Seven factors that influence sexual consent

By Valeria Escobar Through over 150 interviews spanning five years, two Columbia researchers have tried to “pull back the curtain” on the sex lives of Columbia undergraduates. As concerns around sexual assault have become a central part of the undergraduate student experience, during which as many as one in three women and almost one in …

The Nuanced Push for American Sex Education

By Rachel Janfaza According to the Sexuality and Information Council of the United States, only 38 percent of high schools and 14 percent of middle schools across the country teach all 19 topics identified as critical for sex education by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Despite research demonstrating the health benefits of comprehensive …

Real Orgasms And Transcendent Pleasure:

How Women Are Reigniting Desire By Malaka Gharib How can more women allow themselves to experience sexual pleasure? That’s one of the central questions in The Pleasure Gap: American Women and the Unfinished Sexual Revolution, a book published this month by public health researcher and journalist Katherine Rowland. Rowland explores why American women aren’t happy …

Number Of Teens Coming Out Doubles, But Suicide Attempts Still Troublingly High

by John Anderer As recently as 10 years ago, the idea of coming out and being accepted as homosexual or bisexual felt unthinkable for countless LGBQ teens. Society has seen significant progression in recent years, though, and a new study finds that the number of U.S. teens openly identifying themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or …

What I learned talking to 120 women about their sex lives and desires

By Katherine Rowland Male desire is a familiar story. We scarcely bat an eyelash at its power or insistence. But women’s desires – the way they can morph, grow or even disappear – elicit fascination, doubt and panic. In 2014, as experts weighed the moral and medical implications of the first female libido drug, I …

To stop sexual and domestic violence, start in the classroom

By Ben Santos and David Martin As two prosecutors with decades of experience helping survivors of domestic and sexual violence in King County, we spend all day, every day responding to cases involving abuse. Over the last year, almost 5,000 survivors of sexual violence and their families sought help from the King County Sexual Assault …

Homosexuality may have evolved for social, not sexual reasons

By Andrew Barron How did homosexuality in humans evolve? Typically, this question is posed as a paradox. The argument is this: gay sex alone can’t produce children, and for traits to evolve, they have to be passed onto children, who get some form of competitive advantage from them. From this perspective, some argue homosexuality should …

There’s a new sexual orientation category called heteroflexible.

And it brings health issues that need to be addressed. By Darcel Rockett Labels, categorization, boxes. There are some, if not many, who don’t want any part of identifying themselves by others’ characterizations. But, according to Nicole Legate, an assistant professor of psychology at the Illinois Institute of Technology, some categorization is vital when it …