Category Archives: Sex

This tends toward the academic rather than the erotic. But not entirely.

Quote of the day—Annalee Armstrong

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HIV integrates its genetic material into the genome of a host cell, meaning available therapies just can’t remove it. A team of scientists at Temple University and the University of Nebraska Medical Center managed to remove the virus completely from mice during preclinical testing using a combination of CRISPR and antiretroviral therapy. They also found no adverse events that could be linked to the therapy in the study, published back in 2019.

…

The company is also working on similar treatments for other viruses, including herpes and hepatitis B.

Annalee Armstrong
September 27, 2021
Excision’s CRISPR gene editing therapy for HIV is heading into human testing after FDA clearance
[A few months ago a male friend (who I suspect is bi-sexual) pointed out that COVID-19 is not the first pandemic our generation has lived through. My thinking about this enabled a quick response to different friend just a few days later who was pontificating on how COVID-19, “Hit the sweet spot of infectiveness and lethality.” I disagreed, “It could be a lot more lethal.” “Not really”, he replied, “It would be hard to be more lethal and still infect a lot of people because it would kill people before they could infect as many people as it does.” I had a three letter acronym response, “HIV”.

He immediately conceded. A disease as infectious as chickenpox with the silent latency and deadliness of HIV would have the potential to exterminate humanity.

I fear that as long as we have global trade if we don’t develop the ability to respond to new diseases in timeframes of weeks, or perhaps days, some disease will, “Find the sweet spot” (or be engineered) to close the curtain on humans.

HIV was first recognized as a new disease in 1981. At the time I figured scientists would have it figured out and curable in “five or ten years”. Forty years later a promising cure is going into human trials.

Herpes too was a pretty big deal in the mid 1980s. Like HIV, herpes is now treatable but incurable. That may be changing in the next few years.

Think of all these diseases as practice for the future.—Joe]

Self-esteem correlated with number of sex partners

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Interesting:

An analysis of data collected across 10 world regions suggests that men’s self-esteem is more strongly tied to their sexual success than women’s. The findings were published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.

…

The study authors accordingly proposed that having a greater number of past sexual partners should increase self-esteem. They further reasoned that this positive link between self-esteem and number of past sexual partners should be stronger among men since greater sexual acceptance is more adaptive for men. That is, men’s ability to pass on their genes relies strongly on having a high number of sexual partners, while women’s success in passing on their genes rests on having higher quality sexual partners who will invest in offspring.

The first thing that came to mind when reading this was, “Correlation doesn’t mean causation. Perhaps having a high self-esteem, as a consequence of such things as job success, physical attractiveness, etc. contributed to the higher number of sexual partners.”

The authors are concerned about that as well:

The authors note that past experimental studies have found that manipulating self-esteem seems to impact sexual desire differently among men and women, suggesting that self-esteem might be “both a cause and a consequence of short-term mating success in men.”

“Future work should seek to disentangle the many functions of self-esteem within men’s short-term mating psychology,” the researchers write, “including work to identify how self-esteem may serve specially-designed functions as both a consequence, and a cause, of short-term mating success.”

Many years ago I would hear things to the effect that women with high number of sexual partners by women was frequently a result of low self-esteem. At the time I knew two young women (in their mid 20s) who that seemed to apply to but it did not appear to be a consistent pattern. More recently with women in their 50s and 60s I have talked to about numbers of sex partners don’t seem to show any correlation one way or the other. But this did not involve any accurate self-esteem measurements.

More study is required before, if ever, the head shrinks start prescribing lots of sexual partners to increase self-esteem.

Quote of the day—Terri Conley

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If you inch towards suggesting that people who do something other than monogamy might not be miserable or that they might have some advantages, they were just so hostile to that. I found that really fascinating.

Terri Conley
August 4, 2020
How One Psychologist Upended Everything We Know About Women, Sex, & Monogamy
[As well as being fascinating I think making people uncomfortable with clear factual data is great fun! I love doing it with the stupidity of gun laws as well as human psychology.—Joe]

Looks indicate which men have cheated

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This is almost unbelievable:

People can predict with modest accuracy whether a man (but not a woman) has cheated before based solely on the appearance of his face, according to a recent study published in Royal Society Open Science. In other words, we seem to have a limited ability to pick out men who have committed infidelity just by looking at them.

I’m having trouble coming up with plausible reasons for this to be true. Perhaps a particular physical appearance gives them more opportunities/temptation.

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It’s in the genes

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Infidelity Lurks in Your Genes

We have long known that men have a genetic, evolutionary impulse to cheat, because that increases the odds of having more of their offspring in the world.

But now there is intriguing new research showing that some women, too, are biologically inclined to wander, although not for clear evolutionary benefits. Women who carry certain variants of the vasopressin receptor gene are much more likely to engage in “extra pair bonding,” the scientific euphemism for sexual infidelity.

I’m not surprised. My informal interviews with women indicates a bimodal distribution. Either women 50 years and older have had a relatively small number of sexual partners, less than 10 or else dozens or, sometimes, many hundreds.

See also my post here.

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Quote of the day—Wednesday Martin

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Most people in sexual partnerships end up facing the conundrum biologists call “habituation to a stimulus” over time, a growing body of research suggests that heterosexual women, in the aggregate, are likely to face this problem earlier in the relationship than men. And that disparity tends not to even out over time. In general, men can manage wanting what they already have, while women struggle with it.

Wednesday Martin
February 14, 2019
The Bored Sex
[I’d like to see the research on this. I’m a bit skeptical that women are more likely than men to have these feelings. However, I have talked to a number of women who identify with this.

One women asked me to take some sexy pictures of her. It turned out it was for one of her boyfriends. Not her husband. The husband wasn’t supposed to know about them. “How many boyfriends do you have?”, I asked. Her answer was a bit of a surprise to me, “Enough for my own basketball team.”

Another woman was married a couple years to a really nice guy when she started getting “restless”. She felt she just had to have sex with someone other than her husband. She decided there was something wrong with her mate selection and divorced him. She found someone else, thought things were great, then after a couple years the same thing happened. She ended up finding a local sex club that she started attending regularly.

Another woman had been married something like five to seven years and found she could barely stand to have sex with her husband. He was a really nice guy and she liked him a lot, he was good looking, but sex just wasn’t something she wanted to do with him. What about sex in general? Did she have an interest in sex with some other men? Ahh…. yes, she would like to have sex “with like seven guys at the same time”. The last time I talked to her she was meeting a married man several times a week but still had no interest in her husband.

Another woman “stopped counting” after she had 200+ sex partners (both male and female) before she finally “settled down” and got married. After a couple years she was “climbing the walls”. She got her husband to regularly go to a sex club with her and her cravings were brought under control. But her husband didn’t really care for that solution and the last I heard from her there were a lot of compromises on both sides but without either being very happy about the situation.

Those are just the few I can think of off the top of my head. I could go dig through my notes and find many more examples. The point is,I am quite sure what Martin is saying has some truth to it. “Conventional wisdom” on this topic is at least not universally applicable. I’m willing to consider the hypothesis that a significant portion of the female population is content being monogamous but there is a lot of data that says it is not universal and that women who have very ordinary childhoods with no discernible “damage” are not comfortable with monogamy.

See also Sex at Dawn (Sex at Dusk is a counter argument) and Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free.—Joe]

You knew it was coming

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Technology is advancing extremely rapidly. More and more jobs can be done by automation. This should come as no surprise:

Male sex robots with unstoppable bionic penises are coming this year

David Levy, author of Love and Sex With Robots, says, ‘I’m sure women will find robots equally appealing as men. ‘If women are that interested in getting satisfaction from a vibrator, imagine how the same women will feel having a robot they can put their arms round them and having the robot squeeze them.’

The date of that article was a year ago. The male sex robots are now available.

Of course, this same company has been making female sex robots for quite some time now.

I wonder how realistic it will be when one of the male robots is with one of the female robots. Will it be against the law if someone put them in a public park and let them do their thing?

We live in interesting times.

Democrats, sex, and violence

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Justin Lehmiller wrote a book, Tell Me What You Want: The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life. I participated in his research survey but haven’t read the book the book yet. He has been writing a few articles about his research and I found this one particularly interesting:

Republicans and Democrats Don’t Just Disagree About Politics. They Have Different Sexual Fantasies.

…

While self-identified Republicans and self-identified Democrats reported fantasizing with the same average frequency—several times per week—I found that Republicans were more likely than Democrats to fantasize about a range of activities that involve sex outside of marriage. Think things like infidelity, orgies and partner swapping, from 1970s-style “key parties” to modern-day forms of swinging. Republicans also reported more fantasies with voyeuristic themes, including visiting strip clubs and practicing something known as “cuckolding,” which involves watching one’s partner have sex with someone else.

By contrast, self-identified Democrats were more likely than Republicans to fantasize about almost the entire spectrum of BDSM activities, from bondage to spanking to dominance-submission play. The largest Democrat-Republican divide on the BDSM spectrum was in masochism, which involves deriving pleasure from the experience of pain.

The BDSM thing is consistent with the Democrat goals of acquiring complete power. And, as we fear, inflicting pain, suffering, and submission. This claim is further exemplified by Karin Jones on Twitter who, after reading Lehmiller’s article said:

A fun read by @JustinLehmiller. He’s right! As a Democrat I often fantasize about BDSM activity – like crushing Donald Trump’s balls in my bare hands until he falls to his knees and begs me to impeach him.

In contrast, my most far out political fantasies involve the government obeying the constraints imposed upon it by the constitution and politicians who violate the law being prosecuted.

Never give up your guns. If you do what follows will be the wildest fantasies of the Democrats and it will be extremely unpleasant.

The sexual playground

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Interesting article in Psychology today.

Most Americans Have Tried Unconventional Sex
The popularity of unconventional sex raises questions about what’s “deviant.”

…

Imagine a playground filled with happy children. Some can’t get enough of one activity: the swings, slide, sandbox, carousel, climbing structures, whatever. Others sample two or three. Some circle among everything. And others avoid the various stations, preferring to make their own fun alone or with others. What can we say about children who love swings, but never use the slide? What does it mean if all kids do is play in the sandbox? It means nothing. It’s play, and kids play in the ways that appeal to them individually.

Sex is adult play. Like a playground, it includes myriad possibilities, none better or worse than any other. Absent harm to self and others, it doesn’t matter how adults twist the sheets. It’s play. It’s pleasure. And erotic pleasure is uniquely individual.

So we must think long and hard before labeling any legal sexual possibilities weird or deviant. There is no normal, so we must be careful calling anything abnormal.

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Quote of the day—Jodie

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I think everyone should get as much sex as they can.

Jodie
October 23, 2018
[Jodie is my boss.

She has also been known to announce, “This is now a HR free zone.” and say something less that politically correct.

I have an awesome boss in a number of ways (never mind that she once tried to drown me). I’ve never had a boss tell their staff this sort of thing before.—Joe]

Progressives don’t want you to read this

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I haven’t read this yet. It sounds interesting:

An elementary mathematical theory based on “selectivity” is proposed to address a question raised
by Charles Darwin, namely, how one gender of a sexually dimorphic species might tend to evolve with
greater variability than the other gender. Briefly, the theory says that if one sex is relatively selective
then from one generation to the next, more variable subpopulations of the opposite sex will tend to
prevail over those with lesser variability; and conversely, if a sex is relatively non-selective, then less
variable subpopulations of the opposite sex will tend to prevail over those with greater variability. This
theory makes no assumptions about differences in means between the sexes, nor does it presume that
one sex is selective and the other non-selective. Two mathematical models are presented: a discrete-time
one-step statistical model using normally distributed fitness values; and a continuous-time deterministic
model using exponentially distributed fitness levels.

If I had seen this without much other context I probably would have read the abstract and moved on. Interesting, but not worth much more time. However…

The context in which I ran across this was Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole, an peer reviewed paper, approved and published, was removed from online archives:

Colleagues I spoke to were appalled. None of them had ever heard of a paper in any field being disappeared after formal publication. Rejected prior to publication? Of course. Retracted? Yes, but only after an investigation, the results of which would then be made public by way of explanation. But simply disappeared? Never. If a formally refereed and published paper can later be erased from the scientific record and replaced by a completely different article, without any discussion with the author or any announcement in the journal, what will this mean for the future of electronic journals?

I save banned CAD files for 3D printing. I buy banned books. And I publish banned academic papers.

Quote of the day—Robin Hanson

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One might plausibly argue that those with much less access to sex suffer to a similar degree as those with low income, and might similarly hope to gain from organizing around this identity, to lobby for redistribution along this axis and to at least implicitly threaten violence if their demands are not met. As with income inequality, most folks concerned about sex inequality might explicitly reject violence as a method, at least for now, and yet still be encouraged privately when the possibility of violence helps move others to support their policies. (Sex could be directly redistributed, or cash might be redistributed in compensation.)

Robin Hanson
April 26, 2018
Two Types of Envy
[Interesting. Read the article to get background about “incels” if you aren’t familiar with the term.

Some people see “incels” as about male supremacy. See, for example, What Are ‘Incels’? The Anti-Woman Online Community Behind the Toronto Van Attack. I think it is more about envy and inability to find a partner which results in the symptoms of a somewhat male supremacist attitude. The author doesn’t even mention this as a component. I suspect counseling, social skills training (not pickup artist type stuff), and attending social events to practice their training would provide the “cure” for “incels”.

I knew the scum bag loser who shot some people then drove his car through groups of people in Isla Vista California in 2014 had problems with his relationships with women. But I didn’t know there were online communities of these type of people and that the April 23rd terrorist attack in Toronto was perpetrated by someone who identified as an “incel”.

Getting back to the QOTD by Hanson. In the quote above, Hanson may appear to advocate for the forced redistribution of sexual access. In an addendum they clarify:

Let me also clarify that personally I’m not very attracted to non-insurance-based redistribution policies of any sort, though I do like to study what causes others to be so attracted.

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Apparently many people can’t imagine any other way to reduce or moderate sex inequality. (“Redistribution” literally means “changing the distribution.”)  In the post I mentioned cash compensation; more cash can make people more attractive and better able to afford legalized prostitution. Others have mentioned promoting monogamy and discouraging promiscuity. Surely there are dozens of other possibilities; sex choices are influenced by a great many factors and each such factor offers a possible lever for influencing sex inequality. Rape and slavery are far from the only possible levers!

What I find interesting about this whole thing in that the political left has some components which would appear to make them likely to take this on as an issue. Consider the following:

  • The left uses violence to achieve their ends just as the “incel” attackers.
  • The left appears to take the side of those who use violence to achieve their ends.
  • The left uses envy and disparity of outcomes as political issues to justify government intervention (government intervention is actually just a special case of using violence).
  • “Slavery”, one method of addressing the sexual access inequality, can also be used to described the nearly 100% marginal income tax rates frequently advocated and sometimes implemented by the political left.
  • The left views many issues through some sort of sexual lens. i.e. Markley’s Law, feminism, celebration of sexual minorities, etc.

Hence, one could make the case that taking up the cause of “incel”s will soon be part of their political platform. It appears to be a good fit.—Joe]

I can vouch for this

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I got a vasectomy and was very pleased with the results. My positive experience isn’t all that unusual:

Results revealed that of those men, 12.4 percent reported having sex more often after the vasectomy, while only 4.5 percent of men reported having sex less often. In addition, vasectomized men reported better erectile function, better orgasms, more sexual desire and overall more sexual satisfaction.

News you can use

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This might be useful in certain circumstances:

Scientists have known for more than a half-century that our pupils dilate whenever we see something we find sexually arousing. This is a non-voluntary response that is controlled by the autonomic nervous system—the body system that controls other automatic responses like heart rate, respiration, and digestion. As a result, it’s not something that people can consciously control, so it gets around the problems of people lying on surveys and faking genital responses.

For example:

a new set of studies published in the Journal of Sex Research finds that—among men—pupil dilation doesn’t just reveal the gender of the people they’re attracted to, but also their age.

…

when viewing images of children, no increase in pupil size was observed for men in any sexual orientation group. In fact, if anything, their pupils actually had a tendency to constrict when viewing kids. The results of all of these studies suggest that pupil dilation holds a lot of promise as a technique for measuring attraction based on both gender and age.

…

it could also be quite useful to forensic researchers who study pedophilia and other sexual interests that people are strongly motivated to conceal.

It’s not mind reading, but it might be close enough to make life safer for your kids in some situations.

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Interesting psychology

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As you read the news about all the sexual harassment claims and denials keep in mind the human mind is a tricky thing. For example:

Several studies have shown that people are more likely to label a given behavior as sex to the extent that their significant other did it as opposed to themselves. In a study of 839 college students (96% heterosexual) who were asked whether oral contact with another person’s genitals counted as sex, it turned out that just 36% of women and 39% of men said it did when they imagined themselves doing it. However, when asked to imagine their partner doing the same thing with someone else, 62% of women and 63% of men suddenly viewed it as sex.

Truth is extremely elusive. Definitions matter. Measurements matter. Numbers matter. There are facts and there are opinions. A lot of what we are seeing in the news are opinions and what is important are the facts.

There are always tradeoffs

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From Justin J. Lehmiller, 5 Ways Women Can Orgasm That Don’t Involve Sexual Activity:

  1. Some women can literally think themselves to orgasm.
  2. Some women have orgasms in their sleep.
  3. Some women have orgasms while they exercise.
  4. “Nipplegasms” are a thing, too.
  5. Some women have experienced orgasm during childbirth.

While I’m sometimes envious of all the sexual advantages women have I only have to remind myself that I never had and never will have the risk of going through childbirth.

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