| New Survey Shows More Women Having Wilder Sex, Watching Porn |
The survey, done by the English Netmums website, found three-quarters of women having less sex because of longer work hours, but when they do have sex, they’re much more adventurous when compared to last year’s survey, TheSun.co.uk reported.
The study shows 76 percent of women use porn, that’s a 10 percent rise from last year’s survey of women who admitted watching porn with their partners.
The most popular format is online porn, which is watched by 61 percent of couples.
Just one couple in 20 looks at magazines, while 18 percent watch porn DVD’s.
The survey of 4,200 women also revealed four in five women like to dress up and indulge in role play.
A French maid uniform is used by 42 percent of women, followed by nurses uniform, while 16 percent of couples like the policewoman uniform.
More than half of the women said they use sex toys in the bedroom to add excitement.
"Our survey shows they are taking control in the bedroom," Netmums founder Siobhan Freegard said. "They know what to do to get their sex lives back on track and are not afraid to experiment and introduce new methods to spice things up."
"During this age of multi-tasking, when we all wish there were 25 hours in a day, at least women are going after quality sex when they are having it," Katy Zvolerin, Adam & Eve's public relations director told XBIZ. "That women are willing to experiment more and become more adventurous says a lot. We are finding that themed lingerie, costumes and toys are much more popular than in years past, and a great way to add fun in the bedroom."
Last year’s survey showed more than half weren’t happy with their sex life, but this year more than 60 percent claimed to enjoy a fulfilling sex life.
| http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100204144815.htm |
First Discovery of the Female Sex Hormone Progesterone in a Plant
Leaves of the walnut tree contain progesterone, the female sex hormone, discovered for the first time in a plant. (Credit: iStockphoto)
ScienceDaily (Feb. 7, 2010) — In a finding that overturns conventional wisdom, scientists are reporting the first discovery of the female sex hormone progesterone in a plant. Until now, scientists thought that only animals could make progesterone. A steroid hormone secreted by the ovaries, progesterone prepares the uterus for pregnancy and maintains pregnancy. A synthetic version, progestin, is used in birth control pills and other medications.The discovery is reported in the American Chemical Society's Journal of Natural Products.
"The significance of the unequivocal identification of progesterone cannot be overstated," the article by Guido F. Pauli and colleagues, states. "While the biological role of progesterone has been extensively studied in mammals, the reason for its presence in plants is less apparent." They speculate that the hormone, like other steroid hormones, might be an ancient bioregulator that evolved billions of years ago, before the appearance of modern plants and animals. The new discovery may change scientific understanding of the evolution and function of progesterone in living things. Scientists previously identified progesterone-like substances in plants and speculated that the hormone itself could exist in plants. But researchers had not found the actual hormone in plants until now. Pauli and colleagues used two powerful laboratory techniques, nuclear magnetic resonance and mass spectroscopy, to detect progesterone in leaves of the Common Walnut, or English Walnut, tree. They also identified five new progesterone-related steroids in a plant belonging to the buttercup family.
Genital Herpes Virus Reactivates Widely Throughout Genital Tract
ScienceDaily (Jan. 30, 2010) — Genital herpes caused by a reactivation of herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2) is generally treated as a lesion in one specific area of the genital region. A new study, however, finds that the virus can frequently reactivate throughout the genital tract, an important new concept that could help guide both HSV-2 treatment and prevention. Now available online, the study appears in the Feb. 15 issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases.
In the study, Christine Johnston, MD, MPH, and colleagues at the University of Washington and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle collected daily samples during a 30-day period from seven separate genital sites in four women infected with HSV-2. HSV-2 was detected from more than one anatomic site on 56 percent of days when there was viral shedding -- and on genital surfaces on both sides of the participants' bodies on most days when virus was detected at more than one site.
Using a detailed sampling method and a sensitive assay, the authors showed that both symptomatic and asymptomatic HSV-2 reactivations often occurred at widely spaced regions throughout the genital tract. These reactivations were often on both sides of the body, even though clinical lesions typically emanate from one anatomic spot. The study's findings illustrate an important new concept in HSV-2 pathogenesis, the authors wrote, and may help in developing comprehensive treatment that both suppresses and limits the transmission of HSV-2 infection.
The authors also noted limitations of their study, including a small sample size and the unique features of the study's subjects. For example, all participants had a history of symptomatic genital herpes, and three of the four had acquired HSV-2 infection within the past year, increasing the chances of high viral reactivation and lesion rates. Additionally, although there were a high proportion of days with lesions during the study period, two of the participants who had recently acquired genital herpes contributed the majority of lesion days.
In an accompanying editorial, Edward W. Hook III, MD, of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, called the study's findings "of great potential importance, as they further challenge widely held beliefs regarding genital herpes and, by extension, its management." Many clinicians treat patients with newly diagnosed herpes episodically, managing the signs and symptoms of periodic symptomatic recurrences, Dr. Hook wrote. "From a personal and public health perspective, the biology of the infection suggests that a national campaign for serological testing of those at risk would provide the foundation for more effective efforts to control HSV transmission to others, and that for most sexually active persons with HSV-2 whose sex partners are not known to also be infected, suppressive therapy should be the preferred approach."
Adapted from materials provided by Infectious Diseases Society of America.
| The Screaming O Releases BigO 2 |
The BigO 2 features a top vertically designed clitoral stimulator that offers two vibration options — steady or nine stages of pulsation. As an upgrade to the popular BigO, the BigO 2 features a special 90-degree twist for extra “oomph.”
“The vertical bullet head gives the BigO 2 — and her — a screaming advantage,” said Conde Aumann, The Screaming O representative. “Horizontal can’t cut the mustard quite like the BigO 2 can. Nothing else hits the spot quite like this.”
The BigO 2 also features a separate steady vibration unit located at the bottom of the ring for the “boys.” The dual vibrating cockring also includes replaceable batteries.
“Couples can enjoy the comfortable erection-enhancing power that the original BigO offers, but now the BigO 2 has a special twist that gives something for both him and her to scream about,” The Screaming O partner Keith Caggiano said. “It’s like having an Energizer Bunny in the bedroom — they’ll be going and going all night long.”
The BigO 2 is available in three colors: clear, purple and blue.
The Screaming O BigO 2 dual vibrating erection ring joins the company’s line of disposable and non-disposable vibrating rings and products. To view The Screaming O’s full line, visit TheScreamingO.com.
TV Drama Can Be More Persuasive Than News Program, Study Finds
ScienceDaily (Feb. 11, 2010) — A fictional television drama may be more effective in persuading young women to use birth control than a news-format program on the same issue, according to a new study.
Researchers found that college-age women who viewed a televised drama about a teen pregnancy felt more vulnerable two weeks after watching the show, and this led to more support for using birth control.
However, those who watched a news program detailing the difficulties caused by teen pregnancies were unmoved, and had no change in their intentions to use birth control.
The results show the power that narratives like TV shows can have in influencing people, said Emily Moyer-Gusé, co-author of the study and assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University.
"A message that is hidden inside of a story may overcome some of the resistance people have to being told how to behave," Moyer-Gusé said.
"The impact that dramatized stories have on people's beliefs and intentions depends a lot on the individual viewers, and not just the message -- but our results suggest the effect can be there."
Moyer-Gusé conducted the study with Robin Nabi of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Their research appears in the current issue of the journal Human Communication Research.
The study involved 353 undergraduate students between the ages of 18 and 25. All of them watched one of two programs that focused on the difficulties associated with unplanned teen pregnancies.
Half of the participants watched a program developed by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy to be broadcast on Channel One -- a news program that airs in many U.S. high schools. This program used a news format, and profiled male and female teen parents. The overall message was that teen pregnancy makes life as a young adult more difficult.
The remaining participants watched an episode of the U.S. teen drama, The OC. In this episode, high-school students Ryan and Theresa faced the difficult consequences of an unintended pregnancy.
The programs were pre-tested with other students, who agreed that they both had the same main message concerning the difficulties of teen pregnancy.
Before watching the programs, participants completed questionnaires concerning how often they used some form of birth control if they were sexually active, and their intentions to use birth control over the next year.
Immediately after viewing the programs, participants filled out questionnaires concerning how much they were emotionally involved in the program, how much they identified with the characters, and other issues concerning their response to the programs they viewed.
Two weeks later, they were contacted again and asked about their intentions to use birth control.
The researchers found that male and females had different responses to the programs.
Watching the news-format program had no effect on men's safe-sex intentions two weeks later.
But two weeks after watching The OC, men said they were actually less likely to follow birth control practices than they did before they viewed the program. That was probably because men reported they didn't like the program as much as women did, and didn't identify with the characters, Moyer-Gusé said.
Women had a different reaction to the programs. The news-format program had no effect on their intentions to use birth control. But those who watched The OC episode were more likely to report in two weeks that they planned on taking steps to prevent pregnancy.
The findings revealed some of the underlying mechanisms that made the TV drama persuasive to many women viewers.
Findings showed that viewers who said they identified with the two main characters in The OC episode also felt, when contacted two weeks later, that they were more vulnerable to an unplanned pregnancy. That, in turn, led to greater intentions to use birth control.
"Many of the women participants were able to put themselves in the place of the characters and sense they could end up in a similar situation if they weren't careful," Moyer-Gusé said.
Feeling vulnerable was the key to accepting birth control practices for the women in the study.
"One of the reasons why some people avoid safer sex behaviors is because they feel invulnerable -- they have this optimistic bias that nothing bad will ever happen to them," she said.
"But if you vicariously experience a bad result happening to you by watching a narrative program, that may change behavior in a way that is difficult to achieve through a direct message."
Participants, particularly women, were more likely to be persuaded to use birth control if they felt the program they watched didn't have an overt safe-sex message.
Most people didn't think The OC episode was preaching the use of birth control, but those who did were much less likely to increase their intentions to use birth control, the findings showed.
In addition, those who reported that they reacted to the characters in The OC as if they were friends were also less likely to see an overt message in the show, and were more likely to accept birth control practices.
Moyer-Gusé emphasized that the results don't mean that men aren't persuaded by narratives such as TV dramas.
"The show we chose happened to connect less with the men. But if we picked another topic or another show, I believe a narrative program could also be persuasive to male viewers."
While these results suggest persuasive messages might be better received by people if they are wrapped up in a story, Moyer-Gusé cautions that it isn't always that simple. As the different reactions of men and women
in this study showed, a lot depends on the individual viewers and not just the message.
"The problem with using stories to persuade people is that people can interpret them in different ways. You don't always get the results you expect," she said.
| Web address: |
Herpes simplex virus 2 (HSV-2) typically causes genital herpes, a chronic, life-long, viral infection. Although studies indicate that consistent condom use reduces the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases such as chlamydia and gonorrhea, the effectiveness of preventing the transmission of HSV-2 through condom use is less certain, according to background information in the article.
Emily T. Martin, M.P.H., Ph.D., of Children's Hospital Research Institute and the University of Washington, Seattle, and colleagues analyzed data from six HSV-2 studies to assess the effectiveness of condom use in preventing the virus. The studies included three candidate HSV-2 vaccine studies, an HSV-2 drug study, an observational sexually transmitted infection (STI) incidence study and a behavioral STI intervention study. These yielded results from 5,384 HSV-2-negative individuals (average age 29) at baseline for a combined total of 2,040,894 follow-up days.
More than 66 percent of those who took part in the six studies were male, 60.4 percent were white, 94.1 percent were heterosexual and most reported no prior STIs.
A total of 415 of the individuals acquired HSV-2 during follow-up. "Consistent condom users [used 100 percent of the time] had a 30 percent lower risk of HSV-2 acquisition compared with those who never used condoms," the authors write. "Risk of HSV-2 acquisition decreased by 7 percent for every additional 25 percent of the time that condoms were used during anal or vaginal sex." The risk of acquiring the virus increased significantly with increasing frequency of unprotected sex acts. There were no significant differences found in condom effectiveness between men and women.
"Based on findings of this large analysis using all available prospective data, condom use should continue to be recommended to both men and women for reducing the risk of HSV-2 acquisition," the authors conclude. "Although the magnitude of the protective effect was not as large as has been observed with other STIs, a 30 percent reduction in HSV-2 incidence can have a substantial benefit for individuals as well as a public health impact at the population level."
Funding for this project was provided by grants from the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Journal reference:
- Emily T. Martin, MPH; Elizabeth Krantz, MS; Sami L. Gottlieb, MD, MSPH; Amalia S. Magaret, PhD; Andria Langenberg, MD; Lawrence Stanberry, MD, PhD; Mary Kamb, MD, MPH; Anna Wald, MD, MPH. A Pooled Analysis of the Effect of Condoms in Preventing HSV-2 Acquisition. Arch Intern Med, 2009;169(13):1233-1240 [link]
Revision to the bible of psychiatry, DSM, could introduce new mental disorders
By Rob Stein Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, February 10, 2010; A01
Children who throw too many tantrums could be diagnosed with "temper dysregulation with dysphoria." Teenagers who are particularly eccentric might be candidates for treatment for "psychosis risk syndrome." Men who are just way too interested in sex face being labeled as suffering from "hypersexual disorder."
These are among dozens of proposals being unveiled Wednesday by the American Psychiatric Association in the first complete revision since 1994 of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or "DSM" -- the massive tome that has served as the bible for modern psychiatry for more than half a century.
The product of more than a decade of work by hundreds of experts, the proposed revisions are designed to bring the best scientific evidence to bear on psychiatric diagnoses and could have far-reaching implications, including determining who gets diagnosed as mentally ill, who should get powerful psychotropic drugs, and whether and how much insurance companies will pay for care.
"It not only determines how mental disorders are diagnosed, it can impact how people see themselves and how we see each other," said Alan Schatzberg, the association's president. "It influences how research is conducted as well as what is researched. . . . It affects legal matters, industry and government programs."
The proposals will be debated in an intense process over the next two years, with potentially billions of dollars at stake for pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, government health plans, doctors, researchers and patient advocacy groups.
But perhaps more important, the outcome will help shape which emotions, behaviors, thoughts and personality traits society considers part of the natural spectrum of the human persona and which are considered pathological, requiring treatment and possibly even criminal punishment.
Even before being made public, the proposed changes have been the subject of sometimes bitter debate over whether the process was based on solid scientific evidence and was adequately shielded from influence by the pharmaceutical industry, and whether some critics were driven by financial interests in maintaining the old diagnostic criteria.
Supporters argue that the revisions would make diagnoses more accurate, creating more useful and precise definitions and sometimes reducing the number of psychiatric labels. For example, "autistic disorder" and "Asperger's disorder" would be replaced with a new, single category called "autism spectrum disorders." Critics, however, fear the new diagnoses could unnecessarily stigmatize many people and lead to the unnecessary use of psychiatric medications that can sometimes produce serious side effects.
"By massively pathologizing people under these categories, you tend to put them on an automatic path to medication, even if they are experiencing normal distress," said Jerome C. Wakefield, a professor of social work and psychiatry at New York University.
After being posted on the Internet, which of the proposed changes become final will be determined by a public comment period that will last until April 20, studies to validate some of the changes, further review, and votes by the association's Board of Trustees and Assembly. A final version is expected to be released by May 2013.
"We're mindful of the concern that we don't want to overdiagnose," Schatzberg told reporters during a telephone briefing Tuesday. "We want to, in fact, get an accurate assessment of what the degree of psychopathology might be in the culture."
Among the concerns are proposals to create "risk syndromes" in the hopes that early diagnosis and treatment will stave off the full-blown conditions. For example, the proposals would create a "psychosis risk syndrome" for people who have mild symptoms found in psychotic disorders, such as "excessive suspicion, delusions and disorganized speech or behavior."
"There will be adolescents who are a little odd and have funny ideas, and this will label them as pre-psychotic," said Robert Spitzer, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, who has been one of the most vocal critics of the DSM revision process.
Similarly, a proposal to create a new condition for people at risk for dementia could cause unnecessary anxiety, treatment and other harms, critics said.
"These people will never get long-term-care insurance if they have that on their chart," said Michael B. First, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University.
William Carpenter of the University of Maryland, who chaired the working group that made the risk syndrome recommendation, acknowledged those concerns but said that experts decided that the potential benefits of early intervention warranted the move.
Others expressed concern about the proposals to create new conditions such as "temper dysregulation with dysphoria," or TDD. Supporters say it is intended to counter a huge increase in the number children being treated for bipolar disorder by creating a more specific diagnosis, though critics argued that it would only compound the problem of overtreatment.
"They are close to treating the children like guinea pigs. I think that's appalling and outrageous," said Christopher Lane, author of "Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness." "The APA should be moving to prevent such controversial practices, not encouraging them, as it is doing here."
In addition to classifying the symptoms of grief that many people experience after the death of a loved one as "depression," the proposals include adding "binge eating" and "gambling addiction" as bona fide psychiatric conditions; they also raise the possibility of making "Internet addiction" a future diagnosis. Some critics questioned the proposal to create a "hypersexual disorder."
"How many people with just healthy sex drives will be given that label?" First said.