A recently released Netflix documentary on the “manosphere” is making some big cultural waves. In it, Louis Theroux, a British filmmaker and journalist, interviews prominent young and charismatic male influencers who feel victimized and ostracized in a world that’s been improved by feminism and other pursuits toward sociopolitical justice. According to the BBC, the manosphere […]
Saving Face
The Face: A Cultural History by Fay Bound-Albert is a fascinating and recently published cultural anthropological project that explores how human societies have interpreted and valued the face over time. Bound-Alberti analyzes how those interpretations influence identity, power, and social hierarchy in the here and now. The face is also something that contemporary gendered and […]
The Neanderthal Within
We all have some Neanderthal genes within us. A study recently published in the journal Science has found chromosomal evidence that coupling between male Neanderthals and human females was much more common than the opposite pattern. This might in part be due to Neanderthals being physically stronger than humans, able to overpower humans in battle, […]
Do You Regret Your Last One Night Stand?
Why do people sometimes regret one-night stands? An international team of researchers studied this question by conducting a survey with 1,044 participants (649 females, 395 males; more than 40 nationalities) who retrospectively evaluated their most recent one-night stand. Only a minority evaluated their last such encounter negatively: women were more likely to do so, but […]
Same-Sex Relations in the Animal Kingdom
We noticed a plethora of sex stories about non-human animals in circulation while we were organizing our March 1digest. This extensive study from Nature Ecology and Evolution found that same-sex relations are common in nonhuman primate species, and the research illuminated some potential fascinating reasons as to why this may be the case. The study’s […]
How Big a Threat is AI-Generated Child Porn?
An article in the New York Times in July 2025 reported that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) claimed to have received over 485,000 tips about AI-generated child pornography in the first six months of the year, a dramatic increase relative to 2024. Most of these came from Amazon AI Services. But […]
Helping Boys Understand Consent
A study interviewing 35 Australian men aged 18-32 found they understood sexual consent in the abstract, “but struggled to apply it in practice.” Most of them “found verbal requests for consent awkward, unnecessary, or disruptive,” instead relying intuitively on their sense of mutuality (reciprocated, escalating cues), trust, timing, location, and verbal check-ins. They seldom considered […]
Biological Roots of Nonmonogamy
Recently published, The Intimate Animal: The Science of Love, Fidelity and Connection, explores monogamy, fidelity, and other relational modes of loving and fucking subjects via both biological determinist and social constructionist perspectives. The book’s author, Justin Garcia, is Executive Director and Senior Scientist at the Kinsey Institute. As an evolutionary biologist, Garcia considers evolution’s role […]
Female Tortoises Commit Suicide to Avoid Sexual Harassment
In this study the mating behaviors of tortoises on Golem Grad Island in North Macedonia were analyzed and it was determined that a significant proportion of females died young, and from walking off cliffs in particular. While it was noticed that males died in this way as well, the females falling off cliffs significantly outnumbered […]
AI-Generated Women Sexier Than the Real Thing
In a fascinating study just published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, a team of Czech researchers tested how 604 female-attracted adult Czech men and 45 female-attracted women responded to still photos of naked women (real, surgically enhanced, AI-generated, CGI-generated, high-end sex doll, and hentai). All groups, male and female, young and old, found the […]