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The New York Times has an article about yet another pharmaceutical intervention to “improve” sex. This one is for premature ejaculation (aka PE), a notoriously difficult-to-define situation
Throughout the history of sexology, different researchers have tried to come up with a good working definition of the term. Masters and Johnson (that’s a photo of them, BTW. Click on it for more info about them) used it if the guy came before his (female) partner. Others have set the minimum sufficient time for intercourse at two minutes, while Sciele Parma, the folks who are manufacturing this new drug peg it at one minute. By comparison, many sex therapists say that premature ejaculation is when the situation causes distress for either or both partners.
Now, I want
Continue reading Another Step Towards the Medicalization of Sex
At Good Vibrations, we regularly have people ask us about the “herbal” pills, creams and other products available at most sex stores. I’m proud to say that we’ve never carried them because we’ve never had confidence that they were effective and safe. I think it’s worth unpacking this a bit more, especially in light of the fact that the Food & Drug Administration has issued a warning about Stiff Nights, one of many such products.
There are a couple of risks that you take when you start looking for pills that haven’t been tested. First, there’s the question of effectiveness. Some products don’t contain anything that actually does any good. Others contain so little of it that there’s no real effect. That can be hard
Continue reading The Risks of Erection Pills
Sometimes, it seems like every time I turn around, someone else is freaking out about “protecting children from sex” which usually translates into withholding information, lying about sex and safety, pretending that teens aren’t sexual beings, and projecting a “do what I say, not what I did” message. Ironically, as Judith Levine points out in her extensively researched book Harmful to Minors, all of these strategies actually increase the chances that youth and young adults will end up in the very situations that we really need to protect them from. STI and pregnancy rates go up and kids have sex at younger ages when we hide the facts from them. The research shows it, even though lots of people refuse to accept that.
On a
Continue reading some new info about kids and the internet
A few days ago, I was following a Twitter conversation between @AlexaRPD and @audaciaray about the issue of mandatory disclosure of HIV status to sexual partners. In part, it was sparked by a news story about a sex worker whose arrest for prostitution became a felony rather than a misdemeanor because she’s HIV positive. And these two incredibly intelligent folks were on opposite sides of the question of whether disclosing HIV status should be mandatory (for people in general, not just sex workers).
As is often the case, I can see both sides of this issue. On the one hand, I absolutely agree that if you have a health condition that you could pass along to someone else, you have a moral responsibility to inform
Continue reading mandatory HIV disclosure? no thanks
By now, most people have at least heard of the PC muscle. But there’s a lot of confusion about it, so I think it’s time to clear some of it up.
The PC (or pubococcygeus) muscle is one of the many muscles of the pelvic floor and it gets a lot of attention when it comes to sex. It’s shaped like a V. The point of the V attaches to the front side of the tailbone (or coccyx) and the wider end attaches to the back side of the pubic bone. It surrounds the anus and genitals and helps support the internal organs. Tightening the PC muscle can cause the vagina to tighten down or cause the penis to bounce up and down.
In general,
Continue reading PC Sex
From MSNBC.com
It seems that people who engage in mindfulness practices like meditation or yoga have better sex. According to a recent article in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, sexually unsatisfied women who meditated and did yoga reported increases in arousal and desire. Although this is very preliminary research, it seems that these practices help you learn to stay present and focused on what you’re experiencing, rather than having your attention wander.
This reminds me of the sexological concepts of “spectatoring” and “sensate focus.” Spectatoring is when you get so focused on imagining how you look or how you’re performing that you increase your anxiety and stop enjoying the sex you’re having. That sounds pretty distracted to me and mindfulness skills would certainly help with
Continue reading do yoga, have better sex
From 3News in New Zealand
Until now, sex educators and researchers have been assuming that in order to transmit HIV, there needed to be some sort of break in the skin. That made a lot of sense given that HIV is a blood-borne disease and that it can be transmitted through blood contact.
There’s now research that shows that HIV can enter through the lining of the vagina, even if it’s intact. The virus seems to target skin that has recently shed the outer layer, which would then be less resistant to attack.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that the virus can’t also be transmitted through breaks in the skin. One explanation for why HIV is can be transmitted through anal sex is that
Continue reading new info on women and HIV
According to this article from BBC News, men who ejaculate regularly have a lower rate of prostate cancer. The hypothesis is that by flushing the fluids that the prostate gland produces, you keep them from stagnating and causing problems. Similarly, women who breast feed seem to have lower rates of breast cancer, so it seems plausible to me.
I seem to recall that in his book Winter’s Light, John Preston described how he developed a bacterial infection in his prostate after his sex drive plummeted due to depression as a result of finding out he was HIV-positive. Since his body was used to having lots of sex, his prostate effectively got backed up and got infected. His doctor told him to masturbate every day and
Continue reading Good news…sex is good for you!
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