Women with HIV, after years of isolation, coming out of shadows

By Erin Allday Anita Schools wakes at dawn most days, though she usually lazes in bed, watching videos on her phone, until she has to get up to take the HIV meds that keep her alive. The morning solitude ends abruptly when her granddaughter bursts in and they curl up, bonding over graham crackers. Schools, …

Why Straight Rural Men Have Gay ‘Bud-Sex’ With Each Other

  By Jesse Singal [A] lot of men have sex with other men but don’t identify as gay or bisexual. A subset of these men who have sex with men, or MSM, live lives that are, in all respects other than their occasional homosexual encounters, quite straight and traditionally masculine — they have wives and …

The Type Of Contraceptive You Use Could Influence Your Sexual Behavior

By Ben Taub [I]n the animal kingdom, sex serves a pretty straightforward purpose, allowing the birds and the bees to reproduce. Humans, however, have rather more complicated sex lives, and do the dirty for pleasure as well as procreation. According to new research from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the University of …

Experts: Sex and Porn Addiction Probably Aren’t Real Mental Disorders

By Jesse Singal< It isn’t just Anthony Weiner: There is a big, noisy conversation going on about sex and porn addiction, as a couple quick Google searches will readily reveal. Naturally, that conversation has brought with it a growing market for counselors and even clinics specifically oriented toward treating these problems. The problem is, many …

The Vulnerable Group Sex Ed Completely Ignores & Why That’s So Dangerous

By Hallie Levine [W]hen Katie, 36, was identified as having an intellectual disability as a young child after scoring below 70 on an IQ test, her parents were told that she would never learn to read and would spend her days in a sheltered workshop. Today she is a single mum to an 8-year-old son, …

Hard times – the ups and downs of the penis

Penises can be problematic. They are powerful, untameable beasts, capable of wielding immense pleasure but also able to cause devastating emotional wounds. And that’s just anal sex by Liam Murphy As well as the obvious physical harm that can be inflicted – skinny jeans have cursed a generation to suffer cock-caught-in-fly related trauma – the magnificent …

How do women really know if they are having an orgasm?

Dr Nicole Prause is challenging bias against sexual research to unravel apparent discrepancies between physical signs and what women said they experienced By Olivia Solon In the nascent field of orgasm research, much of the data relies on subjects self-reporting, and in men, there’s some pretty clear physiological feedback in the form of ejaculation. But …

Vaginismus: solutions to a painful sexual taboo

Many women use terms such as ‘failure’ or ‘freak’ to describe themselves By Teresa Bergin [V]aginismus is a very common but rarely discussed problem. Most women I see with this difficulty will not have discussed it with anyone else, not even female members of their own family or girlfriends. The silence that surrounds the issue …