that could be considered even close to life-like. We are still far away from the development of a convincing sex robot that can mimic the persona of a human and be considered lifelike enough to evade the uncanny valley.

The creation of artificial lovers can also be seen as a philosophical problem. What effects can this development have on society and human relations?
There have been many discussions about technology and human relations. With respect to artificial lovers, the narratives of Sherry Turkle, Noel Sharkey and Maria Ashande are useful in viewing the range of issues surrounding sex robot lovers. Whilst academics like Sherry Turkle have discussed the loss of emotion surrounding technological communication and the isolating effects of technology, there has been no empirical research on the effects of loneliness and sex robots to date, so I am cautious about making sweeping statements against them. It is clear why many people feel that sex robots could isolate certain individuals in society and increase the likelihood of people rejecting conventional, human relationships in favour of an intimate relationship with an artificial lover.

Marina Ashande has offered a very valuable insight into the future of marriage alongside artificial lovers. She highlights how there are many cultural and historical values could be changed with the adoption of artificial lovers in society. It shows that the philosophical debate around artificial lovers expands far beyond the concepts of love, intimacy and emotion.

In 2017, the FRR [Foundation for Responsible Robotics] released a report about the future of sex robots and artificial lovers, of which I was a co-author. It highlights some of the issues that may arise from having relationships with robots.

One could argue that a robot or doll is just an object, like any other sex toy. What makes technologies like robotics or artificial intelligence different?
This is a very interesting question. I believe the difference between, let’s say, a vibrator and a sex robot, is that we are more likely to project our feelings onto artifice that resembles humans, or animals. Furthermore, a sex robot offers some form of ‘presence’ in the room, as opposed to a sex toy. We are more likely to anthropomorphise them, which harks reason for caution amongst some academics, for example, Kathleen Richardson believes the increase in our likelihood to anthropomorphise sex robots means we can project negative feelings onto sex robots.

This also raises the question: Should people have sex with robots at all?
I don’t see why not! Any technology can have a negative impact on wider society, but I firmly believe they have potential for positive uses.

The scientific and technical developments in this field are not only progressing rapidly, they are also becoming increasingly complex. Is there a particular development we should keep an eye on – a development which will be of great interest to us in the future?
As much as sexbots take the headlines, I think there are some great examples of sex-tech that have applications for wider society. For example, at a 2018 hackathon in Australia, the winning concept was an application that linked disabled people with the sex industry.

Whilst helping those with physical and mental disabilities access the sex industry may be a small step, the applications for sex-tech provide opportunities for people to reinvent and reengage with their sexuality.

My own research in sex-tech and the sex industry has highlighted that sex workers are utilising sex-technology. This is interesting for me, as not only does it provide evidence that shuns radical feminist narratives about the ‘victimisation’ of women in the sex industry, it also shows that women are manipulating technology for financial gain at very minimum risk to themselves. The narratives surrounding the sex industry have long perpetuated the notion that women put themselves at serious risk in order to profit from their bodies. The webcam and sex-tech industry have the power to silence such arguments.

Complete Article HERE!

What Can Brain Scans Tell Us About Sex?

By

Men have a far greater appetite for sex and are more attracted to pornography than women are. This is the timeworn stereotype that science has long reinforced. Alfred Kinsey, America’s first prominent sexologist, published in the late 1940s and early 1950s his survey results confirming that men are aroused more easily and often by sexual imagery than women. It made sense, evolutionary psychologists theorized, that women’s erotic pleasure might be tempered by the potential burdens of pregnancy, birth and child rearing — that they would require a deeper emotional connection with a partner to feel turned on than men, whose primal urge is simply procreation. Modern statistics showing that men are still the dominant consumers of online porn seem to support this thinking, as does the fact that men are more prone to hypersexuality, whereas a lack of desire and anorgasmia are more prevalent in women. So it was somewhat surprising when a paper in the prestigious journal P.N.A.S. reported in July that what happens in the brains of female study subjects when they look at sexual imagery is pretty much the same as what happens in the brains of their male counterparts.

The researchers, led by Hamid Noori at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Germany, weren’t initially interested in exploring sexual behavior. They were trying to find ways to standardize experiments that use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fM.R.I.) to observe how the brain responds to visual stimuli. In order to do that, they needed to compare past studies that used similar methods but returned diverse results. They happened to choose studies in which male and female volunteers looked at sexual imagery, both because doing so tends to generate strong signals in the brain, which would make findings easier to analyze, and because this sort of research has long produced “inconsistent and even contradictory” results, as they note in their paper. Identifying the reasons for such discrepancies might help researchers design better experiments.

A search turned up 61 studies that met Noori’s criteria for inclusion: Healthy adult men and women of different sexual orientations (including bisexual and transgender subjects) who had rated erotic images in terms of how arousing they were. Those participants had then been put in an fM.R.I. scanner — which detects changes in blood flow associated with neuronal activity — and been shown the most arousing images as well as neutral, nonsexualized ones. What Noori’s team found was that image type — whether it was a picture or a video — was the strongest predictor of differences in which parts of the brain became engaged. Unexpectedly, the weakest predictor was the subjects’ biological sex. In other words, when men and women viewed pornographic imagery, the way their brains responded, in the aggregate, was largely the same.

This latter, more provocative finding yielded the paper’s title, “Neural Substrates of Sexual Arousal Are Not Sex Dependent.” Headlines followed, along with controversy in the cognitive neurosciences. Researchers whose work has shown differences between men’s and women’s brains viewing sexual stimuli objected to such generalization. But the purpose of statistically analyzing many studies together, a process called meta-analysis, is precisely to be more conclusive: The goal is to reveal global patterns that smaller studies can’t.

The science of sex is inherently paradoxical. For centuries, social stigma, prejudice and misogyny have condemned as aberrant sexual pleasures we now know are healthy. Yet despite the growing realization of how much outside views shape even our most private behavior, we can still experience the mechanics of our own desire — never mind that of others — as a fundamental mystery. Noori’s team is trying to shed light on a big part of that lingering mystery: If men’s and women’s brains respond similarly to sexual stimuli, what accounts for the apparent differences in how they approach sexual practices?

Answering that question means connecting the dots from what triggers the firing of specific neurons to how those firings give rise to the myriad thoughts and feelings we have about sex to the actions we take in response to them. Knowing what all this should look like neurologically could give clinicians more ways to treat the 43 percent of women and 31 percent of men who, according to the Cleveland Clinic, report problems in their experience of sex. “Issues of sexual behavior and sexuality are highly associated with mental health, with life satisfaction, even with physiological health,” says Justin Garcia, director of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University. That makes it crucial to find out what “the constituent parts” of sex are.

In fact, it is still extremely difficult to interpret what activity in a given region of the brain really means. When viewing erotica, women often (and far more often than men) experience a disconnect between their physiological arousal — measured by genital temperature, wetness and swelling — and what they describe feeling. This could mean that they do not realize or do not want to divulge that an image is turning them on, or that they believe an image is or should be arousing when it isn’t, physiologically. That dissonance raises a host of complications. To what extent do cultural attitudes toward pornography — historically, women have been shamed for consuming it — influence both our subconscious and conscious responses to sexual images? Because neuroimaging has been available for only the past 30 years — Noori analyzed studies from 2001 and later — there’s no way to compare similar scans from the ’50s, say, and see how shifting norms might have changed the results.

Complicating things further is the multifunctionality of brain networks. In 2017, Janniko Georgiadis and Gerben Ruesink, at the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands, published a review that showed seemingly distinct patterns of brain activity for wanting sex, liking (or having) sex and the opposite, inhibiting sex. The broadness of these categories shows how opaque those concepts are. Melissa Farmer, a research assistant professor in the department of physiology at Northwestern University, points out that “desire might be anything from when you see someone up until you act on that and approach them. That’s a lot of steps.” Neuroimaging has the potential to delineate those steps more precisely and objectively than self-reporting possibly could.

But even “objective” brain activation can be ambiguous. In a previous study, Georgiadis found that in women, the same areas that tend to become active when viewing sexual imagery that neuroscientists have deemed pleasing also became active in response to photos of vomiting or feces. What scientists tend to regard as “arousal” on brain scans could also be its opposite, or perhaps some combination of each. Likewise, it’s conceivable that the “sameness” Noori found in male and female brain activity indicates that characteristics we’ve defined as opposites actually overlap. In 2015, researchers led by Daphna Joel at Tel Aviv University published an article that analyzed more than 1,400 M.R.I.s of male and female brains and concluded that in most brains, certain regions might be more “male” while others are more “female,” creating a unique gender “mosaic” that defies either-or classification.

Sexual behavior, in turn, is inextricable from other behaviors. Indeed, as Georgiadis and Ruesink point out, the same “sometimes quite generic” brain activity associated with erotic stimuli is also part of how we process “reward, memory, cognition, self-referential thinking and social behavior.” We use the same neural processes to determine if a sexual experience is valuable and worth repeating as we do for food and drugs. A more complete mapping of how men and women respond neurologically to pornography, and how that affects their behavior, might thus offer a model for explaining happiness or addiction.

“In the brain, sex is everywhere,” Georgiadis says, and recognizing its interactions with other mental processes might also argue for a different, less binary definition of it, both as a behavior and as a biological classification. As neuroimaging enables a more granular view of brain networks, we may find that new labels are needed. That could even argue for dispensing with categories like “desire” and “arousal” or “male” and “female” in favor of descriptors that better capture how those concepts intermingle and connect with others.

Complete Article HERE!

What Do Your Sex Dreams Really Mean

And Should You Pay Attention To Them?

By Vicky Spratt

In certain schools of psychoanalysis, namely that of Sigmund Freud, dreams are considered to be a snapshot of our unconscious desires. As he saw it, while we sleep, we play a tape of things we cannot or, perhaps, would not do while we are awake. Freud saw dreams as the fulfilment of a repressed wish.

This, for anyone who has ever had a sex dream, can make for troubling reading. If you’ve ever woken up from one, particularly if you share a bed with your real life partner, still able to remember everything in vivid detail, you’ll know what a complex set of feelings it can provoke.

Not too long ago this came up while I having a weekend away with a friend. As we sat in a country pub, drinking lager shandies with cards on the table (that we had no intention of playing) and both confessed that recently we’d been having more sex dreams than we felt entirely comfortable with.

If a new study, published in the journal Psychology and Sexuality, is to be believed, there’s a reason why this is coming up so much in conversation. Young women today are reporting having more erotic dreams than they have ever done in previous studies (though still less than men).

The researchers defined an erotic dream as including “sexually motivated actions such as flirting, kissing, intercourse or masturbation as well as watching sexual actions.” They asked 2,907 16-92 year-olds about their dreams and found the highest frequency of erotic dreams among those aged 16-30.

There’s a pretty straightforward explanation for all of this, as the study itself points out. Young women, who have grown up in the wake of the feminist movements of the 1960s and 70s which brought about a sexual revolution, are more open about sex. As a result, they’re more likely to report erotic dreams than older generations would have been at their age.

Young women today are reporting having more erotic dreams than they have ever done in previous studies (though still less than men).

Back in that small, quiet country pub my friend (who for obvious reasons will remain anonymous) and I both expressed serious concern about what our dreams might mean and how they were influencing our relationships.

“In mine,” she had half-whispered, leaning in across the wobbling table and spilling beer in the process, “I’m always a younger version of myself and I’m getting off with men that age too.”

I confessed that my dreams always involved the same ex-boyfriend to the point where I now felt incredibly uncomfortable and, at several points, had even considered reaching out to him. The whole thing was causing me to reconsider my current, long-term relationship.

Since then, another friend (who also wished to stay anonymous), has told me that she had “started to look forward to turning the light out in bed” because she knew she could drift off into an erotic dream, despite being very much in love with her current partner.

Perhaps that’s because at some point in our lives we’ve all read – or at least heard of Freud – and absorbed the idea that our dreams are our subconscious trying to tell us something.

Sexual desire and guilt are often convergent parts of being human but when it comes to dreaming, about someone else, while lying next to your real life partner they become one and the same.

Dr Dylan Selterman is a senior lecturer at the University of Maryland’s psychology department. His work focuses on patterns of dreaming and how dreams influence our subsequent behaviour. I asked him what he makes of this latest research?

“To be clear, the study doesn’t actually show that young women (or men) are having more erotic dreams today,” he said, offering a word of caution. “The study simply shows that participants estimated a higher percentage of erotic dreams than in previous studies. This could be explained by a number of factors. The current study was recall-based, whereas previous studies used diaries. In general, diary studies are more accurate in terms of frequencies, but the recall-based studies can still be quite useful”.

In his own research, Selterman has found that the content of erotic dreams does affect how we interact with our romantic partners afterwards.

“Specifically,” he says, “socially negative dream content including jealousy and infidelity predicted more conflict and less intimacy the following day, especially for people who either scored high in insecurity or whose relationship was not going well.”

Meanwhile, for people whose relationship was going well he found “if they had a sex dream they felt more intimacy with their partners the next day.”

This reflects the experience of one of my friends. She found that having sex dreams actually made her feel more affectionate towards her partner. She said it made her “appreciate” him more and actually inspired her to have more sex with him in real life. (A colleague also told me she has had a sporadic but recurring sex dream about the same man for over a decade. That man is Eminem and she’s harboured fond feelings for him ever since.)

However, for the other, the opposite was true. She and her partner had become disconnected, she was unsure about whether she wanted to stay in the relationship. Every morning, after one of the erotic dreams she so looked forward to she would feel “empty and guilt ridden.”

Selterman cautions that while there is growing research in this area there isn’t enough to draw concrete conclusions from. When is comes to psychology, he points out, have moved on a lot since Freud.

“I’m not sure that erotic dreams ‘mean’ anything in terms of symbolism or latent content because we don’t have evidence for that,” he adds. “Instead, we likely dream about sex because we think about sex while we’re awake. The continuity hypothesis (which is mentioned in the new research), suggests that dreams mirror our thoughts and behaviours while awake.”

So, I ask Selterman, should we pay attention to sex dreams when we have them or not? “Sure!” he says, “why not! Dreams can give a great insight into our minds and relationships.”

However, insight is not the same as a dream delivering us a veiled message from our subconscious. A sex dream is more likely to be a reflection of something you were already thinking about that day. If it comes as a surprise to you in the night, it might be worth being very honest with yourself about what you want and whether you’re getting what you need when you’re awake.

Complete Article HERE!

‘Gay gene’ theories belong in the past – now we know sexuality is far more fluid

Gender norms imprison us all, dictating our behaviour for fear of abuse – and that extends to who we sleep or fall in love with

By

It turns out that genetics is almost as complicated as love and sex. New research has shown that the long fabled “gay gene” does not exist; that a variety of different genes contribute to same-sex attraction, and that several other factors are in the mix too.

For many LGBTQ people – myself included – the very notion of this study sets off big queer alarm bells, though it should be noted researchers worked closely with LGBTQ groups. As early as 1993, the Daily Mail – and mock it all you like, it’s one of the country’s main newspapers – published an article under the headline “Abortion hope after ‘gay genes’ findings”. In the age of supposed “designer babies”, what if the hatefully inclined chose to make sure their unborn child wasn’t gay or bisexual?

Then there’s the old homophobic trope that people “choose” to be gay, and that falling in love with someone of the same gender is a “lifestyle choice” – a perverse myth long used to punish LGBTQ people and fuel the horror of so-called gay conversion therapy. It is reassuring, then, that the study isn’t suggesting that how children are raised by their parents determines their sexuality: one environmental factor that’s been previously researched is that foetal development in the womb may have a significant impact, for instance.

But while the research may be interesting, it is surely irrelevant. Believing that LGBTQ people choose their sexuality belongs in the same bin as flat-Earthism and climate emergency denial. All LGBTQ people grow up in homophobic societies, whether that bigotry is imposed by coercive social attitudes or by the state. Almost all of us endure agonising periods marked by fear and shame, and struggled to come out to ourselves, let alone our family, friends and society: the idea we opted out of heterosexuality for a bit of a laugh is clearly fantasy.

What is more interesting is that we will not know how fluid sexuality truly is until homophobia – and its parent, sexism, because it’s really about enforcing gender norms – is vanquished. Of course there are many who believe their sexuality is effectively fixed as straight or gay. Not so for bisexuals – and for others, their sexuality is more fluid still. The experiences of men and women differ markedly here. Although younger men are more comfortable showing feelings for each other, many men still fear that even expressing affection for another guy will have them pejoratively labelled as exclusively gay. Women who have attraction towards other women, meanwhile, are objectified and sexualised: it’s a crude sexual fantasy for men.

The polling shows that younger people are increasingly less likely to identify as heterosexual, a symptom of growing emancipation. According to YouGuv survey this year, while 83% of 18 to 24-year-olds in Britain identified as heterosexual just four years ago, now only 75% do, with 16% now self-describing as bisexual, an astonishing 14 points higher than 2015.

Sexual and gender norms imprison us all, dictating our behaviour for fear of reprisal – abuse or even violence – and that extends to who we sleep with or fall in love with. When the struggle for freedom succeeds, those boundaries will finally be overcome.

Complete Article HERE!

Bisexuality Among Black Women Is On The Rise

By Tristan Bridges and Mignon R. Moore

Since 1972, social scientists have studied the General Social Survey to chart the complexities of social change in the United States.

The survey, which is conducted every couple years, asks respondents their attitudes on topics ranging from race relations to drug use. In 2008, the survey started including a question on sexual identity.

As sociologists who study sexuality, we’ve noticed how more and more women are reporting that they’re bisexual. But in the most recent survey, one subset stood out: 23% of Black women in the 18 to 34 age group identified as bisexual – a proportion that’s nearly three times higher than it was a decade ago.

What forces might be fueling this shift? And what can learn from it?

Bisexuality among women is on the rise

In the 10 years that the General Social Survey has included a question on sexual identity, rates of identification among gay men, lesbian women and bisexual men in the U.S. haven’t changed much.

Bisexual identifying women, on the other hand, account for virtually all of the growth among those who say they’re lesbian, gay or bisexual. Of all of the women who responded to the 2018 survey, more than 1 in 18 identified as bisexual. One decade ago, only 1 in 65 did.

Bisexuality among women is on the rise

In the 10 years that the General Social Survey has included a question on sexual identity, rates of identification among gay men, lesbian women and bisexual men in the U.S. haven’t changed much.

Bisexual identifying women, on the other hand, account for virtually all of the growth among those who say they’re lesbian, gay or bisexual. Of all of the women who responded to the 2018 survey, more than 1 in 18 identified as bisexual. One decade ago, only 1 in 65 did.

The most dramatic shift among bisexual identifying women is happening among young people. In the 2018 sample, more than 1 in 8 women from the ages of 18 to 34 identified as bisexual. There were more than twice as many young female bisexuals as there were young lesbians, gay men and bisexual men combined.

That’s a large shift – and it all happened in a relatively short period of time.

Add race to the figures and you’ll see that young Black women, in particular, account for a disproportionate share of this shift.

A few years ago, we wrote about how approximately 18% of young Black women identified as lesbian or bisexual in the 2016 General Social Survey sample. That rate was more than two times higher than for white women or other racial groups – and almost four times higher than for men of any racial group.

By 2018, more than 25% of young Black women identified as lesbian or bisexual. And the majority of that change can be accounted for by bisexual-identifying Black women.

In other trends, Black women also led the way

Data like these help us to establish a shift is occurring, but they don’t really explain why it’s happening.

Exploring the “why” requires different methods of analysis, and existing studies – like Mignon Moore’s research on gay identity and relationships among Black women – can provide some clues.

But beyond this, other demographic research shows that Black women have led the way in other trends related to gender.

Consider the gender gap in college attendance. As early as 1980, Black women began to outpace Black men in completion of a four-year college degree. It wasn’t until a decade later that white women started earning college degrees at a higher clip than white men.

And in the first half of the 20th century, more unmarried Black women started having children. Eventually, more unmarried white women started having children, too.

Perhaps when it comes to sexuality, Black women are also ahead of the curve. If that’s the case – and if this trend continues – we might expect women of other races to follow suit.

A shortage of men?

Cultural forces might also play a role.

Sociologists Emma Mishel, Paula England, Jessie Ford and Mónica L. Caudillo also analyzed the General Social Survey. Rather than study sexual identities, they studied sexual behavior. Yet they discovered a similar pattern: Young Black women were more likely to engage in same-sex sexual behavior than women and men in other racial and age groups.

They argue that these shifts speak to a larger truth about American culture: It’s more acceptable for women to spurn gender norms because femininity isn’t valued as highly as masculinity. Since masculinity and heterosexuality are closely intertwined, men might believe they’ll suffer a higher social cost for identifying as bisexual.

Others have pointed to the shortage of men hypothesis to explore young Black women’s decisions about relationships and marriage. This too might explain why young Black women, in particular, seem more willing to explore bisexuality.

According to this argument, fewer “marriageable” men create a need for women to consider options beyond heterosexual relationships or marriage. A traditional marriage isn’t as necessary as it once was; since women have more educational and economic opportunities, they can afford to be pickier or, possibly, to explore same-sex relationships.

Another aspect of the hypothesis involves the disproportionately high rates of incarceration of Black men in the U.S. It’s possible that because Black women are, as a group, more likely to live in areas with smaller “pools of marriageable men,” they’re more open to bisexuality.

We’re less convinced by the shortage of men argument because it ignores the fact that incarceration rates of Black men haven’t increased over the past decade. Yet over this period of time, the percentages of young Black women identifying as bisexual have grown substantially.

The challenge of surveying sexuality

Finding reliable ways of measuring sexual identity on surveys is more difficult than you might think, and the trend could have been spurred by something as simple as the way the question is phrased in the General Social Survey:

“Which of the following best describes you?”

  • gay, lesbian or homosexual
  • bisexual
  • heterosexual or straight
  • don’t know

Of the roughly 1,400 people who responded to this question on the 2018 GSS survey, only six responded “don’t know.” Another 27 didn’t respond at all.

But everyone else selected one of those three options.

Perhaps some respondents didn’t want to neatly tie themselves to the category of “gay” or “straight.” If this is the case, “bisexual” almost becomes a default fallback.

Either way, one thing seems clear: Young people – especially young Black women – are more willing to explore their sexuality. And the ways they are sexually identifying themselves on surveys is only one indicator of this change.

Complete Article HERE!

Is there such a thing as ‘normal’ libido for women?

Drug companies say they can “fix” low sex drive in women.

By Caroline Zielinski

Ever wished you could reciprocate your partner’s hopeful gaze in the evening instead of losing your desire under layers of anxiety and to-do lists? Or to enthusiastically agree with your friends when they talk about how great it is to have sex six times a week?

Perhaps you just need to find that “switch” that will turn your desire on – big pharma has been trying for years to medicalise women’s sex drive, and to “solve” low libido.

One US company has just released a self-administered injection that promises to stimulate desire 45 minutes after use.

In late June, the US Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) approved Vyleesi (known scientifically as bremelanotide), the second drug of its kind targeting hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD), a medical condition characterised by ongoing low sexual desire.

Vyleesi will soon be available on the market, and women will now have two drugs to choose from, the other being flibanserin (sold under the name Addyi), which comes in pill form.

Many experts are sceptical of medication being marketed as treatment for HSDD and the constructs underpinning research into the condition.

Yet many experts are highly sceptical of medication being marketed as treatment for HSDD, and also of the scientific constructs underpinning the research into the condition.

What is female hypo-active sexual desire disorder?

Hypo-active sexual desire disorder (or HSDD) was listed in the DSM-4, and relates to persistently deficient (or absent) sexual fantasies and desire for sexual activity, which causes marked distress and relationship problems.

“The problem is, it is very hard to describe what this medical condition actually is, because its construction is too entangled with the marketing of the drugs to treat it,” says Bond University academic Dr Ray Moynihan, a former investigate journalist, now researcher.

His 2003 paper, and book, The making of a disease: female sexual dysfunction,  evaluates the methods used by pharmaceutical companies in the US to pathologise sexuality in women, focussing on the marketing campaign of Sprout Pharmaceuticals’ drug flibanserin, an antidepressant eventually approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a treatment for women experiencing sexual difficulties.

“This campaign, called Even the Score, was happening in real time as I was working as an investigative journalist and author.

“I got to see and document the way in which the very science underpinning this construct called FSD – or a disorder of low desire – was being constructed with money from the companies which would directly benefit from those constructs.”

The campaign was heavily criticised, mainly for co-opting  language of rights, choice and sex equality to pressure the FDA to approve a controversial female “Viagra” drug.

During his research, Dr Moynihan says he found “blatant connections between the researchers who were constructing the science, and the companies who would benefit from this science”.

“The basic structures of the science surrounding this condition were being funded by industry,” he says.

What does the science say?

The biological causes of the condition have been widely researched. A quick search comes up with more than 13,000 results for HSDD, and a whooping 700,000 for what the condition used to be called (female sexual dysfunction).

Some of these studies show that women with the condition experience changes in brain activity that are independent of lifestyle factors, and other research has found that oestrogen-only therapies can increase sexual desire in postmenopausal women.

Others look into the effectiveness of a testosterone patch increasing sexual activity and desire in surgically menopausal women. Most say there is little substantive research in the field, and even less conclusive evidence.

“Oh, there are … studies galore, but mostly they are done by the industry or industry supporters – that’s one problem,” says Leonore Tiefer, US author, researcher and educator who has written widely about the medicalisation of men’s and women’s sexuality.

“There is no such thing as ‘normal’ sexual function in women,” says Jayne Lucke, Professor at the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society at La Trobe University.

“Sexual function and desire changes across the lifespan, and is influenced by factors such as different partners, life experiences, having children, going through menopause.”

Using the word ‘normal’ is very powerful, because it puts pressure on women about our idea of what is a ‘normal’ woman’.
Professor Jayne Lucke

Professor Lucke has studied women’s health and public health policy for years, and believes our need to understand female sexuality and its triggers has created a rush to medicalise a condition which may not even exist.

“Using the word ‘normal’ is very powerful, because it puts pressure on women about our idea of what is a ‘normal’ woman’,” she says.

The studies submitted by AMAG (Vyleesi) and flibanserin (Sprout Pharmaceuticals) for approval from FSD have been criticised for their connection to industry, as well as the small differences between the drugs effects and those of the placebo.

For example, Vyleesi was found to increase desire marginally (scoring 1.2 on a range out of 6) in only a quarter of women, compared to 17 per cent of those taking a placebo. A review of flibanserin studies, including five published and three unpublished randomised clinical trials involving 5,914 women concluded the overall quality of the evidence for both efficacy and safety outcomes was very low.

Side effects were also an issue with both medications.

Flibanserin never sold well, partly due to problems with its manufacturer and partly due to its use terms: that women would have to take it daily and avoid alcohol to experience a marginal increase in their sexual experiences.

“I’m just unsure of the mechanism of action with these drugs – they seem to be using the model of male sexual desire as a baseline,” Professor Lucke says.

“In the heterosexual male model of sexuality, the man has the erection, then there is penetration, hopefully an orgasm for both: that’s the model this is targeting”.

That said, it doesn’t mean that women don’t suffer from authentic sexual difficulties – the preferred term by many physicians, including the head of Sexual Medicine and Therapy Clinic at Monash Health and a sex counsellor at The Royal Women’s Hospital, Dr Anita Elias.

“I don’t use terms like ‘dysfunction’, or worry about the DSM’s classification system,” she says.

“Clinically, I wouldn’t waste too much time reading the DSM: we’re dealing with a person, not a classification.”

She says she prefers to talk about “sexual difficulties” rather than sexual “dysfunction” because often a sexual problem or difficulty is not a dysfunction, but just a symptom of what is going on in a woman’s life (involving her physical and emotional health, relationship or circumstances, or in her beliefs or expectations around sex).

She prefers ‘sexual difficulties’ rather than ‘dysfunction’ because often … (it) is a symptom of what is going on in a woman’s life.

“It’s the reason you don’t feel like having sex that needs to be addressed rather than just taking medication,” she says.

Dr Elias believes silence and shame that surrounds the topic of female sexuality is impacting how these conditions are being dealt with at a medical and societal level.

“Sexual pain and issues just don’t get talked about: if you had back pain, you’d be telling everyone –but anything to do with sex and women is still taboo”.

Dr Amy Moten, a GP based in South Australia who specialises in sexual health, says sexual difficulties are not covered well enough during medical training.

“While training will include a component of women’s sexual health, this tends to refer to gynaecological conditions (such as STIs) rather than sexual function and wellbeing.”

She says many GPs won’t think to ask a woman about sexual issues unless it’s part of a cervical screen or conversation about contraception, and that many women are reluctant to have such an intimate conversation unless they trust their GP.

“We need to think more about how to have these conversations in the future, as we’re living at a time of general increased anxiety, a lot of which can relate to sexual health.”

As for medication? It may be available in the US, but the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) has confirmed no drug under that name has been approved for registration in Australia – yet.

Complete Article HERE!

Recent study suggests sex could slow Parkinson’s disease

That’s one factor identified in a large-scale study of early stage Parkinson’s patients

by

There’s still no known cure for Parkinson’s disease, but a recent study gives some hope that it can be at least slowed down. 

The treatment? Sexual activity.

The study, published by the European Journal of Neurology and conducted by a British and Italian research team over 24 months, examined the relationship between an active sexual life and the progression of early-stage PD.

Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative disorder that affects dopamine-producing neurons in the brain, causing a range of debilitating physical symptoms over time including tremors, loss of balance and motor skills, and rigidity.

Causes remain a mystery, and PD is expected to affect 1 million Americans by the year 2020, making the results of this study a welcome bit of positive news.

The study involved a subgroup of patients involved in the PRIAMO study, a large Italian multicenter observational study designed to assess the prevalence and evolution of non-motor skills (NMS) in patients affected by PD.  

The average age of the participants was 57,  and all were considered to be in the “early stages” of PD progression.  They were tested for baseline motor skills, underwent a mental-health screening, and completed an extensive health interview during which they were asked a range of questions related to overall health.

Patients were also asked if they had sex and/or sexual dysfunction during the past year. Male respondents were twice as likely to be sexually active as the women in the study, but nearly half of the male respondents also complained of problems with erectile dysfunction. 

According to researchers, sexual activity did drop off for many subjects during the following two years of the study, but they concluded that men who engaged in sexual activity displayed less severe motor disability and a better overall quality of life than those who did not.

Women, however, did not share in those results.

No clear reason is certain, although the study skewed heavily male (238 men versus 117 women) and PD symptoms can be different for men and women. Women also may not have felt as comfortable answering questions about their sexual activity and habits.

In addition, certain medications PD patients take to activate dopamine receptors in the brain can increase movement. These may account for the increased quality of life described in the study.

Still, doctors and patients alike should be encouraged by the findings, and hopefully this is a step in the right direction of Parkinson’s knowledge and treatment.

Complete Article HERE!

Healthy Sex On A Regular Basis Means A Healthy Brain

By

Healthy sex is something we should all aspire to achieve, regularly. It might make you laugh, but, it will seriously boost your brain health. Maybe you thought that your most important sex organ was the one between your legs. Realistically speaking, it’s your brain. Think about it, your brain controls every small or big thing you do. Therefore, it’s just as crucial to your sex life as the other parts.

Studies show that your brain releases chemicals, which control your libido, arousal, and sexual performance. And ultimately, it controls your body’s movements and responses too.

It doesn’t surprise me at all that a healthy brain means a happier sex life. However, most people don’t seem to value the relationship between sex and the brain. There is a very strong reciprocal process between the two. And having sex often helps keep your brain young, sharp, and happy.

Healthy Sex For Your Brain

I mean it’s a win-win. It is not like sex is a mission for you to do. Healthy sex is something that everybody should enjoy on a regular basis. Add not just because it’s fun, but because it’s really beneficial to your overall health too.

Build A Stronger Brain

There’s research that says regular sexual activity increases neurogenesis. This is the growth of new neurons in the brain which improves cognitive function in multiple areas. In addition, experts have found that sexual experience also promotes cell growth in the brain’s hippocampus, which is essential to memory.

Instant High

There is a great amount of pleasure that you experience when having sex. This is largely due to dopamine, which is a chemical messenger in the brain and is in charge of many functions. The hormone is involved in reward, motivation, memory, attention, and regulating body movements.

Therefore, when dopamine releases into the body, it creates feelings of pleasure and reward. That’s why you feel naturally driven to repeat the same activity.

A Natural Anti-Depressant

When having healthy sex, your brain produces natural chemicals and hormones that allow you to feel satisfied and relaxed. These include oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin. All three of these happy hormones are released during an orgasm. Serotonin is the main hormone responsible for mood.

Other research has discovered that women who had sex without a condom had fewer depressive symptoms than women who used a condom. This research took a guess and presumed that unique compounds in semen, including estrogen and prostaglandin, have antidepressant properties. These are then absorbed into a woman’s body after sex.

Therefore, if you’re in a committed relationship, this could do wonders to your quality of life!

Less Forgetfulness

Struggling to remember normal things in your daily grind can be frustrating. It happens to the best of us though! It could be because of something else though. How’s your sex life going? Is it healthy?

Apparently, a healthy sex life improves your memory significantly.

Like I said, sex increases cell growth in the hippocampus. The hippocampus is a brain region vital to long-term memory. Other experiments have found that engaging in regular sexual activities grows more neurons in the hippocampus. These studies were conducted on rodents, however, there is no evidence proving that the effects are the same in humans.

But I guess you can let a healthy sex life speak for itself…

No More Stress

Sex is the ideal way to release tension. It’s been proven to be a natural relaxant.

Science suggests sex can improve your mood and decrease anxiety by reducing stress signals in the brain and lowering blood pressure. These connections in the brain and the body all work in tandem. Sexual interaction and physical affection improve mood and reduce stress. Likewise, improving your mood and reducing stress increases the likelihood of future sex and physical affection in a relationship.

It’s a continuous cycle and if you get it right you will be happy and healthy forever.

Better Sleep

Who struggles to fall asleep at night? It happens to the best of us. Luckily a healthy sex life can help that! And at the same time, more sleep helps boost your sex drive. So it’s another win/win. The sleepy effect is due to the hormones mentioned earlier. Moreover, having an orgasm releases another hormone, prolactin, which makes you relaxed and sleepy.

The time between the sheets is also more likely to induce sleep in men than women because the prefrontal cortex of a man’s brain slows down after ejaculation. Studies say that when combined with the hormone surges, this can result in the well-known ‘rolling over and falling asleep’ behavior.

Hey, Smarty Pants!

Yup, sex makes you smarter.

Apparently, people who have frequent, regular sexual activity score higher in many different mental tests. Studies say they’re more fluent in speaking, their visual perception improves, and they can judge the space between objects better. Then in other studies, frequent sexual activity has been linked to better sustained cognitive abilities in older adults.

All the processes in your body are closely connected. And sex is a massive part of it! Everything that affects your brain affects your sex life, both positive and negative. Depression, anxiety, ADHD, PMS, substance abuse, and personality disorders all impact sex.

That’s why you should never pit your mental health at the bottom of your list of priorities. It must be number one. Mental health issues can make having healthy sexual relationships very difficult. Your emotions and sex life are both directly connected to your brain. Managing stress, finding life balance, and healthy lifestyle habits will improve your sex life. We can’t deny that a healthy brain and your sex life are closely connected. They both help each other. However, having a healthy sex life will lead you to a stronger brain.

And a strong brain means a strong and happy sex life!

Complete Article HERE!

What Our Skeletons Say About the Sex Binary

Society increasingly accepts gender identity as existing along a spectrum. The study of people, and their remains, shows that sex should be viewed the same way.

Stanislawa Walasiewicz won the gold for Poland in the women’s 100-meter dash at the 1932 Olympic Games. Upon her death, an autopsy revealed that she had intersex traits.

By

She wasn’t especially tall. Her testosterone levels weren’t unusually high for a woman. She was externally entirely female. But in the mid-1980s, when her chromosome results came back as XY instead of the “normal” XX for a woman, the Spanish national team ousted hurdler María José Martínez-Patiño. She was ejected from the Olympic residence and deserted by her teammates, friends, and boyfriend. She lost her records and medals because of a genetic mutation that wasn’t proven to give her any competitive advantage.

People like Martínez-Patiño have been ill-served by rules that draw a hard line between the sexes. In the U.S., the Trump administration looks set to make things worse. According to a memo leaked to The New York Times in October, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is trying to set up a legal binary definition of sex, establishing each person “as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth.” But our bodies are more complicated than that.

An increasing recognition of this complexity by researchers and the public has affirmed that gender sits on a spectrum: People are more and more willing to acknowledge the reality of nonbinary and transgender identities, and to support those who courageously fight for their rights in everything from all-gender bathrooms to anti-gender-discrimination laws. But underlying all of this is the perception that no matter the gender a person identifies as, they have an underlying sex they were born with. This represents a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of biological sex. Science keeps showing us that sex also doesn’t fit in a binary, whether it be determined by genitals, chromosomes, hormones, or bones (which are the subject of my research).

The perception of a hard-and-fast separation between the sexes started to disintegrate during the second wave of feminism in the 1970s and 1980s. In the decades that followed, we learned that about 1.7 percent of babies are born with intersex traits; that behavior, body shape, and size overlap significantly between the sexes, and both men and women have the same circulating hormones; and that there is nothing inherently female about the X chromosome. Biological realities are complicated. People living their lives as women can be found, even late in life, to be XXY or XY.

Skeletal studies, the field that I work in as a doctoral student in anthropology, and the history of this field show how our society’s assumptions about sex can lead to profound mistakes, and how acknowledging that things are not really as binary as they may seem can help to resolve those errors. Trump and his advisers should take note.

If you’ve ever watched the TV series Bones, you’ve heard Temperance “Bones” Brennan, the show’s protagonist and star forensic anthropologist, call out to her colleagues whether the skeleton she’s analyzing is male or female. That’s because sex distinctions are very helpful to know for missing persons and archaeological sites alike. But just how easy is it to make this determination?

In the early 1900s, the U.S.-based anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička helped to found the modern study of human bones. He served as the first curator of physical anthropology at the U.S. National Museum (now the Smithsonian Institution). The skeletons Hrdlička studied were categorized as either male or female, seemingly without exception. He was not the only one who thought sex fell into two distinct categories that did not overlap. Scientists Fred P. Thieme and William J. Schull of the University of Michigan wrote about sexing a skeleton in 1957: “Sex, unlike most phenotypic features in which man varies, is not continuously variable but is expressed in a clear bimodal distribution.” Identifying the sex of a skeleton relies most heavily on the pelvis (for example, females more often have a distinctive bony groove), but it also depends on the general assumption that larger or more marked traits are male, including larger skulls and sizable rough places where muscle attaches to bone. This idea of a distinct binary system for skeletal sex pervaded—and warped—the historical records for decades.

Two pelvises with drastically exaggerated differences—a man’s shown on the left and a woman’s on the right (identified in Lithuanian)—illustrate how sex was estimated skeletally in the early 1900s

In 1972, Kenneth Weiss, now a professor emeritus of anthropology and genetics at Pennsylvania State University, noticed that there were about 12 percent more male skeletons than females reported at archaeological sites. This seemed odd, since the proportion of men to women should have been about half and half. The reason for the bias, Weiss concluded, was an “irresistible temptation in many cases to call doubtful specimens male.” For example, a particularly tall, narrow-hipped woman might be mistakenly cataloged as a man. After Weiss published about this male bias, research practices began to change. In 1993, 21 years later, the aptly named Karen Bone, then a master’s student at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, examined a more recent dataset and found that the bias had declined: The ratio of male to female skeletons had balanced out. In part that might be because of better, more accurate ways of sexing skeletons. But also, when I went back through the papers Bone cited, I noticed there were more individuals categorized as “indeterminate” after 1972 and basically none prior.

Allowing skeletons to remain unsexed, or “indeterminate,” reflects an acceptance of the variability and overlap between the sexes. It does not necessarily mean that the skeletons classified this way are, in fact, neither male nor female, but it does mean that there is no clear or easy way to tell the difference. As science and social change in the 1970s and 1980s revealed that sex is complicated, the category of “indeterminate sex” individuals in skeletal research became more common and improved scientific accuracy.

For generations, the false perception that there are two distinct biological sexes has had many negative indirect effects. It has muddied historical archaeological records, and it has caused humiliation for athletes around the globe who are closely scrutinized. In the mid-1940s, female Olympic athletes went through a degrading process of having their genitals inspected to receive “femininity certificates.” This was replaced by chromosome testing in the late 1960s and subsequently, hormone testing. But instead of rooting out imposters, these tests just illustrated the complexity of human sex.

It might be more convenient for the U.S. federal government to have a binary system for determining legal sex; many U.S. laws and customs are built on this assumption. But just because it’s a convenient system of classification doesn’t mean it’s right. Some countries, such as Canada, and some states in the U.S., including Oregon, now allow people to declare a nonbinary gender identity on their driver’s license or other identification documents. In a world where it is apparently debatable whether anti-discrimination laws apply to sex or gender, it is a step in the wrong direction to be writing either one into law as a strictly binary phenomenon.

The famous cases of strong, athletic, and audacious female athletes who have had their careers derailed by the Olympic “gender tests” exemplify how misguided it is to classify sex or gender as binary. These women are, like all of us, part of a sex spectrum, not a sex binary. The more we as a society recognize that, the less we will humiliate and unnecessarily scrutinize people—and the less discriminatory our world will be.

Complete Article HERE!

How genes and evolution shape gender – and transgender – identity

There are many genes involved in shaping not just our biological sex, but also our gender identity.

By

Mismatch between biological sex and gender identity, culminating in its severest form as gender dysphoria, has been ascribed to mental disease, family dysfunction and childhood trauma.

But accumulating evidence now implies biological factors in establishing gender identity, and a role for particular genes.

Variants – subtly different versions – of genes linked with gender identity might simply be part of a spectrum of gender and sexuality maintained throughout human history.

Transgender and gender dysphoria

Some young boys show an early preference for dressing and behaving as girls; some young girls are convinced they should be boys.

This apparent mismatch of biological sex and gender identity can lead to severe gender dysphoria. Coupled with school bullying and family rejection, it can make lives a torment for young people, and the rate of suicide is frighteningly high.

As they move into adulthood, nearly half of these children (or even more when the studies are closely interrogated), continue to feel strongly that they were born in the wrong body. Many seek treatment – hormones and surgery – to transition into the sex with which they identify.

Although male to female (MtF) and female to male (FtM) transitions are now much more available and accepted, the road to transition is still fraught with uncertainty and opprobrium.

Transwomen (born male) and transmen (born female) have been a part of society in every culture at every time. Their frequency and visibility is a function of societal mores, and in most societies they have suffered discrimination or worse.

This discrimination stems from a persistent attitude that transgender identification is an aberration of normal sexual development, perhaps exacerbated by events such as trauma or illness.

However, over the last decades, growing recognition emerged that transgender feelings start very early and are very consistent – pointing to a biological basis.

This led to many searches for biological signatures of transsexualism, including reports of differences in sex hormones and claims of brain differences.

Sex genes and transgender

In the 1980s I was swayed by the passionate advocacy of Herbert Bower, a psychiatrist who worked with transsexuals in Melbourne. He was revered in the transgender community for his willingness to authorise sex change operations, which were highly controversial at the time. Aged in his 90s, he came to my laboratory in 1988 to explore the possibility that variation in the genes that determine sex could underlie transgender.

Dr Bower wondered if the gene that controls male development might work differently in transgender boys. This gene (called SRY, and which is found on the Y chromosome) triggers the formation of a testis in the embryo; the testis makes hormones and the hormones make the baby male.

There are, indeed, variants of the SRY gene. Some don’t work at all, and babies who have a Y chromosome but a mutant SRY are born female. However, they are not disproportionately transgender. Nor are the many people born with variants of other genes in the sex determining pathway.

After many discussions, Dr Bower agreed that the sex determining gene was probably not directly involved – but the idea of genes affecting sexual identity took root. So are there separate genes that affect gender identity?

Evidence for gene variants in transgender

The search for gene variants that underlie any trait usually starts with twin studies.

There are reports that identical twins are much more likely to be concordant (that is both transgender, or both cisgender) than fraternal twins or siblings. This is probably an underestimation given that one twin may not wish to come out as trans, thus underestimating the concordance. This suggests a substantial genetic component.

More recently, particular genes have been studied in detail in transwomen and transmen. One study looked at associations between being trans and particular variants of some genes in the hormone pathway.

Studies of twins help us learn about the genes involved in determining identity.

A recent and much larger study assembled samples from 380 transwomen who had, or planned, sex change operations. They looked in fine detail at 12 of the “usual suspects” – genes involved in hormone pathways. They found that transwomen had a high frequency of particular DNA variants of four genes that would alter sex hormone signalling while they had been developing in utero.

There may be many other genes that contribute to a feminine or a masculine sexual identity. They are not necessarily all concerned with sex hormone signalling – some may affect brain function and behaviour.

The next step in exploring this further would be to compare whole genome sequences of cis- and transsexual people. Whole genome epigenetic analyses, looking at the molecules that affect how genes function in the body, might also pick up differences in the action of genes.

It’s probable that many – maybe hundreds – of genes work together to produce a great range of sexual identities.

How would “sexual identity genes” work in transgender?

Sexual identity genes don’t have to be on sex chromosomes. So they will not necessarily be “in sync” with having a Y chromosome and an SRY gene. This is in line with observations that gender identity is separable from biological sex.

This means that among both sexes we would expect a spread of more feminine and more masculine identity. That is to say, in the general population of males you would expect to see a range of identities from strongly masculine to more feminine. And among females in the population you would see a range from strongly feminine to more masculine identities. This would be expected to produce transwomen at one end of the distribution, and transmen at the other.

There is a natural range in masculine and feminine identity.

This occurrence of a range of differing identities would be comparable with a trait such as height. Although men are about 14 cm taller than women on average, it’s perfectly normal to see short men and tall women. It’s just part of the normal distribution of a certain human characteristic expressed differently in men and women.

This argument is similar to that which I previously described for so-called “gay genes”. I suggested same–sex attraction can readily be explained by many “male-loving” and “female-loving” variants of mate choice genes that are inherited independently of sex.

Why is transgender so frequent then?

Transgender is not rare (MtF of 1/200, FtM of 1/400). If gender identity is strongly influenced by genes, this leads to questions about why it is maintained in the population if transmen and transwomen have fewer children.

I suggest genes that influence sexual identity are positively selected in the other sex. Feminine women and masculine men may partner earlier and have more kids, to whom they pass on their gender identity gene variants. Looking at whether the female relatives of transwomen, and the male relatives of transmen, have more children than average, would test this hypothesis.

I made much the same argument to explain why homosexuality is so common, although gay men have fewer children than average. I suggested gay men share their “male loving” gene variants with their female relatives, who mate earlier and pass this gene variant on to more children. And it turns out that the female relatives of gay men do have more children.

These variants of sexual identity and behaviour may therefore be considered examples of what we call “sexual antagonism”, in which a gene variant has different selective values in men and women. It makes for the amazing variety of human sexual behaviours that we are beginning to recognise.

Complete Article HERE!

If You’re Sexually Woke, Then Let Straight Men Experiment Freely

“Through [gay] experiences, I found out that I am completely straight. I won’t go back.”

by

When a woman mentions she’s had an “experimental phase,” it’s often shrugged off as a shared experience. But when men share this same information, the results are often more extreme: They’re teased, labeled gay, or their masculinity is questioned; a Glamour survey even found that 63% of women wouldn’t date a man who had sex with another man. This is an extension of the idea that female homosexuality and sexual fluidity are more socially accepted.

All of this information is nothing new. What’s less known, however, is exactly how interested men are in sex with other men: Are straight men just as curious as women, but shame is suppressing their desire, or are women indeed the more sexually fluid gender?

 

“I know of no evidence that shows that men are less likely than women to have an ‘experimental phase,’” Ritch C. Savin-Williams, Ph.D., and author of Mostly Straight: Sexual Fluidity Among Men tells NewNowNext. “I do believe men are less likely to report it to researchers, on surveys, or to their friends and families due, in part, to the ‘homohysteria’ that pervades our culture.”

As result of his research, Savin-Williams believes men are just as curious in same-sex dalliances as women, and argues if men were “allowed” to engage in such behavior, more would. “I do believe there is a subset of straight men who are fascinated by penises and they might well have sex with a man for that reason.”

 

When a woman mentions she’s had an “experimental phase,” it’s often shrugged off as a shared experience. But when men share this same information, the results are often more extreme: They’re teased, labeled gay, or their masculinity is questioned; a Glamour survey even found that 63% of women wouldn’t date a man who had sex with another man. This is an extension of the idea that female homosexuality and sexual fluidity are more socially accepted.

All of this information is nothing new. What’s less known, however, is exactly how interested men are in sex with other men: Are straight men just as curious as women, but shame is suppressing their desire, or are women indeed the more sexually fluid gender?

 

“I know of no evidence that shows that men are less likely than women to have an ‘experimental phase,’” Ritch C. Savin-Williams, Ph.D., and author of Mostly Straight: Sexual Fluidity Among Men tells NewNowNext. “I do believe men are less likely to report it to researchers, on surveys, or to their friends and families due, in part, to the ‘homohysteria’ that pervades our culture.”

As result of his research, Savin-Williams believes men are just as curious in same-sex dalliances as women, and argues if men were “allowed” to engage in such behavior, more would. “I do believe there is a subset of straight men who are fascinated by penises and they might well have sex with a man for that reason.”

Getty

This last point is one of many uncovered in a 2017 study. Researchers from Northwestern University conducted 100 interviews with men who identified as straight, but sought casual sex with men online. After analyzing the results, the study concluded that these men are indeed primarily attracted to women, with no sexual attraction to men—despite the desire to have sex with men.

Confused? The result relies on semantics. To researchers, “sexual attraction” must include both “physical” and “emotional” attraction. So while these men have a sexual attraction (a combination of both emotional and physical attraction) toward women, it is often only a physical attraction when it comes to men. Some said they aren’t drawn toward male bodies as much as they are female, and others observe they’re only interested in penises. Some will even limit what they’re willing to do with men to convince themselves that their sexual interest in women is stronger than their attraction toward men.

“I know what I like. I like pussy,” Reggie, 28, shares in the survey. “I like women. The more the merrier. I would kiss a woman. I can barely hug a man. I do have a healthy sexual imagination and wonder about other things in the sexual realm I’ve never done. Sometimes I get naughty and explore. That’s how I see it.”

John, 43, is less lewd in his perspective. He tells NewNowNext that masturbating didn’t come naturally to him, so he had a friend show him how. After that inaugural moment, the rest was history. “I have had anal sex and oral sex with a few other guys as a young man, mostly out of sexual frustration but also experimenting. Ultimately, through these experiences, I found out that I am completely straight. I won’t go back.”

Based on the men he’s spoken with in his career, Eric Marlowe Garrison, certified sexuality expert and bestselling author, laments most straight men experiment as a top, mimicking cisgender, heterosexual intercourse. Some do bottom, of course. But that’s considered feminine and submissive.

Author Dan Savage wrote in The Stranger, “If a straight guy sucks one cock and gets caught—just that one cock, just that one time—no one will take him seriously when he says he’s straight.”

But what if it’s more than one cock? What if these straight-identifying men are having regular sex with men? Are they still considered straight or would their sexual preference veer into bisexual territory? What’s the barometer here? Better yet, does one even exist?

“I believe one can be male, straight, and have gay sex without changing either of the first two,” Savin-Williams says. “Of course, they might well be ‘mostly straight,’ a spot on the sexual continuum next to totally straight. Thus, gay sex might not be experimental but an expression of their slight degree of same-sex sexuality.”

Garrison agrees, suggesting that straight men who experiment shouldn’t be scrutinized any more than “a vegan whom you catch eating chicken.”

Same-sex experimentation, though often discouraged, is well documented throughout male history. Think fraternity and military hazing rituals, online personal ads, and straight men frequenting public restrooms for gay sexual encounters pre-Grindr. With such a complicated and discreet history, can straight guys ever experiment without reprimand? Sexuality isn’t black and white‚ it exists on a spectrum. Sexologist Alfred Kinsey published this discovery back in 1948. A lesbian can mess around with a guy every now and then and still identify as gay, just like a heterosexual man can hook up with a man and still identify as straight.

Fortunately, it appears that with each passing generation people’s understanding of sexuality is expanding inch by inch. Savin-Williams and Garrison believe today’s youth are more likely to report that they have engaged in same-sex dalliances, given the more positive attitudes toward same-sex behavior.

In addition to these expert perspectives, a study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior previously analyzed same-sex experiences between 1990 and 2014 and found not one but two encouraging results. First, it revealed that people’s acceptance of same-sex relationships had quadrupled in the timespan; and second, that same-sex activity had nearly doubled for men and women. The final survey in the study documented that 7.5% of men aged between 18 to 29 reported a gay sexual experience and 12.2% of women in the same age bracket reported a lesbian experience.

Sexual experimentation is exploration at its core. And as progressive attitudes toward sexual fluidity emerge, men may become more comfortable openly exploring rather than remaining curious and, perhaps, adopting homophobic attitudes as a result of suppression. Whether they learn they like men or find out they’re more definitively attracted to women, with less social-cultural stigma, that information will be theirs to discover—not for others to judge.

Complete Article HERE!