category: ‘science’

Selfish Lovers are Better Lovers

We’ve all been told to be selfless in the sack. We imagine that the best partner is someone who focuses completely on the others needs. I talk to so many people who feel compelled to do things that they don’t find pleasurable because they want to please their lover. Some of this can be healthy [...]

Mass hysteria!

If you’re like me, you love old-timey science and the peephole into the past that it gives us. I particularly love to learn about disorders that seemed to have a very strong social and cultural correlate. This particular article talks about hysteria and how, when doctors started to photograph patients in the throes of their [...]

Butt sex and lube: the plot thickens

You may have seen the alarming articles in the media over the past couple of weeks, proclaiming that Science has discovered that using lube during anal sex is a non-refundable one-way ticket to an STI. As is often the way with media outlets, genuinely useful (though inconclusive) research gets distilled down into quick and sensationalist [...]

Chimp Sex Toys 101

Looks like we’re not alone in the sexual accoutrement department. We now know that chimpanzees also use “tools” to enhance their sex lives. I anthropocentrically put “tools” in scare quotes because, let’s be honest, they’ve got a long way to go before they achieve an ape-vibrator. Even so, the evidence is intriguing. Says primatologist Dr. [...]

Girls gone wild, 1930s style

I give you “Sex Madness,” a 1938 exploitation movie disguised as a PSA warning its viewers against syphilis. You can watch it here on YouTube if you have an hour to kill. But what I love most about this movie is not the movie itself, which is woefully un-exploitative to modern sensibilities, but the fact [...]

Erotic capitalism

“Erotic capital,” broadly defined by Catherine Hakim, the senior research fellow in sociology at the London School of Economics who coined the term, is:
a nebulous but crucial combination of physical and social attractiveness. Properly understood, erotic capital is what economists call a “personal asset,” ready to take its place alongside economic, cultural, human and social [...]

Penis is my favorite color too!

The folks at XKCD did a color survey a little while back, and while I didn’t do the survey, nor did I even read the questions, I quite enjoyed the wrap-up of the data. Feel free to read the whole blog entry, but my particular favorite part was the gender breakdown of popular colors:
I was [...]

Do you have any Neanderthal in you? Would you like some?

Apparently, if your DNA is non-African derived, you’re also part Neanderthal:
…all non-Africans – be they from France, China or Papua New Guinea – share the same amount of Neanderthal DNA, suggesting that interbreeding occurred before those populations split. The timing makes the Middle East the likeliest place where humans leaving Africa and resident Neanderthals did [...]

The science of pleasure and pain

We’ve all heard about those test animals that are given a treat followed by a painful shock and how they come to associate the treat with pain, even when not given the shock. Interestingly, the converse can also be true — if given a shock and THEN a treat (or a certain smell, or something [...]

Getting it on, Victorian-style

Don’t believe the hype! Victorian ladies liked a hot piece of ass just as much as we modern folk do! And now there’s evidence of it — fifty years before Kinsey did his sexuality studies, unassuming Stanford professor Clelia Mosher unearthed intimate details about how the women of the time viewed sex and its place [...]