Sex Aware

The Sex Census 2012, surveyed almost 25,000 people in the UK about their sex lives and claims to be the biggest survey of its kind. Sponsors Ann Summers and Relate both hope to use the data gleaned from the survey to gain a better understanding of what makes the nation tick.

Ann Summers hopes that the partnership and Sex Census will help it appeal to a broader audience and make sure the brand is associated with the serious side of a healthy sex life. Relate hoped to broaden perceptions of its brand and services beyond relationship counselling to include sex therapy. Both parties hope to make the dual branded survey an annual census.

The Report is straightforward and informative without being preachy or judgemental. Eg on the subject of Pornography:

There is still a big gender split when it comes to pornography use: just 19% of women use it once a week or more, compared to 58% of men. And 41% of women use pornography once a month or more, compared to 76% of men.

For many years it's been said that women are more interested in pornography when there is a relational component – for example where there is a storyline that details part of a relationship rather than just images of sex – while men are more visually stimulated by images; but our survey says differently. Although a significantly higher proportion of men use pornography regularly, the choices made by men and women are remarkably similar. There is almost no difference at all between the genders when it comes to accessing pornography on the internet, while slightly more women than men use adult TV channels and buy their porn on DVD. The only variations are that women are still bigger consumers of erotic literature and twice as many men access live sex cams from their computers or via their phone.

I found no relationship between being pro the legality of porn, or propensity to watch porn, and pro social behaviors e.g. volunteer work, blood donation, etc.

We can dismiss the feminist (and sociological) charges of porn increasing sexual violence and leading to sexism. The USA, Sweden, Germany, Netherlands and Japan were just some of the countries that suddenly went from no legal pornography to quite widespread availability and consumption of it. These studies all found that greater availability of, and exposure to, pornography does not increase the rate of sexual assaults on women, and probably decreases it. Japanese porn is quite frequently violent and yet even there rape decreased from an already very low base. It's interesting that an increase in porn exposure decreases sexual violence only, and has no effect on other crime. Economists would put this down to a substitution effect.

Several countries have sex offender registers -- mainly of pedophiles. A wide variety of professions are represented on these registers. Members of professions that supposedly promote morality e.g. clerics or teachers, are quite common on it yet conspicuously absent from such registers are men who have worked in the porn industry.

This study (See artilce) found no relationship between the frequency of x-rated film viewing and attitudes toward women or feminism. From the General Social Survey (controlling for IQ, education, income, age, race and ideology) I found that those who are pro the legality of porn are less likely to support traditional female roles, more likely to be against preferential treatment of either gender, and to find woman's rights issues more frequently salient. Although I found that women's rights issues are less salient to male watchers, and female watchers are less likely to think women should work, I also found that watching porn is unrelated to negative attitudes toward women and feminism.

In short exposure to and tolerance of pornography does not cause anti-social behavior (and may even reduce it in relation to sex) and does not get in the way of pro social behavior either.

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Those who condemn porn do not seem to realise that, for most of us, it is an outlet and nothing more. Many of us need to release our sexual urges, and porn aids masturbation. Most men do not secretly wish that their girlfriends looked, or acted, like the mute, glazed-eyed and fake-breasted girls in porn videos. Some men might find it hot to watch a MILF get triple-teamed by guys with penises the size of baseball bats, but the majority of us do not want anything like that in our own bedrooms. Watching porn allows men and women to easily live out their sexual fantasies, without the difficulties of organising it in real life.

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The elusive female G-spot may not actually exist at all, according to scientists. The G-spot is said to be a small area of the female body where nerve endings are concentrated, with the capability to provide intense pleasure. '

After reviewing 100 studies conducted over the past 60 years, experts have concluded that there is no evidence for the fabled centre of female sexual pleasure after all.

Research leader Dr Amichai Kilchevsky, a urologist from the Yale-New Haven Hospital in Connecticut, blamed pornography, magazines and sex therapists for ruthlessly promoting the idea. While he admitted the concept merited further attention and that modern investigative techniques might help, he said he hoped his conclusion would take the pressure off couples who had not located it.

Objective measures have failed to provide strong and consistent evidence for the existence of an anatomical site that could be related to the famed G-spot, he wrote in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.

His findings support those of researchers from King's College London, who questioned 1,800 women in one of the largest studies on the subject and concluded that there was no evidence for the existence of the G-spot.

Given the typical danger-oriented media coverage of pornography, it's easy for parents to feel terribly anxious about this issue. To listen to Newsweek or morality groups, you'd think that every American boy is in danger of becoming a porn addict---an obsessive, aggressive loser who hates women, and eventually destroys himself.

So let's all take a deep breath and calm down.

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