Good Vibrations Magazine

via Dr. Petra
Researchers in the Department of Psychology at McGill University, Canada are looking for folks to participate in an online survey exploring male body image and sexuality.
From the survey page:
The purpose of this study is to better understand how men evaluate certain features of their genitals, and the factors that influence this perception. It [...]

Clipped from: Carnal Nation by clp.ly

I have to admit that this is the sort of thing that seems so obvious to me that I’m surprised that someone had to do research. But then, it’s good to have empirical validation, especially since that means that it can be used in other research.
It turns out that [...]

You may have heard about the recent research published in the British Medical Journal that’s been making the rounds. The original title (Sex, health, and years of sexually active life gained due to good health: evidence from two US population based cross sectional surveys of ageing) isn’t nearly as funny as the one that the [...]

I just read an amazing report by The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy called  The Fog Zone: How Misperceptions, Magical Thinking, and Ambivalence Put Young Adults at Risk for Unplanned Pregnancy (PDF). It’s a thorough and impressive bit of research about the gap between what young adults know about contraception and [...]

One of the most common arguments against porn is that it increases sex crimes, especially sexual violence against women. However, Milton Diamond, a professor at University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, has just published research showing that this isn’t the case.
The report, Pornography, Public Acceptance and Sex Related Crime: A Review, discusses the ongoing debate over [...]

One of the challenges that sexologists, educators, and therapists face is the lack of credible, reliable, and well-designed research on sexuality. As much as that’s true for more common forms of sexual expression, it’s even more so for sexual practices that are less common. BDSM and open relationships are the target of a lot [...]

One of the biggest challenges when it comes to regulating sexually-explicit material online is how to filter out the stuff you don’t want without also losing the stuff you want to keep. For example, if you filter porn websites that contain the word “breast”, you’re likely to also filter sites with information on breast cancer [...]

I just got an email from Jessi Fischer (aka The Sexademic) about her research project for her graduate thesis. She’s examining sexualized situations, gender and words and she needs people to be guinea pigs. Well,  not really. All you do is go to her project website, enter some basic demographic info, and watch a short [...]

Every time I think we’ve sorted out the question of whether the G-spot exists, some new study gets published and the media takes it and runs with it. The Times (UK) has reported that a team of British researchers has shown that the G-spot doesn’t exist. But when you dig a bit deeper, a few [...]

The New York Times has an article about yet another pharmaceutical intervention to “improve” sex. This one is for premature ejaculation (aka PE), a notoriously difficult-to-define situation.

Throughout the history of sexology, different researchers have tried to come up with a good working definition of the term. Masters and Johnson (that’s a photo of them, BTW. [...]

This morning, I participated in a teleconference call hosted by the Female Health Company, the folks who manufacture and distribute the Female Condom. If you’re not familiar with this product, it’s sort of a loose pouch that can be inserted into the vagina, as compared to a regular condom which is rolled over the penis. [...]

I really like it when people publish interesting science articles about sex. As much as we think we know about it, there’s always something new to learn. So put your sex geek hat on!
First, back in 1999, BMJ.com (originally the British Medical Journal) posted an article showing an MRI scan of penis-vagina intercourse. Up until [...]

There are a lot of people conducting sex research, but most of us only hear about them when they make headlines. So I decided to take a look behind the scenes so you can hear about sex research from someone who’s actually doing it. Dr. John Beiter has been giving people his test as a [...]

I’m fascinated by the ways in which guilt and shame play out in our lives, especially our sexual lives. I don’t think there’s a sex educator out there who hasn’t had someone come to them with these feelings and, unfortunately, most of us don’t have much of an understanding of how these emotions work. It’s [...]

A new report by the Guttmacher Institute shows that withdrawal (aka pulling out and coitus interruptus) may be more effective than was previously thought. According to “Better Than Nothing or Savvy Risk-Reduction Practice? The Importance of Withdrawal,” by Rachel K. Jones et al., in the June 09 issue of Contraception, “perfect use” of withdrawal results [...]

A lot of the research that I’ve seen about sexwork and sexworkers has been pretty anti-sexwork. People become sexworkers for a lot of different reasons and they do it in lots of different ways, and unfortunately, what we hear about most of the time is the most visible segment of sexworkers, who may or may [...]

Four different articles on related topics came across my inbox today.
First, according to MSNBC.com, 3% of Washington DC residents are living with HIV or AIDS. As if that weren’t appalling enough, “almost 1 in 10 residents between ages 40 and 49 are living with HIV, and black men had the highest infection rate at almost [...]

From New Scientist
A recent article published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives takes a look at patterns in online porn and found some fascinating information. First off (but not too surprising), online porn use is higher among younger people and those who live in urban settings. On the other hand, a higher marriage rate correlates [...]

<full disclosure> I’m on the Advisory Committee for the Community-Academic Consortium for Research on Alternative Sexualities (CARAS) </full disclosure>
CARAS is conducting an online survey to assess the educational needs of the BDSM community. The goals of the project are to identify what educational needs people have, determine what practices educators and organizers have, and increase [...]

According to the latest report from the Guttmacher Institute, publicly funded family planning services prevent 1.94 million unintended pregnancies and 810,000 abortions each year. They are also “… highly cost-effective. More than nine in 10 women receiving them would be eligible for Medicaid-funded prenatal, delivery and postpartum care services if they became pregnant. Avoiding the [...]

I read a lot of sex research- both the sorts of stuff that makes a splash on the blogs and the stuff that most people never hear about. And I often see research become sensationalized in the media. OK, that’s nothing new, but can I just say this? CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION!!
Just because two or [...]

From 3News in New Zealand

Until now, sex educators and researchers have been assuming that in order to transmit HIV, there needed to be some sort of break in the skin. That made a lot of sense given that HIV is a blood-borne disease and that it can be transmitted through blood contact.
There’s now research that [...]

I’ve been inspired lately and I’ve been reading a lot of articles and blogs about porn. The first thing that I have to say is that many of them seem to be written by people with very little actual information about the industry. I’ve been with Good Vibrations for 12 years now, and I’ve learned [...]