National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI)

How Many Men Fake Orgasms?

Couple in bed (Nairobi Today)

Couple in bed (Nairobi Today)

That headline made you do a double-take, right? “But…but only women fake it…right?!” No, apparently it’s not just women. (I’ll let that sink in for a moment now that everything in your world has come crashing down.)

A study published last month in a volume of “Sexual and Relationship Therapy” examines whether faking it, and why, is correlated with sexual and relationship satisfaction. Researchers looked at a sample size of 230 men ages 18-29 years old. Men reported faking it on average about 25% of sexual encounters within their current relationship, and mostly within penetrative (a.k.a. vaginal) sex. (Granted, this is self-reported data, so it’s highly possible some men are lying about their frequency of this act.) It’s unclear as to the sexual orientations of the subjects.

Faking orgasms were found to be related to relationship and sexual satisfaction, but could vary with motivation. Men with lower levels of attraction to their partners indicated that they faked it more frequently. But men who were happy with their partners also faked it “to support a partner’s emotional well-being.” Also, men who faked it when they were drunk correlated to higher levels of sexual satisfaction.

These results parallel a 2010 study published in the “Journal of Sex Research” that also examined rates of faking orgasm (though this one looked at faking for both men and women). And the numbers were near-identical: 25% of men reported faking orgasm, with 28% of men reporting that it occurred during penetrative/vaginal sex.

(Side note: each of these studies referred to faking orgasm as “pretend/pretending orgasm.” I tried to use that phrase in this post, but every time I typed it, I started giggling. Because I’m 12 years old.)

These are interesting stats, and definitely not something I knew before. But does this mean we’ll now have a cultural conversation regarding the faking-orgasm gap?

 

 

How Common Are Hermaphroditic Goats?

Hermaphrodite goat (NPR)

Hermaphrodite goat (NPR)

A recent NPR article on a hermaphroditic goat in Gaza spawned the topic for today’s blog post. The article gave this intriguing stat:

When two naturally hornless goats breed, around 1 in 5 offspring is a hermaphrodite.

I decided to look around to see if that was true. NPR didn’t hyperlink or otherwise cite their source, so I had to go at it myself.

The best thing I found was also the oldest: a 1944 study on the relationship between hornless goats (called “polled” in this case) and subsequent hermaphroditic traits. Spanning 20 years, the study examined the various couplings between polled and horned goats. It found that the horns were a recessive (weak) trait, and that 25% of goat offspring from two dissimilar goat partners (one polled and one horned, in this case) would be likely to be hermaphrodites. The study also found that goats that possessed both horns and hermaphroditic traits were rare.

Isn’t it fascinating how diverse nature is?

#ThrowbackThursday: Dr. Alfred Kinsey Lecturing at UC Berkeley, 1949

Dr. Alfred Kinsey lecturing at UC Berkeley, 1949 (The Guardian)

Dr. Alfred Kinsey lecturing at UC Berkeley, 1949 (The Guardian)

Dr. Alfred Kinsey, known to be one of the (if not the) father of modern sexology, lectured to a packed house at the University of California, Berkeley in 1949. This lecture capped off a big decade for him: He began by teaching a class on marriage (attended mostly by women) in which he espoused his beliefs on sexual frankness and equality for both genders. In 1947, he founded the Institute for Sex Research (now called The Kinsey Institute) at Indiana University. The following year, he wrote the breakthrough work “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.”

I couldn’t find any further information on this image. But look how many people are there to hear him speak! I’m sure it helped that his book had sold 200K+ within the first two months of its release. He was truly a rockstar, and I wonder what it would’ve been like to hear him speak.