photo by e.esders

Before we started writing about sex, we had no idea that so many scientists and researchers spent time so much time studying our sexual proclivities. These days we have trouble thinking of anything sexual that hasn’t been qualified and quantified and written up in a science journal.

Take the age-old issue of whether you’re ruining your shot at a relationship if you sleep with someone on a first date. According to science — at least, according to a new study out of the University of Iowa, just published in the journal Social Science Research — not necessarily. Once you factor out people who weren’t serious about entering a relationship in the first place, it’s pretty much even-stevens. Meaning, couples who boinked on the first date tend to be just as happy and satisfied in their long-term relationship as couples who held off for a while and just masturbated furiously when they got home after a date. (Okay, so that furious masturbation thing wasn’t actually in the survey — we made that up.)

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photo by Jason Clapp

Writing about sex and relationships is hard work: all the Eyes Wide Shut balls we’re required to attend, all the whips and chains we need to inspect, all the pillow fights we have to have in our lingerie. It’s exhausting! So we’re taking a long weekend (and hope you are too!). We’ll be back on Tuesday refreshed and ready to take on all your pressing romantic inquiries.

photo via IMDB

When we read that a researcher at the University of Wales Institute in Cardiff had released a study claiming that the cougar dating trend is a myth and a media construct, we were ready to buy his argument. After all, we’ve witnessed first-hand — and have occasionally, shame on us, been responsible for — how a so-called trend can get blown out of all proportion for the sake of a sexy headline. So we tend to be more than ready to believe that a much-hyped, now-sitcom-ed trend is actually just hype.

But it turns out that the researcher, Michael Dunn, doesn’t have the most water-tight argument himself. For one thing, his theory is based solely on stats from public online dating profiles, which as we all know, are notoriously unreliable sources of information (who knew the world contained so many men over 6 foot?!). The profiles he looked at (in North American, Europe, Australia, and Japan) showed that most women are looking for men their own age or older and most men are looking for younger women. In other words, Dunn’s real finding is that people don’t use mainstream online dating sites to find or be a cougar… or at least, if they do, they don’t admit it openly in their profiles.

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Teens now spend a whopping seven hours per day on various forms of media. So the American Academy of Pediatrics just issued a revised policy statement, “Sexuality, Contraception, and the Media,” in the September 2010 print issue of Pediatrics (published online Aug. 30). In addition to calling for the creation of a national task force on children, adolescents and the media to be convened by child advocacy groups in conjunction with the CDC or National Institutes of Health, it includes updated recommendations for pediatricians and parents on how to deal with this sex-soaked culture. Among the new recommendations since 2001:

• In addition to supervising their children’s traditional media use, parents (as well as pediatricians) should understand social networking sites and counsel kids about using them.
• The entertainment industry should be encouraged to produce more programming that contains responsible sexual content and that focuses on the interpersonal relationship in which sexual activity takes place. Meanwhile, advertisers should stop using sex to sell products.
• Pediatricians and the government should urge and encourage the broadcast industry to air advertisements for birth control products.
• Ads for erectile dysfunction drugs, which can be confusing to young viewers, should not air until after 10 p.m.
• Parents can use media story lines as teachable moments to discuss sex with their teens instead of doing “the big talk.”

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photo by tifhermon

• Swedish scientists recently discovered a way to help predict whether a mother-to-be will need a C-section. This could save women painful and possibly dangerous hours attempting a doomed vaginal delivery.
• Esteban Rojas, one of the thirty-three Chilean miners who has been stuck underground for 20-some-odd-days (and counting), proposed to his long-time girlfriend. The proposal was written on a piece of scrap paper the miner stuck through a small hole in the tumbled rock.
• Birth rates plummet alongside the stock-market. Studies show that the drastic decrease in US births is a direct result of the recession.
• What would Jesus do…in bed? David Reid, a pastor from Georgia, recently released a book designed to help married Christian couples improve their sex life. The catch: the tips and techniques are inspired by the Bible.

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photo by Mindsay Mohan

California Senator Joe Simitian drafted a new bill that would make it a misdemeanor to impersonate someone online — a.k.a. “e-personation” — with the purpose “of harming, intimidating, threatening or defrauding.” If busted for e-personation, you could get $1,000 in fines and/or one year in prison. The bill was passed unanimously by both the Senate and the Assembly so just needs Ahnold’s signature to become law in California.

This would mean, for example, that it would be illegal to create a Facebook or Twitter account with someone else’s name, and then use that account to embarrass that person. In other words, wounded exes who take to the Internet to screw with the asshole who dumped them may now face jail time if they’re caught. Fortunately, wounded exes everywhere have someone on their side: the online human rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

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photo by ValtheKid

• As if you needed another reason to quit, research shows that smoking drastically increases the chances of erectile dysfunction.
• Obesity, on the other hand, gets a free pass in the birth control department: Contrary to what was previously thought, obesity does not lower the effectiveness of the birth control pill.
• In completely unshocking news, Utah is the least supportive state in the union when it comes to same-sex marriage. Apparently polygamous marriages are okay, but only 22% of the state agrees with gay marriage.

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photo by Pink Sherbet Photography

A study by Bill McCarthy of the University of California and Eric Grodsky of the University of Minnesota found that teens in romantic sexual relationships have similar school experiences to virgins. Meanwhile, students who engage in NON-romantic sexual activity (hook-ups, friends with benefits, etc) were found to be more likely to be suspended or expelled, less likely to aspire to college, and more likely to earn lower grades.

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Is anyone not thinking about sperm donation right now, given the ubiquitous billboards for the movie THE SWITCH featuring Jason Bateman sniffing a cup of jizz?

Anonymous sperm donation is now banned in Britain and several other European countries, and some people are pushing for the same to happen here in the U.S. Proponents of the ban point to a recent study by the Commission on Parenthood’s Future, titled “My Daddy’s Name is Donor,” which surveyed 485 sperm donor offspring (all now adults) and found that they were more prone to depression and other emotional troubles compared to other young adults in control groups. The authors of the study recommended an end to anonymous sperm donation.

What do you think? Why does egg donation seem such a weighty, consequential decision for women, more so than sperm donation is for men? And what would be the consequences of banning anonymous sperm donation?

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photo by Rob Inh00d

We heard from a reader in Australia this week who wanted to alert us to all the sex- and gender-related craziness that is going on in the federal election Down Under. Because we, ahem, don’t have a reporting staff based over there, we thought we’d just share Courtney’s letter with you. The federal election in Australia takes place on Saturday, August 21st. Throw another legal loophole on the barbie!

Dear Em & Lo,

Our two prime-ministerial candidates are, to put it bluntly, very boring. Both have been very conservative, either adamantly believing that “marriage is between a man and a woman,” or too afraid of distancing voters to argue otherwise. To my disgust, even our only openly gay cabinet minister, Penny Wong, won’t contradict her party and support gay marriage. On the abortion front, neither are going to make it MORE difficult to procure a legal abortion in Australia, but they are certainly not going to make it easier, so that women must continue to take advantage of legal loopholes if they want an abortion. What’s worse is that the leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott, has previously shown an extremely anti-abortion stance when he was Minister for Health in 2005, allowing his personal and religious beliefs interfere with his duty to act in the best interests of Australian women when he refused to approve the use of the drug RU-486, the cheap, safe, and less traumatic alternative to surgical abortion.

Abbott has also previously discouraged young men and women from having sex before marriage, and said that women should regard their virginity as a “precious gift.” You can probably see why I, as a 20-year-old woman, am not enthusiastic about this man having any sort of power over me and my rights. “Get Up!”, an independent community advocacy group, feels the same way, and has produced a fantastic and very effective ad featuring women reciting Abbott quotes on matters such as women in the workplace, the cervical cancer vaccine, and abortion.

Outside of the main two political parties, however, an even fiercer battle is raging, and that’s the one that’s captured my attention the most. It’s between two minor parties: The Australian Sex Party (a.k.a. good) and Family First (a.k.a. evil). The Australian Sex Party supports same-sex marriage, the decriminalization of abortion, a national sex education curriculum, stem cell research, and the overturning of mandatory internet filtering (more here on their policies). Family First opposes all of these things. A debate on these issues between Fiona Patten of the Sex Party and Wendy Francis of Family First aired on morning television last week, and wow, it was quite something. If you have a few minutes, it’s here. The good news is that while Fiona Patten was very well spoken and argued her case excellently, Wendy Francis came off as a rude, homophobic, intolerant cow, and I really don’t see how Family First could have won itself any fans in this debate.
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