Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Of Course MIT Hotties Do It For You


filed under: Do It for Science, We Make Art Not Sex by Melissa Gira | 1 Comment

The Times has been hardcore sexing itself up over the last few days, and their readers are already breathlessly responding:

“There’s a little bit of adrenaline, a puffing of the chest, a bit of anticipatory tongue motion,” said a divorced lawyer in his late 40s.

“I feel relaxed, warm and comfortable,” said a designer in her 30s.

“A yearning to kiss or grab someone who might respond,” said a male filmmaker, 50. “Or if I’m alone, to call up exes.”

“Listening to Noam Chomsky,” said a psychologist in her 50s, “always turns me on.”

No, that’s not over the latest spate of sex articles, but a survey pulled into one on the sociobiology of sexual desire.

Is it perverted to admit that the article itself is wet-making?

According to the sequence put forward in the mid-20th century by the pioneering sex researchers William H. Masters, Virginia E. Johnson and Helen Singer Kaplan, a sexual encounter begins with desire, a craving for sex that arises of its own accord and prods a person to seek a partner. That encounter then leads to sexual arousal, followed by sexual excitement, a desperate fumbling with buttons and related clothing fasteners, a lot of funny noises, climax and resolution (I will never drink Southern Comfort at the company barbecue again).

A plethora of new findings, however, suggest that the experience of desire may be less a forerunner to sex than an afterthought, the cognitive overlay that the brain gives to the sensation of already having been aroused by some sort of physical or subliminal stimulus — a brush on the back of the neck, say, or the sight of a ripe apple, or wearing a hard hat on a construction site and being surrounded by other men in similar haberdashery.

Your science may be suspect, Times (as The Stranger’s blog readers are having their own frenzy over), but your prose?

Pure porn for sex nerds.

Thursday, March 29, 2007

A Patch to “Cure” Low Sex Drive


filed under: Sex Hacks, Do It for Science by Irene Kaoru | 3 Comments

We love Irene Kaoru so much we’ve invited her to contribute to Sexerati. Be on the lookout for future pieces from her!

A new patch from Procter and Gamble has been announced, designed to cure women of their low sex drives. Sort of. The transdermal testosterone patch is called Intrinsa, and it will not, the BBC points out, be marketed as the “female Viagra” but rather will prescribed in the UK on a very limited basis and marketed as a solution for low sex drive experienced as a side effect of surgery.

This can be cautiously celebrated but raises about a thousand questions immediately.

All reports I’ve read emphasized that the drug will not be easy to get and really only for women who have experienced loss of desire after ovary removal. If, as P&G has claimed, millions of women are reporting “distress” over their lack of sexual desire, wouldn’t it make sense to make this patch as widely available as possible so that women could decide if they want it or not? After all, if the patch is the boon to frustrated women that it sounds like it could be, surely there are many women with low libidos who would welcome its effects. Perhaps it makes sense to keep the drug relatively under wraps because of some horrible side effects or potential for birth defects–something that needn’t be a concern when dealing with ovary-less women? But according to Australian researcher Susan Davis, director of research at the Jean Hailes Foundation in Melbourne, testosterone is quite safe, and any effects would cease “the moment you stop wearing the patch”. Testosterone therapy has already been available in Australia and Canada for a couple of years; perhaps the US will soon catch up.

The slowness with which the pharmaceutical industry has been able to provide female alternatives to the popular Viagra may betray a mixed institutional attitude toward the issue. On the one hand, a conservative government continues to fear and deny female sexuality, a conservative social climate gasps at the word “vagina”, and a recent much-discussed book claims that women simply don’t like sex as much as men do. (All I’ll say about that one right now: Pish bloody posh.) On the other hand, “sexual dysfunction” has now been diagnosed in more than 30 million American men and has become a multimillion-dollar business, and the pharmaceutical industry must be collectively drooling over the money it could rake in, if only it could come up with an equivalent for the other half of the species. Cultural prudery, conservative politics, or ignorance about women’s sexual needs aside, the potential for squeezing oodles of dollars out of women by targeting their sexual insecurities is a wet dream for companies like P&G.

What I wonder most is whether libido-boosting drugs and hormone therapy will become a positive or negative thing for women. What I wonder most is whether the current pharmaceutical focus on chemicals used to right bodily wrongs simply misses the bigger picture, and if, in the long term, it will leave women as cold as before and more confused. While male physical arousal is external, easily gauged and can be separated from emotional desire, female sexual arousal is not so easy to track, especially given that many women consider their sexual satisfaction on a continuum of intimacy and pleasure, rather than a binary “orgasm or no orgasm” manner. As noted by the Kinsley Institute, female sexual satisfaction and libido is often dependant on intimacy and emotional comfort with a partner, and convincing women via advertising blitz that they are dysfunctional and need to be medicated may in itself have a negative impact on how women see themselves and how they feel when they fuck. Surely some of those men buying Viagra would benefit from learning to explore their own physical satisfaction in more subtle ways, instead of believing that sexual success has something to do with being able to hammer nails with your penis and that sex itself consists only of putting a penis inside a vagina.

The thing that gives me pause about the slew of sex enhancing drugs available is the fear that the prevalence of such drugs will encourage more empty interactions and more physical insecurities, when instead, sex can be considered creative physical exploration and not just a penis in a vagina. A sex life aided by medication might potentially be a smarter, more fulfilled sex life, but not if the medication itself gives us an excuse to stop communicating and thinking. Perhaps the most forward-thinking sexuality is not the most chemically augmented, but the most open-minded.

Monday, March 12, 2007

Breaking Sex Nerd News: Twitterdildonics


filed under: Do It for Science, Dating 2.0, Web Sex Index by Melissa Gira | 1 Comment

A few minutes ago, Jackson West warned the twitterverse that qdot, of the premiere teledildonics resource slashdong, would be demo’ing ‘twitterdildonics’ at the Lifehacker party at South by Southwest, like, now, in Austin.

Just in: vibrating pants are go, and now says Scott Beale,

Twitterdildonics shaking things up at Lifehacker. SMS induced orgasims [sic] for all.

(Via twitter, of course.)

Videoplsthxbai.

twitterdildonics
update: a first photo (by Tim Trentham of Austin Metblogs) is in.

Also, add twitter user:td to play along. Full instructions now posted (of course, it’s open source) by qdot.

Monday, February 26, 2007

Unsolved Sex Science Mysteries: The Orgasm, Revealed!


filed under: Do It for Science by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

From a review by Tim Spector of The Science of Orgasm, via Mind Hacks:

Orgasms apparently alter pain perception and increase pain thresholds, and this link may explain bizarre reports of women having orgasms during childbirth.

Bizarre, you say? I don’t think this is science hitting on (right there, yes!) the clitoral truth, so much as totally not dealing with the concept that mothers can come. I can’t claim that my studies are peer reviewed, but I have heard around that contractions of the vaginal wall go with both territories.

(Ideally, orgasms also accompany contraception. Even more ideally: two orgasms or more.)

However, just when I was ready for the truth — a clear definition of orgasm and where it arises in the brain — I was told it was not a reflex, only a perception of neural activity and, even worse, probably a form of diffuse consciousness in an as yet undiscovered fifth dimension.

Though this might just be a pretty metaphor, or worse, a veil thrown over this gap in the science of sex, either way, the hint of female orgams perhaps not even existing if they can’t be quantified is not unfamiliar. Reminds me of the few lovers I’ve had who thought it was true measure of their abilities to count “how many times” to the exclusion of all other mutual feedback — and it’s not like I go to the bedroom with a clipboard and a lab coat.

At least, not unless we’ve negotiated that first.

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