Millionaire playboy and Instagram celebrity Dan Bilzerian is best known of late for chucking a 90-pound porn star, Janice Griffith, off his mansion roof during a shoot for Hustler, and missing the pool. Griffith is now threatening to sue Bilzerian:
Men want sex more than women do. (While I am sure that you can think of people who don’t fit this pattern, my colleagues and I have arrived at this conclusion after reviewing hundreds of findings. It is, on average, a very robust finding.) This difference is due in part to the fact that men, compared to women, focus on the rewards of sex. Women tend to focus on its costs because having sex presents them with bigger potential downsides, from physical (the toll of bearing a child) to social (stigma).
Accordingly, the average man’s sexual system gets activated fairly easily. When it does, it trips off a whole system in the brain focused on rewards. In fact, merely seeing a bra can propel men into reward mode, seeking immediate satisfaction in their decisions.
Most of the evidence suggests that women are different, that a sexy object would not cause them to shift into reward mode. This goes back to the notion that sex is rife with potential costs for women. Yet, at a basic biological level, the sexual system is directly tied to the reward system (through pleasure-giving dopaminergic reactions). This would seem to suggest a contrasting hypothesis that perhaps women will also shift into reward mode when their sexual system is activated. […] Women, more than men, connect sex to emotions. Festjens and colleagues therefore used a subtle, emotional cue to initiate sexual motivation – touch. Across three experiments, Festjens and colleagues found that women who touched sexy male clothing items, compared to nonsexual clothing items, showed evidence of being in reward mode.
{ Scientific American | Continue reading }
“If a stranger came up to a woman, grabbed her around the waist, and rubbed his groin against her in a university cafeteria or on a subway, she’d probably call the police. In the bar, the woman just tries to get away from him.”
[…]
“The current study was part of an evaluation of the Safer Bars program, a program we developed to reduce aggression in bars, primarily male-to-male aggression,” said Graham. “However, when we saw how much sexual aggression there was, we decided to conduct additional analyses. So these analyses of sexual aggression were in response to how much we observed – which was considerably more than we were expecting.”
photo { John Gutmann, Memory, 1939 }
In this study, we tested the hypothesis that a nonhuman sexual stimulus would elicit a genital response in women but not in men. Eighteen heterosexual women and 18 heterosexual men viewed seven sexual film stimuli, six human films and one nonhuman primate film, while measurements of genital and subjective sexual arousal were recorded. Women showed small increases in genital arousal to the nonhuman stimulus and large increases in genital arousal to both human male and female stimuli. Men did not show any genital arousal to the nonhuman stimulus and demonstrated a category-specific pattern of arousal to the human stimuli that corresponded to their stated sexual orientation.
In 1780, Immanuel Kant wrote that “sexual love makes of the loved person an Object of appetite.” And after that appetite is sated? The loved one, Kant explained, “is cast aside as one casts away a lemon which has been sucked dry.”
Many contemporary feminists agree that sexual desire, particularly when elicited by pornographic images, can lead to “objectification.” The objectifier (typically a man) thinks of the target of his desire (typically a woman) as a mere thing, lacking autonomy, individuality and subjective experience.
This idea has some laboratory support. Studies have found that viewing people’s bodies, as opposed to their faces, makes us judge those people as less intelligent, less ambitious, less competent and less likable. One neuroimaging experiment found that, for men, viewing pictures of sexualized women induced lowered activity in brain regions associated with thinking about other people’s minds.
Female sexual dysfunction is almost a non-experience, the opposite of an adventure that you have, then process, then write about.
{ Cris Mazza interviewed by Megan Milks | TNI | Continue reading }
art { Richard Phillips, Untitled (Smiley), 2000 }
related { Playboy erects huge neon bunny art installation near Marfa, Texas }
Okay, if you want to know…
Will my date have sex on the first date?
Ask…
Do you like the taste of beer?
Because…
Among all our casual topics, whether someone likes the taste of beer is the single best predictor of if he or she has sex on the first date. No matter their gender or orientation, beer-lovers are 60% more likely to be okay with sleeping with someone they’ve just met.
photo { Maurizio Di Iorio }
While the reasons for a male orgasm may appear to be a rather obvious incentive to mate and procreate, scientists have debated more on why a female organism exists. Many sex researchers have assumed that female orgasm rates correlated with fertility; the more she has, the more kids she’ll have. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that the orgasm induces physiological processes that stimulate pregnancy.
No such correlation exists, says new research.
related { Childbirth climax: The revealing of obstetrical orgasm }
For the first time, researchers have found that stress can leave an epigenetic mark on sperm, which then alters the offspring’s hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, a part of the brain that deals with responding to stress. […]
The experiment was conducted with preadolescent and adult male mice. […]
“These findings suggest one way in which paternal-stress exposure may be linked to such neuropsychiatric diseases.”
Theories about the evolution of human sexuality have spawned some intriguing ideas. One of the more peculiar ones is that oral sex has an evolutionary function, namely to detect recent infidelity by one’s partner. Cunnilingus for example, is supposed to allow a man to detect the presence of another man’s semen in or around the woman’s vagina. A recently published study aimed to test this theory and found that a man’s interest in performing cunnilingus was correlated with his partner’s attractiveness. The authors argued that more attractive women are more likely to be targeted by other men for mate poaching, and that partners of such women have more reason to be concerned about sperm competition, and therefore use oral sex to detect possible infidelity, albeit unconsciously.
related { Can you buy sperm donor identification? }
How do scientists measure the physiological aspects of sexual arousal in women? A 2009 paper by Woodard and Diamond reviewed 45 years of research using instruments that measure female sexual function. These devices include the vaginal photoplethysmograph, vaginal and labial thermistors, pressure/compliance balloons, clitoral electromyography, and the electrovaginogram.
The authors note that these physiological measures do not correlate very well with subjective ratings of sexual arousal. […]
Emotional Brain, a Dutch drug company […] developed an at-home testing environment, or ambulatory lab, to conduct studies of sexual function. […] The participants must be so much more comfortable watching hardcore porn and measuring their own vaginal pulse amplitude and clitoral blood volume in the privacy of their homes, without the prying eyes of hoards of scientists in white lab coats. […] “The results of this study support our hypothesis that in healthy controls, clitoral and subjective laboratory measures of sexual arousal show stronger increases to erotic stimuli in the home environment than in the environment of the institutional laboratory. This effect was apparent in response to hardcore stimuli, but not to erotic fantasy.”
People will lie about their sexual behavior to match cultural expectations about how men or women should act – even though they wouldn’t distort other gender-related behaviors, new research suggests. […] men wanted to be seen as “real men:” the kind who had many partners and a lot of sexual experience. Women, on the other hand, wanted to be seen as having less sexual experience than they actually had, to match what is expected of women.
photo { Annemarie Heinrich, Caprichos, 1936 }
Sexuality is seen as a crucial aspect of one’s identification and sexual desire is perceived as the core of one’s identity. Therefore, the emergence of an asexual identity constitutes a radical disruption of approaches to identity and epistemology in social science. This study explores a virtual community of asexual individuals who engage in discussions about contradictory processes of identification, the instability of sexual identities, gender relations and possi- ble representations of asexuality.
The average bicycle police officer spends 24 hours a week on his bicycle and previous studies have shown riding a bicycle with a traditional (nosed) saddle has been associated with urogenital paresthesia and sexual dysfunction. […]
The objective of this study was to assess the effectiveness of the no-nose bicycle saddle as an ergonomic intervention and their acceptance among male bicycle police officers. Bicycle police officers from five U.S. metropolitan areas were recruited for this study. […]
After 6 months, 90 men were reassessed. Only three men had returned to a traditional saddle.
{ International Society for Sexual Medicine | PDF | via Improbable }
images { 1. Charles Ray | 2. Dietmar Busse }
Every month, during each menstrual cycle, there is a very small window in which women can conceive. Most estimates are between five to six days, with the peak ovulatory window being a few hours at the end of the fertile window. The onset of a woman’s period is actually at the beginning of the ovulatory cycle, not the end. Though the exact length varies from woman to woman, the average menstrual cycle lasts about twenty-eight days. During the length of a woman’s overall cycle, she goes through three phases: menses, follicular, and luteal. Ovulation occurs between the follicular and luteal phases. The term “peak fertility” refers to a small window (usually thought to be anywhere between two to six days) when a woman’s conception rate goes up. Though technically every woman only ovulates one day a month, the chemistry of the vagina during this time facilitates sperm life (whereas in other phases, the chemistry produces a spermicidal effect). Sperm can actually retain the capacity to fertilize ova after five days at room temperature. However, unlike in many other species, human females are continuously proceptive and receptive to sex regardless of where they are in their monthly cycle.
Thus, Thornhill and Gangestad (2008) propose that women possess dual sexuality – estrous sexuality and extended sexuality – and that these two distinct forms of sexuality function during different periods of the menstrual cycle. Estrous sexuality (i.e., conceptive or reproductive sexuality) occurs within the fertile period of the menstrual cycle and female sexual preferences and motivations function to obtain “good genes” for offspring through mating with high-quality males. Extended sexuality (i.e., non- conceptive or non-reproductive sexuality), is complementary to estrous sexuality, functioning during unfertile periods to obtain non-genetic material benefits from mates in exchange for sexual access.
{ Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology | PDF }
All kinds of things go into a woman’s vagina. Some are friendly (like sperm and vaginal microbes), and some are very bad (STDs). The immune system in the vagina has to be able to tell the difference and react appropriately. As you can imagine, the system isn’t perfect and sometimes things go terribly wrong.
An article published earlier this month in the journal Frontiers in Immunology reviewed the current state of knowledge of the vaginal immune system. […]
if a woman should become pregnant, her immune system has to know that it can’t attack the growing fetus, even though it’s technically a foreign object. […] When sperm enter the vagina, it sets off a rapid response in the cervix called the leukocyte reaction. A whole slew of immune cells rushes to attack and kill the invading cells, also known to the future baby as ‘dad’. This might be partly why millions of sperm are needed in order for just one to fertilize an egg.
To determine whether “folk myths” regarding the relationships of penile size to body height and foot size have any basis in fact, 63 normally virilized men were studied. Height and stretched penile length were measured; shoe size was recorded and converted to foot length. Penile length was found to be statistically related to both body height and foot length, but with weak correlation coefficients. Height and foot size would not serve as practical estimators of penis length.
{ Annals of Sex Research, 1993 }
Gary and members of his law firm filed a lawsuit late Monday in federal court in Fort Pierce on behalf of Chubby Checker, the 71-year-old singer known for “The Twist,” against Hewlett-Packard and its subsidiary Palm Inc. over the use of Checker’s name on a software application that claims to estimate the size of a man’s penis based on his shoe size…
{ via Improbable | Continue reading }
photo { Leon Levinstein }
