First noticed on tumblr but now available to all, Alex Clayden's paper "Same-Sex Desire in Pharaonic Egypt" which, among other things, tells you about the connection between lettuce and semen and the Ancient Egyptian for "You have a nice ass."
posted by The Whelk on Jan 25, 2013 - 26 comments

Are sex offenders and lads’ mags using the same language? [more inside]
posted by cmoj on Dec 10, 2011 - 37 comments

From the NYT Economix blog: Are good-looking people more likely to get jobs? That depends whether you’re talking about men or women, according to a new working paper.

Job applicants in Europe and in Israel increasingly imbed a headshot of themselves in the top corner of their CVs. We sent 5,312 CVs in pairs to 2,656 advertised job openings. In each pair, one CV was without a picture while the second, otherwise almost identical CV contained a picture of either an attractive male/female or a plain-looking male/female. Employer callbacks to attractive men are significantly higher than to men with no picture and to plain-looking men, nearly doubling the latter group. Strikingly, attractive women do not enjoy the same beauty premium. In fact, women with no picture have a significantly higher rate of callbacks than attractive or plain-looking women. We explore a number of explanations and provide evidence that female jealousy of attractive women in the workplace is a primary reason for the punishment of attractive women.
posted by krautland on Nov 24, 2010 - 75 comments

What counts as sex? A group of researchers at the University of Kentucky-Lexington, thinks that Bill Clinton’s famous assertion that he “did not have sexual relations” with Monica Lewinsky may be the reason so many young people today don’t consider oral sex to count as doing the deed. The study "Sex Redefined: The Reclassification Of Oral-Genital Contact"^PDF which was conducted in 2007 and published this month in the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, surveyed 477 students enrolled in a human sexuality course at a large state university about their views on sex. What they found was that only 20 percent of those students considered oral-genital contact to be sex, compared with nearly 40 percent of a similar group of students surveyed in 1991.
posted by Fizz on Jun 27, 2010 - 96 comments

An article in the June issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society of the Biological Sciences finds that "differences in reproductive strategies are driving individuals' different views on recreational drugs": namely, that views on sexual promiscuity are more closely related to views on recreational drug use than religion, political affiliation or other predictors. The study suggests attitudes against recreational drug use are an evolutionary attempt to promote reproductive stability.
posted by l33tpolicywonk on Jun 16, 2010 - 21 comments

"Some enjoyed sex but worried that they shouldn't. One slept apart from her husband 'to avoid temptation of too frequent intercourse.' " Standford Magazine on the accidental discovery of an unpublished sex survey of American women made 55 years before Kinsey . (via)
posted by The Whelk on Mar 31, 2010 - 50 comments

At Northwestern University, psychologists are paying women to be aroused by porn. It's more fun than looking at ink blots. "Last spring, [the two scientists] were involved in a similar study that tested Chicago-area men for their reaction to straight and gay porn. The results were fairly definitive — straight men [were aroused by] watching a man and a woman have sex; gay men [were aroused by] watching two men have sex. Neither had much crossover. But when Chicago-area women [were exposed to] both stimuli...? 'It appears that women, regardless of sexual orientation, respond to everything.' This is science at its steamiest." (from Jim Romenesko's Obscure Store)
posted by verdezza on Nov 30, 2001 - 22 comments