Sex Research

""Largely based on pre-theory that ties high testosterone (T) to masculinity, and low T to femininity, high T is mainly studied in relation to aggression, mating, sexuality, and challenge, and low T with parenting. Evidence, however, fails to support this, and the social variability in T is better accounted for by a competition–
nurturance trade-off as per the Steroid/Peptide Theory of Social Bonds (van Anders et al., 2011). Four key domains are discussed: adult–infant interactions, sexual desire, sexual behavior, and partnering. Empirical engagements with gender/sex are shown to lead to important insights over assumptions about masculinity–femininity. Humans are discussed within a comparative framework that attends to cross species principles informed by human insights alongside human-specific particularities like social constructions, which are critical to evolutionary understandings of the social role of T. This paper thus integrates seemingly orthogonal perspectives to allow for transformative approaches to an empirically supported social phenomenology of T.""

Testosterone (T) and other androgens are incorporated into an increasingly wide array of human sexuality research, but there are a number of issues that can affect or confound research outcomes. This review addresses various methodological issues relevant to research design in human studies with T; unaddressed, these issues may introduce unwanted noise, error, or conceptual barriers to interpreting results. Topics covered are
(1) social and demographic factors (gender and sex; sexual orientations and sexual diversity; social/familial connections and
processes; social location variables), (2) biological rhythms (diurnal variation; seasonality; menstrual cycles; aging and menopause), (3) sample collection, handling, and storage (saliva
vs. blood; sialogogues, saliva, and tubes; sampling frequency,
timing, and context; shipping samples), (4) health, medical issues, and the body (hormonal contraceptives; medications and nicotine; health conditions and stress; body composition, weight, and exercise), and (5) incorporating multiple hormones. Detailing a comprehensive set of important issues and relevant empirical evidence, this review provides a starting point for best practices in human sexuality research with T and other androgens that may be especially useful for those new to hormone research.

Ce livre rend compte d'une recherche sur la sexualité de jeunes gens, âgés de 18 à 22 ans, étudiants dans une université de la périphérie parisienne. Il saisit sur le vif l'expérience sexuelle et son ancrage dans l'existence sociale de toute une génération. Il porte sur une période de la vie, peu connue, à la charnière entre l'adolescence et l'âge adulte, qui est restituée à partir des longs entretiens biographiques. De véritables biographies personnelles ont été recueillies et analysées en détail par les chercheurs.
Cet ouvrage révèle que les premières relations sexuelles, qui s'inscrivent le plus souvent dans des relations amoureuses, restent placées sous le signe de la construction de soi-même, de la découverte et de l'élaboration de son propre désir et de la découverte de ses limites dans le rapport aux autres. La phase de l'initiation sexuelle et amoureuse est dépassée et c'est le temps des premières déceptions. Les premières ruptures sont l'occasion d'une redécouverte qui leur rappelle les conditions et les limites de la relation à l'autre. Le processus de maturation dans lequel ces jeunes gens se situent détermine leur rapport aux risques. Une minorité de ces jeunes femmes a cependant connu des rapports sexuels sous la contrainte. Cette période de la vie est globalement vécue comme un temps d'initiation et de découverte, d'essais et d'erreurs, et parfois d'errance amoureuse et sexuelle. Elle reste orientée vers l'idéal de la conjugalité qui constitue l'horizon quasiment indépassable et le projet qui donne sens à la vie amoureuse de cette génération.
La plupart de ces jeunes femmes et jeunes hommes ont reçu une éducation sexuelle succincte, transmise au sein de la famille et de l'école, qui les a préparés à gérer les risques de santé liés à l'activité sexuelle (prévention du VIH, grossesses non-prévues).
Pour la minorité d'entre eux, encore inexpérimentée au plan sexuel, et plus importante chez les garçons que chez les filles, c'est le moment d'une interrogation sur la force et la normalité de leur désir, sur leur capacité de séduction et leur rapport aux normes sociales. Ils sont alors empêtrés dans une vie fantasmatique très intense, ou au contraire relativement atone, pour d'autres, mais leur questionnement intérieur reste souvent confus. 
Ces jeunes adultes essaient de se dégager de leur univers familial, en même temps qu'ils s'essaient à de nouvelles expériences sociales liées au début de leur vie étudiante et à la préparation de leur avenir économique et professionnel. Pour la première fois, ils perçoivent l'importance de leur choix scolaire et ses conséquences potentielles sur leur avenir social.
L'expérience personnelle de la sexualité de ces jeunes apparaît très en décalage par rapport à l'optimisme sexuel contemporain qui vante les mérites d'une sexualité récréative. La banalité sexuelle qui caractérise leur expérience personnelle n'en est pas moins chargée de significations émotionnelles complexes. L'entrée dans la sexualité apparaît ainsi comme un long chemin semé d'embûches, un véritable rite d'initiation.
Ces jeunes gens ont été interrogés dans le cadre du service de médecine préventive d'une université de la région parisienne. Ils sont tout à fait représentatifs de leur génération et de leur groupe social.

Sexual orientation typically describes people’s sexual attractions or desires based on their sex relative to that of a target. Despite its utility, it has been critiqued in part because it fails to account for non-biological gender-related factors, partnered sexualities unrelated to gender or sex, or potential divergences between love and lust. In this article, I propose Sexual Configurations Theory (SCT) as a testable, empirically grounded framework for understanding diverse partnered sexualities, separate from solitary sexualities. I focus on and provide models of two parameters of partnered sexuality—gender/sex and partner number. SCT also delineates individual gender/sex. I discuss a sexual diversity lens as a way to study the particularities and generalities of diverse sexualities without privileging either. I also discuss how sexual identities, orientations, and statuses that are typically seen as misaligned or aligned are more meaningfully conceptualized as branched or co-incident. I map out some existing identities using SCT and detail its applied implications for health and counseling work. I highlight its importance for sexuality in terms of measurement and social neuroendocrinology, and the ways it may be useful for self-knowledge and feminist and queer empowerment and alliance building. I also make a case that SCT changes existing understandings and  conceptualizations of sexuality in constructive and generative ways informed by both biology and culture, and that it is a potential starting point for sexual diversity studies and research.

This chapter examines the little discussed debts of Alfred Kinsey to his predecessor Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish homosexual rights activist who set up the first Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin in 1919. It argues that Kinsey's disavowal of Hirschfeld’s "homosexual sexology” indicates how homophobic ideas were transmitted in the 1950s via nationalist discourses that undermined the progressive aims of Kinsey sex research.

Esta publicación corresponde, en gran parte, con el Trabajo Fin de Máster (TFM) dirigido por la Dra. Marián Fernández Cao y presentado dentro del programa de Máster oficial en Estudios Feministas, dependiente del Instituto de Investigaciones Feministas de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, en Junio de 2012.
El trabajo consta de las siguientes partes. Primero se ha descrito el marco teórico desde el que se ha elaborado el marco de referencia. La segunda parte del trabajo consiste en la elaboración del propio marco de referencia o herramienta para el análisis propuesto. En la tercera parte, se mencionan algunas de las utilidades y aplicaciones que puede tener en diferentes actividades y ejercicios profesionales. La cuarta parte consiste en una serie de conclusiones y sugerencias de posibles líneas de investigación, derivadas de las posibilidades que permite el empleo del marco de referencia propuesto en este trabajo. Por último, en la quinta parte, se presenta la bibliografía utilizada de forma directa e indirecta, así como los anexos que permiten complementar el cuerpo de trabajo de este documento.

Yaoi/BL Fandom Survey (only takes 10 mins to complete): https://leeds.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/blfandomsurvey

Researching Sex and Sexualities
University of Sussex 8-9th May 2015
Anna Madill for METHODOLOGIES STRAND

Abstract: Rotten girl on rotten girl: Boys’ Love ‘research’

‘Fujoshi’ (rotten girl) is a derogatory Japanese term for female fans of homoerotic manga and anime in the genre know as Boys’ Love (BL). BL is a global phenomenon and, overlapping with the male-male slash community, one of the largest, female-oriented erotic subcultures. I have underway, what is already, the biggest survey of the Anglophone fandom (https://leeds.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/blfandomsurvey) and have, so far, completed around 12 face-to-face and 30 e-mail interviews. This is the first project I have conducted on sexually explicit material and, although I consider myself to be a fujoshi, I am not, otherwise, a user of pornography/sexually explicit material. In fact, this research has presented a huge challenge to me in terms of becoming more comfortable discussing sexual topics and, even more personally, in making my own investment in MxM public. This has meant dealing with feelings of embarrassment and shame, but also of relief in finding and communicating with other women who have a similar erotic fantasy life. However, the project has also made me feel, at times, frankly paranoid because I have been afraid that my BL may contravene UK prohibited images of children legislation (it doesn’t!). What does BL represent for me that I am willing to put myself through this, spend most of my spare time on it, and, hence, is it really ‘research’?

Biography
Anna Madill is Chair in Qualitative Inquiry and Deputy Head of the School of Psychology, University of Leeds, and member of the university Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies. She is Co-Founder and former Chair (2008-11) of the British Psychological Society Qualitative Methods in Psychology Section and is Associated Editor of the British Journal of Clinical Psychology. Anna received British Academy funding (2011-2013) for ‘Understanding Japanese Boys' Love manga from a UK perspective’ from which she has three book chapters in press, made 12 conference presentations (including a keynote) and many other presentations to academics and the public, and, in relation to which, she has been consulted by the BBC.

Background: Human female orgasm is a vexed question in the field, while there is credible evidence of cryptic female choice that has many hallmarks of orgasm in other species. Our initial goal was to produce a proof of concept for
allowing females to study an aspect of infertility in a home setting, specifically by aligning the study of human infertility and increased fertility with the study of other mammalian fertility. In the latter case - the realm of oxytocin-mediated sperm retention mechanisms seems to be at work in terms of ultimate function (differential
sperm retention) while the proximate function (rapid transport or cervical tenting) remains unresolved.
Method: A repeated measures design using an easily taught technique in a natural setting was used. Participants were a small (n=6), non-representative sample of females. The introduction of a sperm-simulant combined with an orgasm-producing technique using a vibrator/home massager and other easily supplied materials.
Results: The sperm flowback (simulated) was measured using a technique that can be used in a home setting. There was a significant difference in simulant retention between the orgasm (M = 4.08, SD = 0.17) and non-
20 orgasm (M = 3.30, SD = 0.22) conditions; t (5) = 7.02, p = 0.001. Cohen’s d = 3.97, effect size r = 0.89. This
indicates a medium to small effect size.
Conclusions: This method could allow females to test an aspect of sexual response that has been linked to
lowered fertility in a home setting with minimal training. It needs to be replicated with a larger sample size.

Research links explicit sexuality (e.g., physical attraction and pleasure) to high testosterone (T) and nurturance (loving contact) to low T. Engaging in sexual fantasy, which can include explicit sexual and nurturant elements, increases T in women but not in men. We examined whether individual differences in the explicit sexual and nurturant content of fantasy were linked with T or with estradiol (E2). In addition, we explored whether fantasy content differed or overlapped by gender/sex. Participants (26 women, 23 men) provided saliva samples for hormones before and after imagining a self-defined positive sexual encounter and responding to open-ended questions about the situation they imagined. We systematically content-coded responses for explicit sexual and nurturant content. In men, lower inclusion of nurturant content predicted larger T responses to fantasy. Fantasy content was not linked with T in women or with E2 in women or men. Women and men did not differ significantly in explicit sexual and nurturant content. Our findings suggest that individual experiences of fantasy as more or less nurturant affect T in men, provide support for the Steroid/Peptide Theory of Social Bonds, and highlight the value of integrating hormones and content analysis to investigate research questions relevant to sexuality and gender/sex.

"Introduction. Research on postpartum sexuality has focused primarily on mothers, though new findings suggest that relational perceptions may have a strong influence over sexual desire and behavior. Little investigation exists regarding sexuality in partners of postpartum women. Additionally, recent findings point to the importance of a partner’s sexuality for postpartum women’s perceptions of their own sexuality in this time.

Aims. The goal of this research was to explore women’s partners’ sexuality in the early postpartum phase taking into account psychosocial context.

Methods. Partners (N = 114; 95 men, 18 women, 1 unspecified) of postpartum women completed a retrospective online questionnaire about their sexuality during the 3 months following their youngest child’s birth.

Main Outcome Measures. Primary measures included sexual desire (Sexual Desire Inventory), latency to sexual behavior, and enjoyment and initiation of sexual behavior. Other psychosocial variables were investigated: partners’ perceptions of the birth mother’s sexual desire, perceptions of the birth experience (Questionnaire Measuring Attitudes About Labor and Delivery), postpartum stress (Perceived Stress Scale), body image self-consciousness (Body Image Self-Consciousness Scale), social support (Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support),
fatigue, and experiences surrounding breastfeeding.

Results. Partners reported most frequent engagement in intercourse in the postpartum period, earliest engagement
in masturbation, and highest enjoyment of receiving oral sex compared with other sexual activities. Partners’ sexual desire was not correlated with the psychosocial variables measured in the study. Findings for partners’ sexuality were similar by gender, except for perceptions of social support and likelihood to engage in intercourse.

Conclusions. This study provided a novel perspective on the study of postpartum sexuality by investigating physical and psychosocial influences on the experiences of partners of parous women. Given parallels between sexuality reported by partners in this study and by birth mothers in past studies, this study provided evidence that sexuality in the postpartum period may be experienced similarly, highlighting the social and relational nature of the postpartum."

This article considers the gendered emergence of a modern vocabulary of sex at the turn of the last century. Focusing on the meanings and uses of the concept of 'sexual inversion' in  sexology and New Woman writing, it shows that where the discourse of male inversion was tied to the emergence of sexual identity, female inversion was considered a social issue including in feminist writings which critiqued the unequal status of women in Victorian society.

Science reflects cultural practices and also occurs within them, and this ‘knowledge-culture’ is constituted by the public imaginary (general understandings and perceptions of phenomena) and the ‘scientific imaginary’ (the ability to envision scientific questions, methods, meanings and material possibilities for studying phenomena). In this feminist science laboratory case study, I argue that nomenclature contributes to epistemologies
of ignorance, delimiting knowledge-culture and the scientific imaginary about vaginal fluid, which has implications for understandings of women’s bodies as well as sexual health potentials. Abject terms for vaginal fluid (vaginal mucous; vaginal discharge) preclude its existence in the scientific imaginary except as passive signs of dis-ease. I argue for a gendered abjectness of vaginal fluid’s names by situating it next to fluids
that are tied to other mucosal surfaces, thus showing that even when gender is not involved in the name, gendered knowledge-culture can still affect science. I discuss how my ongoing lab research in social neuroendocrinology attends to the immune properties of vaginal fluid and positions women’s bodies as agentic, taking seriously the promise that ‘vaginal fluid’ might afford.

Over the past fifty years, sexuality has been marked by an increasing interest in sexual and reproductive health. This progression can be seen in changes in legislation, in social norms, in sexual practices and in gender relations. It is also characterised by the introduction and use of various technical products, which have a direct impact on both sexual activity and its consequences: contraception, methods of sexually transmissible infections prevention and treatment for male impotence. Irrespective
of their usefulness or their technical effectiveness, these different products are endowed with a symbolic identity that reflects dominant representations of sexuality and the sexual roles of men and women. An analysis of the way in which these products are used illustrates how they have contributed to the development of scenarios of sexual relations, by distributing specific roles to men and to women. Three models of sexuality associated with each product have been analysed: liberated sexuality, protected sexuality, and functional sexuality.
Key words : Sexuality. Contraception. HIV prevention. Sexual disorders. Sexual health

Over the past fifty years, sexuality has been marked by an increasing interest in sexual and reproductive health. This progression can be seen in changes in legislation, in social norms, in sexual practices and in gender relations. It is also characterised by the introduction and use of various technical products, which have a direct impact on both sexual activity and its consequences: contraception, methods of sexually transmissible infections prevention and treatment for male impotence. Irrespective
of their usefulness or their technical effectiveness, these different products are endowed with a symbolic identity that reflects dominant representations of sexuality and the sexual roles of men and women. An analysis of the way in which these products are used illustrates how they have contributed to the development of scenarios of sexual relations, by distributing specific roles to men and to women. Three models of sexuality associated with each product have been analysed: liberated sexuality, protected sexuality, and functional sexuality.
Key words : Sexuality. Contraception. HIV prevention. Sexual disorders. Sexual health

Wie lässt sich das statische Konzept »Grenzen« in Bezug auf Sexualitäten und Geschlechter aktualisieren? Die junge Sexualwissenschaft fokussiert auf »Grenzverschiebungen«, um die dynamischen Aspekte der Geschlechterordnung und der sexuellen Verhältnisse aufzuzeigen. Die hier versammelten Arbeiten beschäftigen sich einerseits mit dem Status quo geschlechtlich-sexueller Lebenswelten und bemühen sich andererseits um eine Weiterentwicklung der kritischen Sexualwissenschaft und -therapie. Das Spektrum der behandelten Themen reicht von psychosozialen Belastungen von Trans*personen über die sozialen Implikationen des Hygieneregimes, das Safer-Sex-Präventionsprogrammen zugrunde liegt, bis zu psychosexuellen Besonderheiten von Männern, die einen sexuellen Missbrauch begangen haben. In den Texten wird sichtbar, wie der wissenschaftliche Nachwuchs vielversprechende Forschungsprojekte entwirft und präsentiert. Die Beiträge bieten Diskussionsstoff und Anregungen, die zu einer Aktualisierung des etablierten Kanons beitragen.

Mit Beiträgen von Louisa Arnold, Elena Bennecke, Maika Böhm, Wiebke Driemeyer, Benjamin Gedrose, Armin Hoyer, Verena Klein, Erik Meyer, David García Núñez, Gesine Plagge, Maria Pössel, Lisa Rustige, Daniel Turner und Christoph Zürn