Well, if anyone ever wondered why scientists hate to speak to people in the media, now we know for sure.
Yesterday, Bloomberg ran a piece about pubic lice titled “Brazilian Bikini Waxes Make Crab Lice Endangered Species” that might have been brilliant (because: pubes!) except it wasn’t. Not even a little bit. … Continue Reading
Pop culture has immortalized the headache excuse. Often, it appears as a joke. We resent this joke, which paints women as evil villains who don’t want to get down, without allowing that we people and have issues, too. The fact that it is rarely targeted at men really rankles us, as it reinforces the notion that men are insatiable sex machines and women are just, well, lying there staring at the ceiling. … Continue Reading
Last year, we debunked the myth that getting semen in the eye hurts because the sperm are trying to impregnate the eyeball, which never in a gazillion years would we ever have imagined we would have to do considering we’re all, you know, sensible adults. Anyway, the post deserved some elaboration, so we turned it into a three-part series. We thought we’d done our duty. … Continue Reading
We’ve all heard what happens to athletes who don’t abstain from sex before the match: they lose. We don’t know how we know or when we first heard it, but we know it and somehow, it seems to make sense. Is it true? The media has been having a field day with this question, especially after digging up a review from the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine from 2000 (um, slow news day?). We can’t be sure they actually read it, given their conclusions. … Continue Reading
Last November, a crew of engineers working on a hydroelectric dam on the Madeira River, a major tributary in the Amazon rainforest, discovered six creatures that looked alarmingly like… well, they looked a lot like dicks. Long, flaccid dicks. The news was kept under wraps while experts worked to confirm the trouser snake’s genus. Finally, it seems we have an answer. … Continue Reading
Meet Paul Zak — or, as he is being called by certain media outlets, Dr. Love. Dr. Love believes in hugging and that the hormone oxytocin determines morality.
Zak’s original field, it turns out, is economics, a far cry from the hearts and teddy bears we imagine when we consider his nickname. But after taking part in experiments on generosity, Zak stumbled on the importance of trust in interactions, which led him, rather inevitably, to research oxytocin. Oxytocin, you might remember, is a hormone that has been linked previously to bonding — between mothers and children primarily, but also between partners. What Zak has done is take the research a step further, arguing in his recent book, The Moral Molecule, that oxytocin plays a role in determining whether we are good or evil. … Continue Reading
Here at Sex and the 405, we have heard many rumors about the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) since we started reporting on their war on pornography, chief among them that they opposed research into an AIDS/HIV vaccine. Not content to become part of the gossip mill, we decided to dive into the allegations. … Continue Reading
When confronted with reminders of their mortality, people have been shown to play up their cultural views, belittle opposing views, and reinforce their self-esteem. In studying these effects, the question of how thoughts of death affected the libido came up.
An initial study in Israel involving 40 men and 36 women found that thinking about death led the men to say that they’d be more likely to hookup with a stranger at a bar than the control group, which had thought about a visit to the dentist. This, curiously, was not the case for the women in the experiment. … Continue Reading
Right whales, massive sea giants once hunted almost to the point of extinction in the days of the whaling industry — who would have guessed these rotund, leisurely mammals entertained such scandalous sex lives? Not only is the right whale exhibitionist, swimming to the surface of the water to mate, but apparently, they’re quite fond of group sex as well!
In Observations of a Female North Atlantic Right Whale (Eubalaena glacialis) in Simultaneous Copulation with Two Males: Supporting Evidence for Sperm Competition in Aquatic Mammals, 2005, Mate, et al., describe the instance of a threesome that unfolded before researchers. … Continue Reading
The questions of whether couples should wait before having sex, and how long, and if it even matters, are robust perennials for news organizations, eager for traffic. Every year, a good handful of studies come out to feed the slow news days, and blogs trip over themselves to regurgitate the information, delighted to tap into fears or hit the jackpot of all things web: a slut- or virgin-shaming comment war to send those pageviews through the roof.
We’re no better. But instead of being snarky about the fact of course a Brigham Young University study found that having sex within the first month of dating led to the worst relationships, we’re going to focus on a compelling aspect of the discussion. … Continue Reading
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