Men and women sin in very different ways, according to an article published in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper.

In an article headlined: “The Unsuspecting Resources of Weakness”, Monsignor Wojciech Giertych, personal theologian to Pope Benedict XVI and the Papal household, says there is “no sexual equality when it comes to sin“.

Addressing the century-old question of why people sin, Monsignor Giertych offers the simple and straightforward answer that women are prouder than men, but men are more lustful.

Details of the methodology are sketchy, and little information is given as to how the conclusion was reached, but it seems that this view was formed by his own experience of the Confessional, and was supported by an analysis of confessional data carried out by 95-year-old Father Roberto Busa, a Jesuit scholar who has also carried out a computerised study of the works of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Monsignor Giertych said:

When one looks at vices not from the view of their opposition to grace but at the difficulty they create, it is clear that men experience them differently from women.

Traditionally, the seven deadly sins are considered: Pride, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Greed and Sloth (although they are not actually listed anywhere in the Bible) – As opposed to Chastity, Temperance, Charity, Diligence, Patience, Kindness and Humility – However, in the Middle Ages, Pope Gregory I drew them into the Catholic Church’s teachings, and they were also widely spread by Dante Alighieri in his Divine Comedy.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that “immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into Hell“. So, Catholics are supposed to confess their sins to a priest at least once a year, whereupon the priest absolves them in God’s name.

The full list of sins, as ranked by the study, is as follows:

Posted by Jonathan as Psychology, Sociology at 12:40 AM BST

No Comments »

Australian researchers have made an interesting discovery: Consuming alcohol improves, rather than damages, men’s performance in the bedroom.

Dr Kew-Kim Chew, of Western Australia’s Keogh Institute for Medical Research, studied 1,580 Australian men and found that drinkers reported up to 30 percent fewer problems than teetotallers.

The finding, due to be published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine and presented to an international conference in April, should reassure men who worry that drinking might cause a type of erectile dysfunction known as “Brewer’s droop”.

More surprisingly, the research found that binge drinkers had lower rates of erectile dysfunction than those who never drank (although it’s important to note that this type of drinking can cause other health problems).

Lead author Dr Kew-Kim Chew said men who drank within safe guidelines appeared to have the best erectile function:

We found that, compared to those who have never touched alcohol, many people do benefit from some alcohol, including some people who drink outside the guidelines.

Even after other risk factors were excluded, Weekend drinkers, High-risk drinkers and those who exceeded alcohol-intake guidelines had lower rates of erectile dysfunction than those who drank one day a week or less. However, ex-drinkers had the highest risk.

Dr Chew said:

These findings suggest a favourable association between low-risk alcohol drinking and [positive] erectile function.

According to Australian National Health and Medical Research Council guidelines, low-risk drinking for men is defined as up to four drinks a day, for up to five days a week.

Dr Chew noted that he had patients with erectile dysfunction who had been previously been told to stop drinking completely, and commented that the latest finding should prevent them compounding their problem by feeling “guilty and stressed” about present or past drinking.

He concludes there is “no justification” to advise men with erectile dysfunction and who drink moderately, to stop or reduce their drinking. However, earlier parts of the study, did confirm that men who smoked or suffered heart disease were at higher risk of erectile dysfunction.

Posted by Jonathan as Biology, Sociology at 6:16 PM BST

No Comments »

Recently, there was much amusement in the labs whilst we watched the consternation unfurl, when Scientist’s announced that after re-examining semen samples taken from Vietnam war veterans, they’d discovered that men with higher IQs have better quality sperm.

The Smarty-pants set took this as confirmation that spending your time studying difficult sums or reading Shakespeare trumps working out and spending your spare time developing bulging biceps; whilst the Muscle boys were up in arms, claiming: Everyone knows a good complexion and nice hair are better than a large IQ. Pretty girls only like Athletes and Bodybuilders – therefore Intellectuals must be destined to die lonely and dateless.

The humorous point is that both camps appear to have confused ‘inclusive fitness‘ of an individual as part of a species with ‘personal fitness‘ such as one might see in a Gym. The downside, we believe, is that this misunderstanding encourages a dangerous myth that Evolutionary fitness is simply a matter of grading masculinity, rather than an expression of the human race’s ability to survive as a species.

People with an understanding of current Evolutionary science will realise that a number of factors feed into ‘inclusive fitness‘, whilst both ‘personal fitness‘ and ‘intelligence’ are simply theoretical optimum conditions – i.e. once one reaches a threshold level of personal fitness and intelligence, then any further advances are a bonus, rather than a guarantee that your genes are markedly better than anyone else’s.

Certainly, some women prefer Bodybuilders, and those Bodybuilders will have an advantage with those women. Just like some women prefer Intellectuals, and those Intellectuals will have an advantage with those women.

Clearly, the person who has trouble catching their breath after running for a bus is certainly at a disadvantage to the rest of the population, whilst the person that can’t work out how to make sense of the Bus timetable is also at a disadvantage to the rest of the population. However, human beings live in an altruistic society, where we usually co-operate to help each other out.

Thus, if I’m not personally fit enough to lift heavy objects all day, I can pay someone to do it for me. Likewise, if I’m not intelligent enough to fix my broken computer, then I can pay someone to do that for me too.

Inclusive fitness and intraspecific competition

Charles Darwin recognized that the interests of individuals are very often synchronized with the interests of their larger groups. As an example, consider the amazing visual acuity of a Hawk, which, at a distance of about a quarter of a mile, can spot a motionless brown mouse in a pile of dry leaves – Eyesight is of paramount importance to hawks, which find food by cruising at great distances above ground level in search of rodents and other small prey.

The fact that hawks see so well is not an accident. The bird’s complex optical hardware and neural software has evolved over millions of generations, in which those Hawks with the best eyesight caught more prey, and hence left more offspring, than their more nearsighted conspecifics. So, the ability to see clearly at long distances is a trait that is advantageous not only to individual Hawks but also to Hawks as a species. Thus, if all hawks had sharper eyesight, the entire species will fare better.

The same is also true of very many other traits and abilities – if all Cheetahs could run a little faster, Cheetahs as a species would fare better, if all Chimps were more intelligent, Chimps as a species would fare better; if all Sharks had a keener sense of smell, Sharks as a species would fare better, etc. etc.

However, there are many other traits and abilities, for which this pattern does not hold.¹ Consider, for instance, the antlers of the male Elk. Natural selection has favoured individual males with larger antlers because the broader an individual male’s rack of antlers the more likely he was to prevail against his rivals for reproductive access to females. Over millions of generations, this advantage led to a gradual increase in the size of Elk antlers, and today the antlers on some males span almost five feet. But, whereas larger antlers help any given male gain advantage over others, they confer no similar advantage for male Elk as a group. In fact, the contrary is true, they are positively harmful.

The reason is that broader antlers make it more difficult for Elk to escape from predators. Once a pack of wolves chases a male Elk with a five foot rack of antlers into the woods, the Elk is trouble. Twist and turn though he might, he simply cannot transport these appendages through trees quickly enough. This is a serious disadvantage, and it might seem that natural selection could not possibly have favoured Elk who were thus encumbered.

Weighing against this disadvantage, however, was the fact that Elk with the broadest antlers had access to more females and, despite their briefer lives, therefore left more offspring. As long as this advantage was more than sufficient to compensate for the increased risk of death from predation, natural selection continued to favour bigger antlers. Eventually however, the advantage from further increases in size no longer outweighed this risk, and from that point antlers grew no further.

The important message of this story is that even though all Elk would clearly do better if every animal’s rack of antlers were trimmed by half, it would not be advantageous for any single animal to trim his antlers. Thus, if a mutant male were born with half-sized antlers, he would be at a hopeless disadvantage in the competition for mates. He might survive to a ripe old age, but in evolution what counts is not how long he lives but the number of grandchildren he leaves; and a mutant with stubby little antlers simply will not leave many grandchildren.

Similar forces appear to explain the exuberant plumage of the Peacock. Drab Peahens favour males with the longest and brightest tail feathers¹. And, experimenters have shown that males with artificially augmented tail feathers are almost always much more successful than other males in acquiring mates. The most common hypothesis for this is that a vibrant tail display is a credible signal that the male is in robust health; a view that is supported by findings that plumage deteriorates sharply in animals with heavy parasite loads.² The logic is that females are likely to have more grandchildren if they mate with males having genes promoting parasite resistance.

In any event, once Peahens came to favour Peacocks with longer tail feathers, natural selection relentlessly began culling males with the shortest displays in each generation, leaving us with modern Peacocks whose tails can reach five feet or more. But like larger antlers on male Elk, longer tail feathers entail costs. They make males not only less able to escape predators but also more likely to attract their attention in the first place. Peacocks as a group would fare much better if each bird’s tail display were shorter by half. Yet, any lone mutant with a shorter tail display would be at a hopeless disadvantage.

Sexual dimorphism (significant sex differences in size within a species) provides another vivid illustration of the conflict between individual and group. Many Bull elephant Seals, for example, weigh over a ton, and can be more than twice as big as their female counterparts. This enormous difference in size was driven by the advantage enjoyed by slightly larger males in their battles with one another for access to females. The victorious males typically command large harems, thereby eliminating a majority of their rivals from the reproductive sweepstakes.

But, whereas size is advantageous in the contest for reproductive access to females, it is disastrous in numerous other ways. It increases caloric requirements, with mature Bulls needing to eat hundreds of pounds of fish each day just to stay alive. It is also disadvantageous in that the victorious breeding males are so large that they sometimes crush their females to death during the act of mounting them. The largest animals may also be more prone to a variety of orthopaedic problems.

As with the evolution of antlers and tail feathers, the advantages of becoming slightly larger eventually came into balance with the disadvantages, and the weight of surviving males stabilized. As before, however, there is nothing attractive about this outcome from the perspective of male Elephant Seals as a group. Each animal would fare much better if all were considerably smaller. The most able fighting males would still gain access to the most females, while most of the disadvantages of excessive size would be avoided. Yet, here too, the problem cannot be solved at the individual level. A smaller mutant would gain the advantages of not needing so much food and not crushing any female he mounted – but these advantages would be swamped by the fact that he would be unlikely to gain access to any females in the first place.

All these examples illustrate Darwin’s central insight that natural selection can, and often does, favour traits that increase the reproductive fitness of individuals at the expense of larger groups. If a trait serves the interests of both individuals and the groups to which they belong, so much the better. But when conflicts arise, individual interests often prevail.

Armed with this insight, modern Behavioural Biologists have begun to make sense of a long list of animal behaviours that are obviously counterproductive at the species level. Thus, in many of the more polygynous species, such as Lions, a successor’s first act on defeating a dominant male is to kill all the young offspring left behind. This practice accelerates the fertility cycle of the lactating females, and thus serves the genetic interests of the conquering male. Yet it is utterly wasteful from the perspective of Lions as a group.

When a dog and his rival each want the same bone, each animal must make a strategic decision in which contextual cues prove crucial. Should he fight for the bone, or defer to his rival and go off in search of another? The typical dog follows a simple decision rule: If his rival is considerably bigger than he is, he defers – if they are roughly the same size, he might fight, depending upon how hungry he is – although if his rival is smaller, he will almost certainly fight, or a least make it known that he intends to.

Thus, it is important that dogs devote scarce neurological capacity to the support of an elaborate mechanism that raises the hackles on their backs whenever they face off against rivals, and as well as this, they must also be able to reach a quick and accurate judgment about how large their rival is.

Hackle-raising makes the animal appear larger, and is therefore more likely to dissuade his rival from fighting. Even though all dogs raise their hackles, only one dog in any pair can be larger than his rival. Dogs as a group would fare better if the neurological capacity that supports hackle-raising were used instead to support better hearing or a keener sense of smell.

Baby birds in their nest must squawk themselves hoarse because their parents make the (not unreasonable) assumption that the bird who squawks loudest must be most in need of food. In the end, of course, there are only so many worms to go around, and nestlings as a group would fare better if all squawked more softly. Yet any individual chick that showed restraint would be much more likely than his siblings to starve.

Intraspecific competition in Human social dynamics

This Darwinian theme of conflict between the interests of individuals and groups also plays out amongst human affairs in countless ways, both trivial and profound. Here is a selection of examples:

Shouting at parties: Whenever large numbers of people gather for conversation in a closed space, the ambient noise level rises rapidly. After attending such events, people often complain of sore throats and hoarse voices from having had to speak so loudly in order to be heard. If all the guests spoke at normal voice levels, they would avoid these problems. And, because the overall noise level would be lower, they would all hear just as well as when they all shout at one another.

So why shout? The problem again stems from the difference between the incentives seen by individuals and those seen by the larger group. Everyone starts by speaking at normal levels, but because of the crowded conditions, it’s difficult for conversation partners to hear one another. The natural solution from the point of view of you and your conversation partner is to simply raise your voices a bit – but that is also the natural solution for all other conversation pairs – and when all raise their voices, the ambient noise level rises, so that no one hears any better than before.

This is certainly wasteful, but here again there is precious little that individuals acting alone can do about it, since if any single conversation pair were to lower their voices while others didn’t, they wouldn’t be able to hear anything. Nobody wants to go home with raw vocal cords, but we humans apparently prefer that cost to the alternative of not being able to engage in conversation.

Anabolic steroid use: The offensive linemen of the Dallas Cowboys, when they won the Super Bowl in 1996, averaged 333 pounds per man, and 300-pounders on the front lines of other teams have become the rule rather than the exception. In the 1970s, by contrast, offensive linemen in the National Football League averaged barely 280 pounds, and the all-decade linemen of the 1940s averaged only 229 pounds.³ One reason that American football players of modern times are so much heavier is that player’s salaries have increased sharply over the past few decades, which has led to much more intense competition for the positions. Size and strength are the two cardinal virtues of an offensive lineman and, other things being equal, the job will always go to the larger and stronger of two rivals. Then, because size and strength, in turn, can be enhanced by the consumption of anabolic steroids, individual players have compelling incentives to consume these drugs.

Yet, if all American football players take steroids, the rank ordering of players by size and strength – and therefore the question of who lands the plum jobs – will be largely unaffected. However, since the consumption of anabolic steroids entails risk of serious long-term health consequences (heightened aggressiveness, severe psychosis, circulatory disorders, testicular atrophy, abnormal sperm morphology, and possibly a variety of Cancers⁴) American football players as a group are clearly worse off if they consume these drugs.

Military arms races: The frantic efforts of nations to acquire more weapons than their rivals is one of the most costly instances of the conflict between individual and collective interests. From each individual nation’s point of view, the worst possible outcome is not to buy armaments while its rivals do. Yet when all nations spend more on weapons, no one is any more secure than they were before.

Most nations recognize the importance of maintaining military parity, and the result is all too often a wasteful escalation of expenditure on arms. All nations would spend much less on weapons if they could make their military spending decisions collectively. And then with the money thus saved, each side could spend more on things that promote, rather than threaten, human well-being.

Overharvesting: Disparities between individual and group incentives have also led to over-fishing of coastal waters, overgrazing of common pasturelands, and over-cutting of forests. The problem is not that individual fishermen don’t know that their activities threaten the viability of coastal fisheries; or that individual hunters don’t recognize that Rhinos are in danger of extinction; or that individual loggers don’t realise that valuable ecosystems are often destroyed by clear-cutting. In each case, individuals know all too well what the collective consequences of their actions will be. Yet when property rights in the use of valuable resources are not clearly defined and enforced, no individual is in a position to take effective action. If a Rhino isn’t killed by one hunter, he will simply be killed by another; fish not taken by one boat will be taken by another; and logs left standing by one company will be quickly claimed by another. In its various forms, the over-harvesting problem has been called “The tragedy of the commons”⁵.

High-heels and Cosmetic surgery: In species in which males invest little in the care of offspring (probably the majority of mammals) males typically battle one another for access to females. But in a small number of species – including Human beings and a handful of other species in which males invest more heavily in the care of offspring – the pattern is somewhat different. In these species, competition amongst males is still common, but we also see competition among females for males. And here again, the Darwinian logic is simple: Whereas females in most species can expect males to contribute no more than their genes and can therefore afford to sit back and let males slug it out, Human females stand to gain a great deal if they can monopolize the services of a relatively able caregiver – and thus, women have an incentive to compete.

Competition amongst Human females plays out in various different ways in different cultures, but invariably at least some aspects of it are wasteful. So, for example, in cultures in which height is viewed as attractive, it’s common for women to wear high-heeled shoes. In cultures in which large eyes are valued, most women wear makeup that makes their eyes look larger. In cultures in which youth is considered attractive, most women use makeup to conceal signs of ageing. In cultures in which body hair is considered unattractive, women may submit to electrolysis treatments. And in cultures that place a premium on large breasts, many women undergo surgical breast augmentation.

All these steps involve costs – sometimes very high costs. Even apparently innocuous actions like wearing high heels can cause foot, ankle and back injuries, tendon shrinkage, and misalignment of internal organs. In a small but not-negligible proportion of cases, cosmetic surgery leads to serious infection, disfigurement, and even death. And yet in each case the advantages that people seek are, to a considerable extent, mutually offsetting. Thus, the height advantage that someone gains from wearing high-heeled shoes is neutralized once high heels become the norm. Yet, as with Military arms races, these costs often cannot be avoided without incurring even greater ones.

To summarise, nobody gets any genetic advantage from spending hours lifting weights, filling out Crosswords or Suduko puzzles. Therefore, it’s only worth continuing those activities if you enjoyed them as pastimes, in the first instance. You may, however, be interested to learn instead that according to the Mayo Clinic, men wanting to make sure their sperm are healthy, are recommended to take a daily multivitamin that contains Selenium, Zinc and Folic acid, since these nutrients are important for sperm function.

References:

1. Cronin, H., The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today (Cambridge University Press, 1991)
2. Hamilton, W. D., M. Zuk, ’Heritable true fitness and bright birds: a role for parasites?’, Science (1982), 218:384-87
3. Noonan, D., ‘Really Big Football Players‘, New York Times Magazine (December 14, 1997), 64ff
4. Windsor, R.E., D. Dumitru, ‘Anabolic steroid use by athletes: How serious are the health hazards?’, Postgraduate Medicine (1988), 84:37-49
5. Hardin, G., ‘The Tradegy of the Commons‘, Science (1968), 162:1243-48

Posted by Jonathan as Sociobiology, Sociology at 5:20 AM BST

No Comments »

There are many theories about the links between sex and food, but researchers in Japan have just came up with a surprise new finding – young people who miss their breakfast tend to lose their virginity earlier.

In a study involving around 3,000 participants, people who did not regularly eat breakfast when in their early teens said they lost their virginity at an average age of 17.5, versus an overall average age of 19 for all Japanese.

For those who started the day with a proper meal, when they were younger, the average age of their first sexual experience was 19.4 years.

The study, backed by Japan’s health ministry, was aimed at finding ways to curb unwanted pregnancies, and examined sexual experiences as well as family relationships and lifestyle habits of Japanese males and females aged 16 to 49 years old. It concluded that a stable home life discouraged early sex.

Kunio Kitamura, Executive Director of the Japan Family Planning Association, which conducted the survey, said:

Those unhappy with their parents (such as for not preparing breakfast) may tend to find a way to release their frustration by having sex

If children don’t feel comfortable in their family environment, they tend to go out.

Additionally, young people who start having sex early tend to miss breakfast because they return home late.

Japan has one of the world’s lowest birth-rates as more young people put off starting families, finding them a burden on their careers or lifestyles.

The survey also showed that the average age of first-time sex was lower for those who found their mother annoying.

People who said they disliked their mother had sex for the first time at an average age of 16, whilst the average age for those who appreciated their mother was 19, Kitamura noted.

Posted by Jonathan as Anthropology, Sociology at 2:51 AM BST

No Comments »

It’s well known that members of the opposite sex appear to become more attractive the more you drink. But, according to a new study, women who drink even moderately experience a reduced ability to rate attractiveness in male faces, even after they are sober.

The research, carried out by Dr Kirsten Oinonen of Lakehead University, in Canada, put 45 young women classed as typical, non-alcoholic drinkers (who consumed less than 40 drinks per month) through a battery of tests, including an exercise on facial symmetry. In this test, the women were presented with 60 pairs of male faces. One in each pair was more symmetrical than the other, and the women had to identify it in each of the pairs.

The results showed that the more a woman had drunk during the previous six months, the less well she was able to judge facial symmetry. And, even women who had drunk the equivalent of just five drinks a month scored less in the test than those who had consumed no drinks – with each additional drink leading to a reduced score on the symmetry test.

Both sexes find facial symmetry attractive, since the more symmetric the features, the more likely the person is to be free from genetic defects, and therefore they are more likely to be a worthy mate. Facial symmetry is thus considered one of the key markers of attractiveness, and plays an important role in mate selection.

Dr Oinonen said:

My study suggests that sober women who drink alcohol are less able to perceive facial symmetry when sober.

When sober, these women are worse at judging facial symmetry, and therefore may find less attractive men more attractive. Given that symmetry is associated with attractiveness of faces, my study does suggest the possibility that alcohol intoxication may decrease facial symmetry perception, and make people look more attractive.

This is the first study to look at this issue. It suggests that as typical alcohol consumption increases in young women, facial symmetry perception performance decreases.

The researchers say the results suggest alcohol has a long term effect on the brain. They believe it could effect the brain’s structure in some way, reducing its visual perception abilities. But, it is not known how long term the effects are or whether they are permanent.

Dr Oinonen added:

Whether or not any damage or deficits are permanent is hard to tell at this point.

Posted by Jonathan as Psychology, Sociology at 10:53 AM BST

No Comments »

When it comes to having sex, first-born girls tend to lose their virginity at a later age than their younger sisters, according to new Australian research.

The study, which was presented to an Australian Society for Human Biology conference recently, was carried out by researcher Fritha Milne, from the University of Western Australia, who examined the sexual appetites and behaviours of siblings.

Previous studies have shown that firstborns are more likely to be confident and family oriented, whilst middle-born children have the toughest time. Now, it seems there are also differences when it comes to reproductive strategies, including the age at first sexual intercourse, first pregnancy and first birth, with the middle-born children standing out in the survey results.

Middle-born males have sex for the first time at a younger age than their brothers, and last-born females are younger when they have sex for the first time. But middle-born children of both sexes tend to have fewer children of their own, the report suggested, with females 2.6 times more likely to fall pregnant at any given age.

Milne said that her work confirmed the first five years of a child’s life are important:

During this time the young must elicit support and resources from the parents,

If there are any siblings, then the siblings have to compete for the limited resources of the parents.

In order to maximise the resources that the children get they have to find themselves a different niche within the family to get those resources from the parents.

She went on to explain that the oldest children tend to align themselves with the “parental status quo,” which partly explains why they’re more conservative in their sexual choices.

Posted by Jonathan as Biology, Sociology at 9:09 PM BST

No Comments »

When it comes to getting intimate, foreplay is just the start, and now a new study has concluded that it’s what comes after sex that matters most to women.

The research, published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, polled more than 5,600 women in Japan, and found that almost half of the respondents (49%) wanted a longer continuation of intimacy with their partner after sex.

That compared with 44 percent who said they wanted longer foreplay and 38 percent of women who said they wanted longer actual intercourse.

Despite this finding, 38.8 percent of respondents said that they had never discussed their favourite sex practises with their partner.

The study summed up that:

Women consider longer foreplay and after play to be more important

and suggested:

[W]omen would benefit by being more forthright in expressing their sexual desires to their partners.

Additionally, more than 30 percent of the women surveyed also rated their partner’s performance in bed as either “very selfish” (6.9%), or “selfish” (25.5%).

Posted by Jonathan as Sociology at 3:47 PM BST

No Comments »

In new research from the ‘Institut fuer Kondom-Beratung‘, 10,477 men from 25 European Union member countries were asked to measure the length and girth of their manhood in its erect state.

The results were that the survey found men around Europe vary dramatically, with the French, famous for their letters, who measured up with the longest and thickest penis, whilst Greeks had the smallest average measurements.

Jan Vinzenz Krause, the institute’s director, who caused a stir two year ago with a prototype “spray-on condom”, refused to comment about how honest he thought the Frenchmen had been in reporting the data. Only noting “The purpose of the survey was to educate teenagers about the importance of effective contraception.”

Posted by Jonathan as Anthropology, Sociology at 12:05 AM BST

4 Comments »

Women’s lack of interest in sex is so common that it should be considered the norm, according to experts, who have conducted some new research.

Psychologist, Professor Marita McCabe, of Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, studied 400 women, and found that the normal way in which they experienced desire was once they were already engaged in sexual activity.

Sixty 60 percent of the women described their libido as unusually low, with most reportedly only getting in the mood for sex, after the intimacy had begun. Further, many women did not realise that it was normal for their sex drive to have highs and lows.

Professor McCabe said:

In movies, on TV, in magazines what you see is sexual women, women wanting sex, engaging in sex and that seems the norm.

Women who have low levels of desire think there is something wrong with them.

But if you’re working hard, if you’ve got kids, if you haven’t got much family support, it’s not surprising you’re not interested in sex at that time.

That is a perfectly normal response. We need to redesign what is abnormal

She went on to explain that fatigue, stress, work and children were major passion-killers:

Those factors really reduced women’s interest in spontaneous sex, as well as the extent to which they experienced desire in the actual sexual situation.

Continuing that another major turn-off was a lack of communication and consideration from a partner:

If a man wants sexual interaction then there’s a whole lot of things he can do that have nothing to do with sex. Washing dishes can be foreplay.

Professor McCabe and researcher Denisa Goldhammer will be further exploring women’s experiences of sexual desire in an online survey of over-18s in heterosexual relationships.

Posted by Jonathan as Psychology, Sociology at 6:48 PM BST

1 Comment »

Often Advertisers make the argument that thinness sells, and so that’s why they use very slim models.

However, Australian Psychologist Phillippa Diedrichs, at the University of Queensland, Australia, has conducted the first empirical research into how people perceive advertisements, as they relate to the size of the model, and how willing those consumers would be to buy products, based on the size of the model.

In the study, Diedrichs created a series of mock adverts for underwear, shampoo and a party dress. One group of adverts utilizing a size eight model, with the other group featured a size 12 woman.

Then, when these ads were shown to more than 300 young people, who were asked to rate how likely they would be to buy the products in the advertisements, and how they felt about their own body image after seeing the adverts. Diedrichs found no difference in the likelihood of respondents buying the advertised products, relative to whether they had seen the adverts featuring the skinnier model versus the ad showing the bigger woman. And, further, both men and women rated each set of advertisements as equally effective.

However, women who saw the size 12 models felt significantly better about their own bodies in comparison to those who saw the thinner models.

Ms Diedrichs explained that her research offered implications that could promote positive body image, saying:

It is often argued that only thin models will sell. However, my research indicates that average-size models may be just as effective in advertisements and that many consumers actually want to see more realistic models.

My research provides an evidence-base for this, by demonstrating that presenting more average-sized models in the media has the potential to improve body image.

 

Posted by Jonathan as Psychology, Sociology at 9:19 PM BST

No Comments »