Understanding how men who have sex with men (MSM) identify with sexual role labels such as Top, Bottom, or Versatile offers descriptive insights into how sexuality, identity, and self-presentation of masculinity intersect on dating platforms. Drawing on cross-sectional data from 141,156 active users of the global gay dating app Surge, a new study describes age-based […]
Sexual Synesthesia
Synesthesia is a neurological condition that causes the senses to link and merge. People with this condition may hear colors or taste words and more than 4% of people have some form of synesthesia. People who experience sexual synesthesia, or sexual synesthetes, may have involuntary visions of color, shapes, patterns, or even full-blown scenes when […]
Broadening Our View of Autoeroticism
Sexual self-stimulation takes more forms than just stroking one’s genitals, as a recent weighted sample of 3,423 American adults shows. Some people arouse themselves by reading erotica or touching different parts of their body, or merely through personal fantasies; orgasm can also be induced by “syntribation,” which involves flexing pelvic or thigh muscles. Although little […]
New Data on Sexual Pleasure
The HUD App, a dating service, has published statistics from their “pleasure census,” a survey of 2,183 users in 63 countries, mostly young females, about a third of them identifying as something other than heterosexual. 88% of men and 76% of women report getting less sex than they desire; most cite inhibitions about communicating their […]
Hunting Unicorns
A new study published in Psychology and Sexualitysurveyed 80 members of a couple, at least one of whom is bi-sexual, who had sought or were seeking a “unicorn,” i.e. a third partner to share sex and/or romance with both of them. Females are more often sought than males, which is unsurprising inasmuch as women are […]
When Penélope Cruz is the Swinger Upstairs
Olivia Wilde directs and stars in The Invite, a sex comedy and relationship drama centered on a struggling married couple, Joe (Seth Rogen) and Angela (Wilde), whose relationship is transformed after they invite their sexually adventurous upstairs neighbors, Hawk (Edward Norton) and Piña (Penélope Cruz), to dinner. The evening begins as a tense social gathering […]
Women Less Heterosexual than Men
LGBTQ+ identification has more than doubled since 2012 according to a recent Gallup poll. 28% of Gen Z women identified as LGBTQ+ compared with 10.6% of Gen Z men. In an in-depth piece, The Conversation brings together an interdisciplinary team (psychology, social work, and gender studies) to look at this national trend and ask if […]
Sex Toy Education in Pornography
A team of three women from the University of New Brunswick has studied the use of sex toys in 100 mainstream heterosexual pornographic videos. They found that the toys (including vibrators, dildos, and butt plugs) are most frequently used by the male partner to enhance the pleasure of the female partner, but are often also […]
World Cup and Babies
Do major sporting events, such as this year’s World Cup, influence the sexual behavior of fans and cause a significant change in local birth rates and sex ratios? A review of 4 different studies indicates that the answer is “maybe”. These studies looked at birth rates and/or sex ratios in live births 9 months after […]
Neuroanatomy of the Clitoris
The clitoris is the least studied organ of the human body and didn’t appear in standard anatomy textbooks until 1995 when it was described as a “small version of the penis”. A new study is using a non-invasive imaging method with micrometer-scale resolution capability to create 3D trajectory of the nerves in the clitoris. This […]