Photo by Flickr user avlxyz. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Speaking of (mostly-male) researcher's obsessive fixation on "female sexuality" and (almost complete) neglect of men's sexuality, Dr. Petra Boynton brings it home with the following thought experiment. She's talking about yet another case of "does she or doesn't she" research on, what else, whether women have "g-spots."

[C]onsider how this scenario would look if it were penises under the microscope. While there are undoubtedly distressing issues facing men around penis size and stamina the stereotype for men is they all experience pleasure from their dicks. If you talk to men you discover some get intense pleasure from testicle stimulation and are unable to orgasm without this. Some hate their balls touched. Some get a lot of pleasure if attention is paid to the shaft of the penis. Some find direct stimulation to the glans uncomfortable. Others experience more pleasure from anal stimulation.

Yet we do not suggest because men can and do experience pleasure from different areas in their genitals that there are specific spots that guarantee male orgasm or that men are somehow deficient if they do not experience say, a left testicle orgasm. We don’t scan, survey, or perform autopsies on penises to establish the most sensitive parts. Nor do we have self help books, courses or sex toys designed to coach men into experiencing orgasm through stimulation to specific areas of their genitals.

Indeed suggesting this usually results in people laughing. Why would we do this? But we do seem to feel the need to continue to make women’s bodies and sexual responses seem complex and difficult. Actually that’s not quite true. One journal and the media appear preoccupied with this. Most people are not that bothered and certainly most sex researchers are not.

Source: Petra Boynton

First of all, hey, left-testicular orgasms! WTF? Where can I get one of those!?!?!? Why aren't there tons of books and DETAILS magazine articles telling me, and my partner(s) how to find this elusive "L-T spot?" Oh, right.

Hey, is it time to get out the bogus Two Rules of Desire of the dominant women-as-the "no-sex" class paradigm yet? Thanks to Rule #1 (it is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to express sexual desire) "female" sexuality is a big, giant mystery. A medical problem! Heck, did I say medical? It's an out-and-out engineering problem! Meanwhile, thanks to Rule #2 (it is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired) there... pretty much isn't a field anyone calls "male sexuality."

It goes without saying that neither women nor men benefit from what amounts to the academic equivalents of trying to get a peek into the girl's lockerroom.

Now. Does that mean there's anything particularly wrong with turning an interest in the sexual details of the kind of people you have an orientation for into a topic for research? Not specifically. Unless for some reason the vast, vast, vast majority of researchers are of one sex and one orientation.

Similarly is should we be particularly put out that guys like this Adam Ostrzenski would prefer to feel more comfortable, say, dissecting dead 83-year-old women to trying to help, say, live 21-year-old men have left-testicle orgasms? Eh. It might be a little phobic but you can't say there's not a heck of a lot of social pressure on straight men not to spend a lot of time thinking about other men's penises.

So!

Not to sound petty or self-interested but this seems like as good a reason as any to encourage more women to become academics in STEM fields. As commenter PattyCake put it in my last post "Because who wants to think about guys jacking off? (Me!)"

Assuming you're a carbon-based life form you've probably heard the common wisdom that men think about sex more often than women. Common wisdom varies but usually it's every six minutes for men. And while common wisdom is pretty much completely silent on how often women think about sex it's always a foregone conclusion that it's not as much.

Anyway, like a lot of common wisdom that "everyone knows" because it reinforces common... um... stereotypes the actual difference was just too well-known for anyone to bother to go back and check.

Until now. Via Patrick Morgan a preliminary study titled "Sex on the Brain?: An Examination of Frequency of Sexual Cognitions as a Function of Gender, Erotophilia, and Social Desirability" tried to confirm what "everybody knows." And discovered instead that while men do think about it more frequently compared to women they also think about all their other bodily needs (food and sleep as well as sex) more frequently. The upshot evidently (again it's another study conducted by public employees with public grant money that's behind another private paywall) is "it's complicated." Men evidently do body check-ins more frequently than women do, and when they do they think about sex... but they also think about other body needs like food and sleep. Women evidently do check-in less frequently but when they do they think about sex, food, sleep, and other needs in proportions very similar to men.

Anyway, it sounds like in absolute terms men do think of sex more often but proportionately don't think about it more than women do. I don't feel a sufficient urge to know to ask someone to send me an ungated copy of the paper, but I am curious how they feel proportional need-based cognitions is a better metric than absolute numbers.

But they must feel pretty confident about it because the abstract ends with

Overall, erotophilia* was a better predictor of sexual cognition than was sex of participant. Taken as a whole, the results suggest that, although there may be a sex difference in sexual cognitions, it is smaller than is generally thought, and the reporting is likely influenced by sex role expectations.”

Source: Discover Blogs - NCBI ROFL

The next question, especially after a relatively small-scale study like this, would probably be whether there's much variation in erotophilia between men and women. But it's always great when someone takes a closer look at what "everybody knows." As Will Rogers said, "It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so."

* See Cory Silverberg's definition of erotophilia. It's a psychological term for, basically, comfort and interest in sex.

Holly Moyseenko Kossover of My Sex Professor has some very welcome news. (Emphasis mine.)

A friend of mine recently pointed an interesting article in Newsweek about another benefit of aging. No, not discounted coffee at McDonald’s (I prefer the stuff that I make at home anyway) – but better sex!

Just when I think I’m living in a culture possibly a little too obsessed with youth, articles like this remind me that getting older definitely brings its own benefits. I’m all about aging gracefully (trying to stay healthy, washing my face every thing) but there are aspects of aging that seem to at least somewhat dance across the minds of even my most zen friends. However, articles that boast how sexy Helen Mirren looks are a nice reassurance (and damn, she is a gorgeous woman – at my age I’d be pleased to look how she does now).

The article points out that studying sexuality in older populations is still relatively new. Why is that? Did we just believe that after a certain age, there is no sex? Sure, the way someone engages in sex may change, but they can still be an extremely sexual individual and enjoy a healthy and fun sex life.

Source: Holly Moyseenko Kossover of My Sex Professor.

Considering how very thoroughly studied sex before, say, age 25 it’s important to understand how older people have sex not just because it’s somehow “fair” but because so much of what we assume to be just plain universal and true about all humans derives from ages when we’re just barely getting basic adulthood under our belts. As it were.

Those studies that have been done suggest, over and over, that a lot of assumptions about immutability — girl’s reticence, boy’s impetuousness for instance — not to mention assumptions about orientation “fluidity” or lack thereof seem to fade as early as the early thirties.

Anyway, it’s not just a case of “but older people have sex too.” That’s rather a foregone conclusion. We just don’t know enough about how everybody has sex to draw very well-informed conclusions about human behavior — sexual or otherwise! I mean, yeah, the light’s better under the street light of college campus-based academic researchers. But, metaphorically speaking anyway, there’s a heck of a lot more sex happening in the dark.

Cory Silverberg of Sexuality.About.Com has a genuinely wonderful, thoughtful, and informative post up this week. The nominal topic is about sex of course, anal sex generally, and lubrication used during anal intercourse in particular. While I’m not going to call any of that part superficial (it’s informative, relevant, thoughtful, and positive in both the attitude- and the sex- senses) what really draws my attention, and makes me like Silverberg very much, is his wonderful sense of journalistic, scientific, public-health, and (most important, considering the topic) sexual/erotic ethics.

But more about that in a moment. The subject at hand is a pair of studies measuring the role popular sex lubricants play in tissue damage and STI transmission during penile/anal intercourse. If you were to just skim the headline/teaser versions of the story you’d conclude that it’s risky to use lube when having anal intercourse.

Perhaps because he’s comfortable enough talking about sex that he doesn’t have the distraction of squeezing his knees together and giggling, and perhaps because he’s just a darn good science reporter, Silverberg explains what it means, what it doesn’t, some good takeaways, and (my favorite) some nice analysis of the pitfalls of over-interpreting individual study results.

Anyway, here’s Silverberg

Taken together, these two papers seem to be suggesting that using lubricants, or at least some kinds of lubricants, might actually be a bad idea when you’re on the receiving end of anal intercourse. And if you listen to the press conference that followed the presentation of the data, it sounds like at least some of the researchers are comfortable interpreting this very early data with some significance.

But don’t put away that lube bottle just yet (and probably you won’t be putting it away ever). Remember that collecting data, interpreting it, and reporting on it are three very different activities. While some blog posts have suggested this is radical news, consider the fact that all of the reporting from the researchers themselves and from IRMA makes it clear that this is very preliminary research, and should be interpreted as such.

He said it here.

So far so good. Here’s a great caveat for assessing not just sex-related research but almost any-related research.

Risk is never absolute and it never exists in a vacuum. The clinical study seems to suggest that using lubricant increases risk of getting an anal STD. But it doesn’t consider the risk of infection without lubricant. Sex educators have said for years that lubricant makes anal sex safer because it reduces friction and tearing, and therefore reduces the risk of STD transmission. This new data doesn’t contradict that because it doesn’t address it.

So that’s the first cool part: Even if there are some risks to using lube for anal intercourse those same risks are even greater if you don’t!

A scandalous oversight? Not really. The researchers are pretty clear they’re offering preliminary research, not final recommendations.

Another non-scandal that’s… probably more closely related to problems with technical and “folk” use of words like “findings,” “risk,” and even “safety.”

Similarly, the lab study of lubricants, which does seem to draw conclusions that some lubricants may be “safer” than others, needs to be contextualized, lest we forget how slippery the term “safe” is. When a researcher says that a silicone lubricant was found to be safe, what they mean was that it didn’t do the one or two bad things they were looking at. It doesn’t mean that if you use silicone lubricant you will be safe, or even safer, if you don’t also consider other factors.

Cool, eh? They’ve drawn some conclusions related to very specific questions they were trying to answer: if you’re worried about, say, lube-induced dessication of surface cells in the rectum then yeah, they’re your guys. Those aren’t the only concerns, though, so as Silverberg (and most likely the researchers) you’d want to assess all the risks before making decisions.

And best of all? The paragraph I’m about to quote makes not one but two really cool, really related points: first that to be really helpful such studies need to take sexual enjoyment into account, and second of all he explains why enjoyability is relevant. (Emphasis mine.)

As usual, sexual pleasure isn’t being talked about at all, and this too needs to be addressed in both the conducting and reporting of future research. The end goal of all this research is awareness of risk and behavior change. We aren’t talking about dental hygiene here. We are talking about activities people engage in for a reason, and sexual pleasure is often part of that reason. To talk about anal intercourse and lubricant, particularly to talk about lube as a risk factor, outside of the context of pleasure makes sense only in the lab, only in theory. It doesn’t matter how good the research is, if you want to affect change in people’s lives, you have to speak to us in a way that we can connect with. If the only argument you make for behavior change is numeric, it might scare us for about three minutes, but it’s not likely to help us at all.

Yup. If something feels good enough to want to do in the first place, even good enough to want to do over and over and over, you need to take that into consideration.

All in all a nice, thoughtful post.