Lately I’ve been really enjoying me some Emily Nagosky :: Sex Nerd. She’s a Massachusetts college health educator. Which means that, like a lot of other campus health educators and healthcare providers, she gets a lot of… inspiration for blog posts. And since she h got a PhD in Health Behavior with a concentration in human sexuality as well as an MS in counseling psychology and a BA in psychology with minors in philosophy and cognitive science she’s decidedly got the qualifications to call herself a sex nerd.

For instance, in addition to posting amazingly practical advice about the mechanics of (enjoyable) anal penetration if you’re not sure or managing differences in arousal cycles for heterosexuals she also comes up with cool, deep, and seriously informed speculation about sex in the context of a Nobel Prize winner’s distinction between the experience versus the memory. Check this out.

Nobel prize winner and psychologist extraordinaire Daniel Kahmeman talks about the distinction between the experiencing self versus the remembering self in the context of happiness – happy in your life (experience) versus happy about your life (remembering).

Of course I’m a sexuality person so I wonder how this relates to sexuality. Given the importance of self-reported “distress” in the diagnosis of sexual dysfunction (PDF of paper by Cynthia Graham, my clinical supervisor in grad school and one of my heroes), it’s likely that a difference between the experience and the memory would have significance for the assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of sexual dysfunction (and indeed for the social construction of sexuality).

But I think it also has rather more playful implications. Allow me to speculate wildly for just a moment…

She said it here.

By which I mean no, really, check it out. Even better, rather than let what starts out as speculation turn into conclusions, she ends her post with a call for scientists to go get her some answers.

One fly in the ointment would be the conventional tendency to assume that men and women start out different and try to understand the differences, instead of (my preferred method) assume we start out the same and try to understand the differences. (The latter really isn’t that far from the former but I strongly believe it makes harder to miss the obvious.) But then if both of us agreed about everything one of us would be redundant. :-)

Definitely worth bookmarking.