Sex Positive

Men and women get caught up in their own needs and then project those needs onto everyone around them. Women see men as cold and brutish because they expect them to have the same need for connection that they have. Men see women as manipulative and deceitful because they assume women use sex as a tool for self-esteem like they do. In both cases, they’re wrong and mischaracterizing the people lying naked in front of them.

The idea that men are from Mars and women are from Venus may feel outdated or even downright sexist, but a recent study suggests that there may be some truth to that notion -- at least when it comes to the way men and women tend to view cheating.

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Over at Eros Blog, Bacchus has an interesting discussion about a point raised in Adrienne West's post at Thought Catalog. In West's "true sex story", she writes about her discovery that men like po...

Examining the what in what do you desire? provides deeper understanding to the nuances of the motivation behind sex.

Some octogenarians recently told the Pope that sex is the key to marital success--and research shows they're right

Young men who take abstinence pledges have trouble adjusting to sexual norms when they become husbands

• Black women write back the most. Whether it’s due to talkativeness, loneliness, or a sense of plain decency, black women are by far the most likely to respond to a first contact attempt. In many cases, their response rate is one and a half times the average, and, overall, black women reply about a quarter more often that other women.
• White men get more responses. Whatever it is, white males just get more replies from almost every group. We were careful to preselect our data pool so that physical attractiveness (as measured by our site picture-rating utility) was roughly even across all the race/gender slices. For guys, we did likewise with height.
• White women prefer white men to the exclusion of everyone else—and Asian and Hispanic women prefer them even more exclusively. These three types of women only respond well to white men. More significantly, these groups’ reply rates tonon-whites is terrible. Asian women write back non-white males at21.9%, Hispanic women at 22.9%, and white women at 23.0%. It’s here where things get interesting, for white women in particular. If you look at the match-by-race table before this one, the “should-look-like” one, you see that white women have an above-average compatibility with almost every group. Yet they only reply well to guys who look like them. There’s more data on this towards the end of the post.

"As a psychiatrist, I’ve seen how intense sexual attraction is notorious for obliterating common sense and intuition in the most sensible people.

Why? Lust is an altered state of consciousness programmed by the primal urge to procreate. Studies suggest that the brain in this phase is much like a brain on drugs. MRI scans illustrate that the same area lights up when an addict gets a fix of cocaine as when a person is experiencing the intense lust of physical attraction. Also in the early stage of a relationship, when the sex hormones are raging, lust is fueled by idealization and projection–you see what you hope someone will be or need them to be–rather than seeing the real person, flaws and all."