Sex on campus isn't what you think: what 101 student journals taught me

Lisa Wade in The Guardian

Moments before it happened, Cassidy, Jimena and Declan were sitting in the girls’ shared dorm room, casually chatting about what the cafeteria might be offering for dinner that night. They were just two weeks into their first year of college and looking forward to heading down to the meal hall – when suddenly Declan leaned over, grabbed the waist of Cassidy’s jeans, and pulled her crotch toward his face, proclaiming: “Dinner’s right here!”

Sitting on her lofted bunk bed, Jimena froze. Across the small room, Cassidy squealed with laughter, fell back onto her bed and helped Declan strip off her clothes. “What is happening!?” Jimena cried as Declan pushed his cargo shorts down and jumped under the covers with her roommate. “Sex is happening!” Cassidy said. It was four o’clock in the afternoon.

Cassidy and Declan proceeded to have sex, and Jimena turned to face her computer. When I asked her why she didn’t flee the room, she explained: “I was in shock.” Staying was strangely easier than leaving, she said, because the latter would have required her to turn her body toward the couple, climb out of her bunk, gather her stuff, and find the door, all with her eyes open. So, she waited it out, focusing on a television show played on her laptop in front of her, and catching reflected glimpses of Declan’s bobbing buttocks on her screen. That was the first time Cassidy had sex in front of her. By the third, she’d learned to read the signs and get out before it was too late.

'What is happening!?' Jimena cried. 'Sex is happening!' Cassidy said.

Cassidy and Jimena give us an idea of just how diverse college students’ attitudes toward sex can be. Jimena, a conservative, deeply religious child, was raised by her Nicaraguan immigrant parents to value modesty. Her parents told her, and she strongly believed, that “sex is a serious matter” and that bodies should be “respected, exalted, prized”. Though she didn’t intend to save her virginity for her wedding night, she couldn’t imagine anyone having sex in the absence of love.

Cassidy, an extroverted blond, grew up in a stuffy, mostly white, suburban neighborhood. She was eager to grasp the new freedoms that college offered and didn’t hesitate. On the day that she moved into their dorm, she narrated her Tinder chats aloud to Jimena as she looked to find a fellow student to hook up with. Later that evening she had sex with a match in his room, then went home and told Jimena everything. Jimena was “astounded” but, as would soon become clear, Cassidy was just warming up.

The cloisters at New College Oxford. Photograph: Alamy

Students like Cassidy have been hypervisible in news coverage of hookup culture, giving the impression that most college students are sexually adventurous. For years we’ve debated whether this is good or bad, only to discover, much to our surprise, that students aren’t having as much sex as we thought. In fact, they report the same number of sexual partners as their parents did at their age and are even more likely than previous generations to be what one set of scholars grimly refers to as “sexually inactive”.

One conclusion is to think that campus hookup culture is a myth, a tantalizing, panic-inducing, ultimately untrue story. But to think this is to fundamentally misunderstand what hookup culture really is. It can’t be measured in sexual activity – whether high or low – because it’s not a behavior, it’s an ethos, an atmosphere, a milieu. A hookup culture is an environment that idealizes and promotes casual sexual encounters over other kinds, regardless of what students actually want or are doing. And it isn’t a myth at all.

I followed 101 students as part of the research for my book American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus. I invited students at two liberal arts schools to submit journals each week for a full semester, in which they wrote as much or as little as they liked about sex and romance on campus. The documents they submitted – varyingly rants, whispered gossip, critical analyses, protracted tales or simple streams of consciousness – came to over 1,500 single-spaced pages and exceeded a million words. To protect students’ confidentiality, I don’t use their real names or reveal the colleges they attend.

My read of these journals revealed four main categories of students. Cassidy and Declan were “enthusiasts”, students who enjoyed casual sex unequivocally. This 14% genuinely enjoyed hooking up and research suggests that they thrive. Jimena was as “abstainer”, one of the 34% who voluntary opted out in their first year. Another 8% abstained because they were in monogamous relationships. The remaining 45% were “dabblers”, students who were ambivalent about casual sex but succumbed to temptation, peer pressure or a sense of inevitability. Other more systematic quantitative research produces similar percentages.

These numbers show that students can opt out of hooking up, and many do. But my research makes clear that they can’t opt out of hookup culture. Whatever choice they make, it’s made meaningful in relationship to the culture. To participate gleefully, for example, is to be its standard bearer, even while being a numerical minority. To voluntarily abstain or commit to a monogamous relationship is to accept marginalization, to be seen as socially irrelevant and possibly sexually repressed. And to dabble is a way for students to bargain with hookup culture, accepting its terms in the hopes that it will deliver something they want.

Burke, for example, was a dabbler. He was strongly relationship-oriented, but his peers seemed to shun traditional dating. “It’s harder to ask someone out than it is to ask someone to go back to your room after fifteen minutes of chatting,” he observed wryly. He resisted hooking up, but “close quarters” made it “extremely easy” to occasionally fall into bed with people, especially when drunk. He always hoped his hookups would turn into something more – which is how most relationships form in hookup culture – but they never did.

‘To think that campus hookup culture is a myth … is to fundamentally misunderstand what hookup culture really is.’ Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

Wren dabbled, too. She identified as pansexual and had been hoping for a “queer haven” in college, but instead found it to be “quietly oppressive”. Her peers weren’t overtly homophobic and in classrooms they eagerly theorized queer sex, but at parties they “reverted back into gendered codes” and “masculine bullshit”. So she hooked up a little, but not as much as she would have liked.

My abstainers simply decided not to hook up at all. Some of these, like Jimena, were opposed to casual sex no matter the context, but most just weren’t interested in “hot”, “meaningless” sexual encounters. Sex in hookup culture isn’t just casual, it’s aggressively slapdash, excluding not just love, but also fondness and sometimes even basic courtesy.

Hookup culture prevails, even though it serves only a minority of students, because cultures don’t reflect what is, but a specific group’s vision of what should be. The students who are most likely to qualify as enthusiasts are also more likelythan other kinds of students to be affluent, able-bodied, white, conventionally attractive, heterosexual and male. These students know – whether consciously or not – that they can afford to take risks, protected by everything from social status to their parents’ pocketbooks.

Students who don’t carry these privileges, especially when they are disadvantaged in many different ways at once, are often pushed or pulled out of hooking up. One of my African American students, Jaslene, stated bluntly that hooking up isn’t “for black people”, referring specifically to a white standard of beauty for women that disadvantaged women like her in the erotic marketplace. She felt pushed out. Others pulled away. “Some of us with serious financial aid and grants,” said one of my students with an athletic scholarship, “tend to avoid high-risk situations”.

Hookup culture, then, isn’t what the majority of students want, it’s the privileging of the sexual lifestyle most strongly endorsed by those with the most power on campus, the same people we see privileged in every other part of American life. These students, as one Latina observed, “exude dominance”. On the quad, they’re boisterous and engage in loud greetings. They sunbathe and play catch on the green at the first sign of spring. At games, they paint their faces and sing fight songs. They use the campus as their playground. Their bodies – most often slim, athletic and well-dressed – convey an assured calm; they move among their peers with confidence and authority. Online, social media is saturated with their chatter and late night snapshots.

On big party nights, they fill residence halls with activity. Students who don’t party, who have no interest in hooking up, can’t help but know they’re there. “You can hear every conversation occurring in the hallway even with your door closed,” one of my abstainers reported. For hours she would listen to the “click-clacking of high heels” and exchanged reassurances of “Shut up! You look hot!” Eventually there would be a reprieve, but revelers always return drunker and louder.

The morning after, college cafeterias ring with a ritual retelling of the night before. Students who have nothing to contribute to these conversations are excluded just by virtue of having nothing to say. They perhaps eat at other tables, but the raised voices that come with excitement carry. At the gym, in classes, and at the library, flirtations lay the groundwork for the coming weekend. Hookup culture reaches into every corner of campus.

The conspicuousness of hookup culture’s most enthusiastic proponents makes it seem as if everyone is hooking up all the time. In one study students guessed that their peers were doing it 50 times a year, 25 times what the numbers actually show. In another, young men figured that 80% of college guys were having sex any given weekend. They would have been closer to the truth if they were guessing the percentage of men who’d ever had sex.

••

College students aren’t living up to their reputation and hookup culture is part of why. It offers only one kind of sexual experiment, a sexually hot, emotionally cold encounter that suits only a minority of students well. Those who dabble in it often find that their experiences are as mixed as their feelings. One-in-three students say that their sexual encounters have been “traumatic” or “very difficult to handle”. Almost two dozen studies have documented feelings of sexual regret,frustration, disappointment, distress and inadequacy. Many students decide, if hookups are their only option, they’d rather not have sex at all.

We’ve discovered that hookup culture isn’t the cause for concern that some once felt it was, but neither is it the utopia that others hoped. If the goal is to enable young people to learn about and share their sexualities in ways that help them grow to be healthy adults (if they want to explore at all), we’re not there yet. But the more we understand about hookup culture, the closer we’ll be able to get.

Why Good Storytellers Are Happier in Life and in Love

Studies find the way people tell their own stories has an outsize effect on their life satisfaction





Storytelling is one way couples bond when a relationship is young. But between long-term partners, the conversation often becomes mundane. Psychologists say it is important to keep telling and listening to each other’s stories. ILLUSTRATION: GARY HOVLAND FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL


By ELIZABETH BERNSTEIN



In William Shakespeare’s time, the word “conversation” meant two things—verbal discourse, and sex.

That’s how intimate the most well-known poet and playwright in the English language viewed the act of talking with another person.

Since the dawn of language, people have shared stories with others to entertain, persuade, make sense of what happened to them and bond. Research shows that the way people construct their individual stories has a large impact on their physical and mental health. People who frame their personal narratives in a positive way have more life satisfaction.

They also may be more attractive. New research, published this month in the journal Personal Relationships, shows that women find men who are good storytellers more appealing. The article consists of three studies in which male and female participants were shown a picture of someone of the opposite sex and given an indication of whether that person was a proficient storyteller. In the first study, 71 men and 84 women were told that the person whose picture they were looking at was either a “good,” “moderate” or “poor” storyteller. In the second study, 32 men and 50 women were given a short story supposedly written by the person in the picture; half the stories were concise and compelling, and half rambled and used dull language. In the third study, 60 men and 81 women were told whether the person in the picture was a good storyteller and were asked to rate their social status and ability to be a good leader in addition to their attractiveness.

The results were the same across all three studies: Women rated men who were good storytellers as more attractive and desirable as potential long-term partners. 

Psychologists believe this is because the man is showing that he knows how to connect, to share emotions and, possibly, to be vulnerable. He also is indicating that he is interesting and articulate and can gain resources and provide support.

“Storytelling is linked to the ability to be a good provider,” because a man is explaining what he can offer, says Melanie Green, an associate professor in the department of communication at the University at Buffalo and a researcher on the study. The men didn’t care whether the women were good storytellers, the research showed.

It feels wonderful to tell someone your stories when you are first becoming intimate. Think of the people you have been in love with in your life. I bet that at least once early in your relationship you stayed up all night talking, telling stories that were revealing and illuminating. That deep communication is sexy.

Stories are profoundly intimate, says Kari Winter, a historian and literary critic at the University at Buffalo. “It is empowering to the teller because they get recognition from the listener. And it is empowering to the listener because it helps them understand the teller.”

The problem is that once the heady early days of bonding are over, the conversation in a long-term relationship often turns mundane: Couples talk about jobs, schedules, the children. Is there any less inspiring question than “How was your day, honey?”

Psychologists say it’s important to keep telling each other stories. They help you remember why you were attracted to each other in the first place. In tough times, they help you make sense of what has happened. Many marriage therapists have couples in crisis each explain their side of events and then weave their stories into one cohesive narrative. “It’s a way to build and maintain a bond over shared history,” says Anna Osborn, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Sacramento, Calif.

How can you use storytelling to continue to bond in your relationship? Here are some tips.

Remember the basics. Every good story contains several core elements, Dr. Winter, of the University at Buffalo, says. The emotions and lessons of the story must be true, even if the story itself is a fantasy. (Think of the Harry Potter stories.) It must have a structure, including a beginning, middle and end. It needs a voice. And it has character development. If you are telling your own story, you need to reveal yourself.

Set aside story time. Find a time and a place where you aren’t rushed and there are no distractions. Then banish the humdrum. “Do not talk about household management issues. Do not talk about the kids,” says Ms. Osborn, the marriage therapist. Agree that this is time to tell stories of things that have happened that are meaningful to you. “Storytelling time should be an invitation to your partner to come into your world,” she says.


Start with your “firsts.” If you aren’t used to telling each other stories, it’s useful to have a few topics ready. Your first anything—date, kiss, dance, car, child, house—is a great place to start. The story of how you met can be particularly powerful and connecting, because it is, essentially, your origin story. And it’s always a happy memory. “Everything was pure then, nothing hurt yet,” Ms. Osborn says.


Tell stories of the past, present and future. Highlighting great memories or successes that you had together in the past helps you reconnect. Narrating recent events that have happened to you, or telling a story about a challenge you are facing, helps illuminate what matters to you. Weaving a story of a future event as you’d like it to happen—a vacation, a child’s wedding, the dance at your 60th anniversary party—can help you visualize what you want for your relationship.


Include your emotions. Show, don’t tell. (“She was wearing a red silk dress and my palms got sweaty.”) “Details can unlock the emotional truths that until now were never spoken out loud,” says Lauren Dowden, a social worker at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine’s Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease Center, as well as a Second City alumna and teacher. She runs a storytelling group for couples where one partner has Alzheimer’s.


Conversely, good stories avoid certain things—cliché, digression, saying too much, not saying enough, lack of attention to the audience and preachiness


Practice. Storytelling is an art form, like playing the piano or creating a garden, says Dr. Winter, the literary critic. “You can start with something simple and it might be satisfying, but it might not be as good or as true as it can be.”


Dr. Winter suggests the three Rs: Reflect on the events. Refine what they meant to you. Read. “Learn from the masters,” she says.

How to have sex with the same person for the rest of your life

The Guardian

 

‘Spending too much time with your partner may be the problem.’ Photograph: Microzoa/Getty Images


1 Accept that having sex with the same person for the rest of your life – unless it’s yourself (see later) – is hard and, at times, boring. But not impossible. The problem – actually, there are several and also lots of contradictions – is that the received wisdom has always been to spend more time with your partner to build something called “intimacy”, which will lead to The Sex. Actually, this may be wrong.

2 Spending too much time with your partner may be the problem. Do romantic weekends make you feel really unromantic and panicked? Seeing someone all the time is not sexy after the first few months. It leads to something called habituation, which must be avoided at all costs if you want to continue having sex with your partner. Habituation is when you stop really seeing someone/thing because you see them all the time, ie taking someone for granted, which leads to hating their guts. In one survey, a common answer to the question “When do you feel most attracted to your partner?” was “When they weren’t there.” This is because anticipation is a powerful aphrodisiac and distance lets erotic imagination back in, which leads to fantasy. Unfortunately, it’s often cruelly crushed when your partner comes back into view.

3 The major stumbling block to sex in a long-term relationship is that you’re after two opposing things: security, reliability – lovely anchoring things like that which make you feel safe – but you also want fire, passion, risk, danger, newness. The two camps are opposed. If you have one, you can’t have the other.

4 The answer is to try to get pockets of distance. Make sure you stay true to yourself. Do things for yourself and by yourself; socialise on your own sometimes. In another survey, respondents said that they found their partners sexiest when the partners were in their element: the life and soul of the party, doing a job really well. Being “other” to the person they knew as reliable and as their partner. Having sex at your partner’s place of work may be something to consider if you can avoid CCTV. You don’t want to watch yourself having sex with the same person over and over again on YouTube because you have become a meme.

5 All this said, you do need to spend some quality time together to keep the bonds going. Sharing good experiences is better than spending your money on stuff for each other. This is because memories of experiences shared become more golden with the passing of time, unlike mere things you get used to (see habituation). Also you can only throw things at each other in an argument that leads to sex if you are in a film starring Sophia Loren. In real life, it leads to hate and mess.

6 Masturbation is basically having sex with the same person for all of your life, yet no one gets sick of that. Why? Because you are safe to go into your own private head-place, and the chances are that there is a real dissonance between the erotic you and the you in the real world. The erotic you has no place in your every day life, the erotic you may not be very responsible (responsibility kills sex drive). The erotic you only has one goal. Orgasm. It isn’t the point, they always tell you that in sex columns, but it’s nice – otherwise, come on, what is the point of all that effort? It’s this distance that’s at the heart of keeping an erotic charge between you and your partner. Consider separate bedrooms.

7 Learn the difference between wanting someone and neediness. The first is sexy, the latter isn’t. Looking after someone because you want to is different from one person being cast in the parenting role to the other, which isn’t sexy at all and will lead to a lack of sex with your partner and, possibly, lots of sex with someone else who doesn’t need looking after.

8 Don’t expect your partner to be everything to you. There’s an oft quoted phrase in relationship circles: “don’t expect your partner to do the job a whole village once did.” Also be realistic: two centuries ago you’d probably be dead by the age of 50, now marriages can last longer.

9 But! Take solace in the fact that older people do have more sex. Last year, a study found that if you’ve been married to the same person for 65 years, you have more sex than you did at your 50th wedding anniversary.

10 The secret of sex with the same person for ever, says Esther Perel, the author of Mating in Captivity, is letting go of “the myth of spontaneity. Committed sex is willful, premeditated, focused and present”. She also suggests good tools for talking with your partner (or to find out things about yourself), for example, start conversations with: “I shut myself off when …” and “I turn myself on when …”

How have the British Muslim men involved in the Rotherham child sex grooming gang been treating their own wives?

Yasmin Alibhai Brown in The Independent


The Pakistani Muslim men – three brothers and an uncle – who groomed, raped and destroyed young girls in Rotherham have been given long sentences. Two local white women have also been convicted of supplying girls to the men. The reactions to these verdicts are instructive. Racists are red with righteous rage; this is what happens, they say, when you let “coloureds” into the country. Many anti-racists, just as blindly furious, assert race and ethnicity have nothing to do with what happened. The white female procurers are their alibis. The rapists’ relatives and community leaders stand by their men. They believe the blokes took what was freely offered by trashy females – children, daughters. Muslims who condemn the exploitation, in their eyes, bring shame on the community. That’s how twisted their values are.

The one question nobody asks is how these men have been treating their sisters and wives. Most of them behave just as abominably and cruelly indoors as they do outside when they prey on young flesh. They want control; they abjure equality. Some – a small minority – do feel a kind of love for the women and girls in the family but many have monstrous views on sexual equality and feminine desire. Home is a cage in which no pleasures are permitted, where hopes and freedoms expire. Activists have sought to free these women for decades. The terrible truth is that as society becomes more permissive, the number of caged birds increases. One caveat: I am not saying all Muslim girls and women are oppressed. What I am saying is that sexual predators from traditional Pakistani families and many other minority communities think all women and girls are low-life. I was looking at my wedding pictures the other day. On a cold, snowy December day, in 2000, I married my English husband in Ealing Town Hall. On the steps we had photos taken. It was freezing cold but I was in a silk sari, as was my mum. My Asian friends in their finery were shivering and smiling happily. The most striking, gorgeous person in the crowd was Humera (not her real name), who had stayed with me several times over the previous two years. She was from a northern town and had escaped a forced marriage. Her family had made her marry a man from Pakistan who had then raped her nightly for months. A social worker helped her escape. I heard of her case and offered to have her live with us for a while. The bruises on her thighs and breasts took months to heal.

She was one of countless such victims, all hidden and hopeless. Forced marriage has since been outlawed and girls have some protection and awareness of their rights but now we have Sharia courts in this country, which condone wife beating, marital rape, compulsory or child marriages, polygamy, paternal ownership of children and extreme sexism. Pre-pubescent Muslim girls are married on Skype. Imams praise this technology, which allows families to trade in their daughters – girls between the ages of six and nine among them. How did our rulers let this happen?

Political scientist Elham Manea, herself a Muslim, has written a new book, Women and Shari’a Law: the Impact of Legal Pluralism in the UK. She investigated 80 faith “councils”, which settle disputes and make quasi-legal decisions. According to Manea these courts are more hardline even than in Pakistan and many of their religious leaders issue horrendous advice. For example, a senior cleric in a British Sharia council pronounced that there was no “right age” for a girl to marry: “As you know, the earlier the better”. Humera’s family were not given religious authorisation to do what they did to her. Imams in the 1990s were conservative but not inflexible Islamicists. Today the human-rights abuses are validated by dozens of Muslim leaders as well as by influential Islamic institutions. Though forced marriages are a curse in Hindu and Sikh families too, they do not have systemised, pervasive doctrines to back their heinous behaviours.

Why is this even important when we are discussing the Rochdale crimes against white British children? Am I trying to deflect attention from those horrors? On the contrary; I am making vital connections. We should find out how those close to the three brothers and the uncle were treated. Was terrible violence meted out to them, too? Should we not know that? More than 1,400 vulnerable white children were abused in Rotherham. Thousands of others are being discovered in other towns. The numbers would shoot up if we also counted the family victims of the groomers.

Grooming and domestic rape often go together. Police and journalists need to be as concerned about the latter as they now (thankfully) are about the former. Families and communities will resist such probes, lob accusations of racism and “insensitivity”. But it has to happen. Females of all backgrounds should be protected from sexual savagery and misogynist Sharia courts. There must be one law for all.

Want To Reduce Abortions? Don't Stigmatise Sex

 

The religious conservatives are responsible for high abortion rates; they are responsible for the injury and death of women.

GEORGE MONBIOT 

Here is the fact that everyone debating abortion should know. There is no association between its legality and its incidence. In other words, banning abortion does not stop the practice; it merely makes it more dangerous.

The abortion debate is presented as a conflict between the rights of embryos and the rights of women. Enhance one, both sides sometimes appear to agree, and you suppress the other. But once you grasp the fact that legalising women's reproductive rights does not raise the incidence of induced abortions, only one issue remains to be debated. Should they be legal and safe or illegal and dangerous? Hmmm, tough question.

There might be no causal relationship between reproductive choice and the incidence of abortion, but there is a strong correlation: an inverse one. As the Lancet's most recent survey of global rates and trends notes, "The abortion rate was lower … where more women live under liberal abortion laws."

Why? Because laws restricting abortion tend to be most prevalent in places where contraception and comprehensive sex education are hard to obtain, and in which sex and childbirth outside marriage are anathematised. Young people have sex, whatever their elders say; they always have and always will. Those with the least information and the least access to birth control are the most likely to suffer unintended pregnancies. And what greater incentive could there be for terminating a pregnancy than a culture in which reproduction out of wedlock is a mortal sin?

How many more centuries of misery, mutilation and mortality are required before we understand that women — young or middle aged, within marriage or without — who do not want a child may go to almost any lengths to terminate an unwanted pregnancy? How much more evidence do we need that, in the absence of legal, safe procedures, such sophisticated surgical instruments as wire coathangers, knitting needles, bleach and turpentine will be deployed instead? How many more poisonings, punctured guts and burst wombs are required before we recognise that prohibition and moral suasion will not trounce women's need to own their lives?

The most recent meta-analysis of global trends, published in 2012, discovered that the abortion rate, after a sharp decline between 1995 and 2003, scarcely changed over the following five years. But the proportion that were unsafe (which, broadly speaking, means illegal), rose from 44% to 49%.

Most of this change was due to a sharp rise in unsafe abortions in West Asia (which includes the Middle East), where Islamic conservatism is resurgent. In the regions in which Christian doctrine exerts the strongest influence over legislation — west and middle Africa and central and south America — there was no rise. But that's only because the proportion of abortions that were illegal and unsafe already stood at 100%.

As for the overall induced abortion rate, the figures tell an interesting story. Western Europe has the world's lowest termination rate: 12 per year for every 1000 women of reproductive age. The more godly North America aborts 19 embryos for every 1000 women. In South America, where (when the figures were collected) the practice was banned everywhere, the rate was 32. In eastern Africa, where ferocious laws and powerful religious injunctions should — according to conservative theory — have stamped out the practice long ago, it was 38.

The weird outlier is eastern Europe, which has the world's highest abortion rate: 43 per 1000. Under communism, abortion was the only available form of medical birth control. The rate has fallen from 90 since 1995, as contraception has become easier to obtain, but there's still a long way to go.

Facts, who needs 'em? Across the red states of the US, legislators have been merrily passing laws that make abortion clinics impossible to run, while denying children effective sex education. In Texas, thanks to restrictive new statutes, over half the clinics have closed since 2013. But women are still obliged to visit three times before receiving treatment: in some cases this means travelling 1000 miles or more. Unsurprisingly, 7% of those seeking medical help have already attempted their own solutions.

The only reason why this has not caused an epidemic of abdominal trauma is the widespread availability, through unlicensed sales, of abortion drugs such as misoprostol and mifepristone. They're unsafe when used without professional advice, but not as unsafe as coathangers and household chemicals.

In June, the US Supreme Court will rule on the constitutionality of the latest Texan assault on legal terminations, the statute known as HB2. If the state of Texas wins, this means, in effect,the end of Roe v Wade, the decision that deemed abortion a fundamental right in the United States.

In Northern Ireland the new first minister, Arlene Foster, who took office on Monday, has vowed to ensure that the 1967 abortion act, which covers the rest of the United Kingdom, will not apply to her country. Women there will continue to buy pills (and run the risk of confiscation as the police rifle their post) or travel to England, at some expense and trauma. Never mind the finding of a High Court judge: "there is no evidence before this court that the law in Northern Ireland has resulted in any reduction in the number of abortions". It just warms the heart to see Protestant and Catholic fundamentalists setting aside their differences to ensure that women's bodies remain the property of the state.

Like them, I see human life as precious. Like them, I want to see a reduction in abortions. So I urge states to do the opposite of what they prescribe. If you want fewer induced abortions, you should support education that encourages children to talk about sex without embarrassment or secrecy; contraception that's freely available to everyone; an end to the stigma surrounding sex and birth before marriage.

The religious conservatives who oppose these measures have blood on their hands. They are responsible for high abortion rates; they are responsible for the injury and death of women. And they have the flaming cheek to talk about the sanctity of life.

Hope for mature women?

'Female Viagra' approved by US drug agency 

• From the sectionBBC News

Experts have said the effects of the libido-enhancing drug are "modest"

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a libido-enhancing drug for women that has been dubbed "Female Viagra".

Flibanserin, a drug produced by Sprout Pharmaceuticals, recently passed an FDA advisory committee meeting.

The pill is designed to assist premenopausal women regain their sex drive by boosting levels of certain brain chemicals.

The drug has been criticised as having marginal effects.

Versions of the pill, which will be marketed as "Addyi", have been submitted for approval in the past but never passed.

It was rejected by the FDA twice for lack of effectiveness and side effects like nausea, dizziness and fainting.

Women taking the drug reported between half and one more sexually satisfying event per month - results experts admitted were "modest".

Originally the drug was produced by German company Boehringer Ingelheim. Sprout bought the drug from that company after it was turned down by the FDA.

Sprout CEO Cindy Whitehead gains approval for the first drug to boost sexual desire in women

Documents from the 4 June FDA advisory meeting describe the drug's purpose as "treatment of hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) in premenopausal women".

Women would take it each night.

A doctor would have to determine whether a woman seeking the pill was suffering from a disorder characterised by a lack of sexual fantasies and desire, causing the woman distress.

Currently, there is nothing on the US market approved for treatment of HSDD or another condition, female sexual interest/arousal disorder (FSIAD).

"This condition is clearly an area of unmet medical need," the FDA documents said.

A brain-shaped stress ball at a Sprout employee's desk at their headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina

Sprout only has 25 employees. Large pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer, Bayer and Proctor & Gamble have all studied female sexual desire disorder treatment but abandoned plans to pursue it.

Sprout's CEO, Cindy Whitehead, told AP they would promote Addyi carefully.

"We would never want a patient who's not going to see a benefit to take it and tell everyone it doesn't work," she said.

Lobbying by Sprout Pharmaceuticals was backed by the women's rights group Even the Score, which has accused the FDA of gender bias by approving a number of drugs treating erectile dysfunction in men without passing an equivalent for women.

Prostitution row: A 'male sex deficit' - what about us horny women?

Rebecca Reid in The Telegraph

The Institute for Economic Affairs has released a new paper this week from the sociologist Dr Catherin Hakim.

Hakim is a controversial figure, best known for her theory of ‘erotic capital’ - the combination of beauty, social skills, good dress sense, physical fitness, liveliness, sex appeal and sexual competence with which women should apparently barter their way through life.

A Katie Hopkins of the academic world, if you will.

No surprise, then, that her latest paper has already caused widespread controversy.

Hakim postulates that prostitution should be fully legalised – to many a perfectly reasonable stance on the debate. But it’s her reasoning that makes the suggestion painfully offensive.

Disinterested in the potential social, economic and health benefits of legalising sex work, Hakim suggests that prostitution should be legalised, because the empowerment of women has created what she terms a “male sex deficit.”

In short because men need sex and modern women aren’t providing it.

What selfish creatures we’ve become. All that working and voting and striving for equality? Well apparently it’s led to an international blue-balls crisis that only legalised prostitution can cure.

• Legalise prostitution because 21st Century men need more sex says think-tank

Dr Catherine Hakim says prostitution should be legalised because of the "make sex deficit"  Photo: DAVID BEBBER

The pros and cons of legalised prostitution is an important and necessary debate.

Unfortunately Hakim has overshadowed that conversation by missing the point so spectacularly that one has to wonder if she did it on purpose.

Her theory hinges upon two beliefs.

First, that male libido outstrips female libido two to one; second that the availability of sex has decreased proportionately as women have become more empowered, because women have less cause to trade sex for gain. Offended yet?

According to Hakim, women (especially women over the age of thirty) don’t really like sex at all.

She writes: “Male demand for sexual entertainments and activity greatly outstrips female sexual interest, even in liberal cultures - this gives women an edge, although many are still unaware of it.”

Ah, the tired trope of the sexually disinterested woman. Sigh.

Hakim’s theory entirely ignores the fact that women experience desire and sexuality just as strongly as men. In fact, she’s wrong to compare the two. Male and female libidos do not have to be expressed the same way in order to be equal.

Her primary example of the disparity between our sex drives is strip clubs.

Well, she might be accurate in saying men more frequently attend strip clubs, but just because women don’t tend to enjoy stuffing fivers in thongs as a group activity, it doesn’t mean we don’t get horny.

The sex toy market (which has a predominately female customer base) tells a different story about female desire. In 2012, it was valued at £250 million in the UK, and $5.5 billion (£3.5bn) worldwide. Not to mention the 100 million copies of “mummy porn” Fifty Shades of Grey that have been sold.

Dakota Johnson as Anastasia Steele in Fifty Shades of Grey

Just because female libido is different from male doesn’t mean it’s non-existent.

Hakim believes that as women become more empowered, and therefore more financially independent, they are likely to withdraw sexual availability further. She writes that the “male sex deficit” is likely to grow in the 21st century, as women become increasingly economically independent and withdraw from “sexual markets and relationships that they perceive to offer unfair bargains”.

Which tells you everything you need to know about her attitude towards sex.

No wonder she wants to legalise prostitution. She seems to think every sexually active woman already is one.

But it’s not just women who should be angered by Hakim’s writing. Her representation of men is just as offensive.

“All the available evidence points in the direction of prostitution and erotic entertainments having no noxious psychological or social effects, and they may even help to reduce sexual crime rates”, she writes.

Here, she is hiding behind the illusion of being sex positive. She would like you to think of her as someone who understands male desire better than other women. But this is a woman who once likened male fidelity to being a “caged animal”.

She tacks a reasonable statement about a lack of evidence that prostitution is harmful, on to one that suggests prostitution would reduce the frequently of rape.

What Hakim is actually doing is reducing men to nothing better than animals. Sex mad beasts, unable to control themselves. She’s saying that male desire isn’t desire at all; it’s an untameable impulse that dominates rational thought.

How unbelievably patronising.

  Photo: PA

By suggesting that access to the services of prostitutes would stop rape, Hakim is, however unintentionally, condoning rape as an act.

The message of that statement is that sex is something men need, and that rape is driven by necessity, rather than want. This theory portrays rape like stealing food when you’re starving: a necessary evil.

Perpetuating these myths isn’t just offensive, it’s dangerous. Women have been told for centuries that they don’t like sex, and that their sexuality only exists for someone else’s gratification.

Feminism has seen women take ownership of their sexuality and move towards an equality of gratification. How can Dr Catherine Hakim, in good conscience, promote the concept that a woman who enjoys sex is the exception, rather than the norm?

Worse still is the underlying message that rape is a consequence of sexual frustration. There are no mitigating factors and there are no excuses. Hakim’s suggestion that providing access to sex for money would reduce sexual abuse is no different from suggesting that providing child porn would decrease offenses of paedophilia.

When exploring the reasons that rape happens, the buck stops with the rapist. Just like short skirts, drinking too much or walking home alone, the “male sex deficit” doesn’t cause or entice rape.

Rapists cause rape. Much more than being offensive, it’s frankly terrifying that a supposedly educated and academic woman would try to attribute it to anything else.

If you cheat on your partner, it’s probably about more than just sex

Phillipa Perry in The Guardian

According to a study published this week, the likelihood of people cheating on their partners rises if they are financially dependent on them – and especially if they are male. From the research carried out by a Connecticut sociology professor, Christin Munsch, it seems that men still expect to be breadwinners in the family, and that they can still feel emasculated when their female partners make more money. Old scripts die hard, it seems.

Babies and toddlers, as anyone who has lived in close proximity to one will know, are not always terribly good at articulating what they feel, but they are very good at acting out their emotions: they bite, they scream, they lie on the floor and beat their fists and generally try to squirm out of situations that don’t appeal to them. We adults do our best to put into words how they are feeling so that they will eventually learn to talk about their emotions, which in therapy-speak we would call “processing feelings”. If you don’t learn how to process feelings, you tend to carry on “acting out”. We don’t dispute that when a baby throws his toys out of the pram, he is actually doing his best to show how he feels.

A man or woman who has an extramarital fling is also very possibly doing their best to manage their feelings by acting out and having an affair. It can be hard to start a conversation with a spouse who is doing their best to provide for the family about how dissatisfied you are with the lack of meaning in your life, about your envy, or your boredom. You don’t want to appear ungrateful. You don’t want to rock the boat.

When unpicking the fallout of affairs in couples counselling, quite often the person who has had the affair says things like, “it just happened”, “it didn’t mean anything”, “it wasn’t anything to do with you”, “I was drunk”, or “it was just a one-night stand”. The financially dependent party might wish they didn’t feel how they feel, and try very hard to push what seem like ungrateful feelings away. But even if they do try to process how they are feeling with their partner, that partner might find it understandably hard to listen to and easy to dismiss. Feelings don’t go away just because we want them to, and unconsciously we look for a way to deal with them.

So when a distraught couple is in the counselling room and the so-called guilty party is saying “it didn’t mean anything”, the counsellor might try to help them find out what it really did mean. It’s probably true that the straying partner does not prefer their one-night stand to their long-term lover, but it might mean that they do have unresolved issues with their partner, that they could not find a way to articulate or have heard. And the so-called innocent party may have even contributed to the event by not being sufficiently open and sympathetic to their partner’s feelings. Too often people in a relationship do not want to listen to their partner’s woes because they feel that means they are to blame, or that they have to fix them, but actually, being heard non-defensively and sympathetically goes a long way to restoring equilibrium.

 An affair is often an enactment of some deep, pushed away resentment. The fling can seem to temporarily cure feelings of an imbalance or a lack of meaning. This is but one explanation for something complicated that probably has many determining factors. It may be that the stay-at-home wife or husband is someone with attachment issues. For example there are people who seem to always need to have a lover as well as a partner because they dare not rely on just one person in case that person abandons them. This situation may be heightened if they are financially reliant on their partner. Such a situation can arise from early attachment issues with their first primary caregiver. Likewise some people feel they need secrets, otherwise they fear merging with their spouse. This feeling may be heightened when their spouse seems to have a stronger identity than they do.

There are probably as many reasons for why people act out in the form of an affair as there are people, but Munsch’s research does show us that inequality between partners can be a problem, and it’s something worth considering in any relationship.

She took a year off from her marriage to sleep with strangers. What could go wrong? The Wild Oats Project Review

Carlos Lozada in The Independent

Get ready for “The Wild Oats Project”. And not just the book. Get ready for “The Wild Oats Project” phenomenon — the debates, the think pieces, the imitators and probably the movie. Get ready for orgasmic meditation and the Three Rules. Get ready for “My Clitoris Deals Solely in Truth” T-shirts.

Robin Rinaldi, a magazine journalist living in San Francisco by way of Scranton, Pa., initially wasn’t sure she wanted children, but she knew that Scott, her stoic Midwestern husband, did not. Over time, Rinaldi decided a baby would add purpose to their lives, but Scott wouldn’t change his mind. “I wanted a child, but only with him,” she explains. “He didn’t want a child but wanted to keep me.” When Scott opted for a vasectomy, she demanded an open marriage.

“I refuse to go to my grave with no children and only four lovers,” she declares. “If I can’t have one, I must have the other.”

If you’re wondering why that is the relevant trade-off, stop overthinking this. “The Wild Oats Project” is the year-long tale of how a self-described “good girl” in her early 40s moves out, posts a personal ad “seeking single men age 35-50 to help me explore my sexuality,” sleeps with roughly a dozen friends and strangers, and joins a sex commune, all from Monday to Friday, only to rejoin Scott on weekends so they can, you know, work on their marriage.

The arrangement is unorthodox enough to succeed as a story, and in Rinaldi’s telling it unfolds as a sexual-awakening romp wrapped in a female-empowerment narrative, a sort of Fifty Shades of Eat, Pray, Love. “I wanted to tell him to f— me hard but I couldn’t get the words out of my mouth” is a typical Rinaldi dilemma. At the same time, she constantly searches for “feminine energy” or her “feminine core” or for a “spiritual practice guided by the feminine.

But more than empowering or arousing, this story is depressing. Rinaldi just seems lost. Still sorting through the psychological debris of an abusive childhood, she latches on to whatever guru or beliefs she encounters, and imagines fulfillment with each new guy. She still rushes to Scott whenever things gets scary (a car accident, an angry text message), yet deliberately strains their union beyond recovery. “At any cost” are the operative words of the subtitle.

Robin and Scott agree to three rules — “no serious involvements, no unsafe sex, no sleeping with mutual friends” — that both go on to break. He finds a steady girlfriend, while Robin violates two rules right away. “In truth, I was sick of protecting things,” she writes about going condom-free with a colleague at a conference. “I wanted the joy of being overcome.”

The men and women she hooks up with — some whose names Rinaldi has changed, others too fleeting to merit aliases — all blur into a new-age, Bay Area cliche. Everyone is a healer, or a mystic, or a doctoral student in feminist or Eastern spirituality. They’re all verging on enlightenment, sensing mutual energy, getting copious action to the sounds of tribal drums. The project peaks when she moves into OneTaste, an urban commune where “expert researchers” methodically stroke rows of bare women for 15 minutes at a time in orgasmic meditation sessions (“OM” to those in the know). “Everyone here was passionate,” Rinaldi writes. “Everyone had abandoned convention.”

Rinaldi holds little back, detailing her body’s reactions along the way. At first she is upset that she can’t feel pleasure as quickly as other women, but she finally decides she’s glad that her “surrender didn’t happen easily, that it lay buried and tethered to the realities of each relationship.” Her clitoris, although “moody,” was also “an astute barometer. . . . It dealt solely in truth.”

And truth often comes in tacky dialogue. “Your breasts are amazing,” one of her younger partners tells her. “You should have seen them in my twenties,” Rinaldi boasts. His comeback: “You’re cocky. I dig that.” (Fade to dirty talk.) When they do it again months later, he thanks her in the morning. “Something happens when I’m with you,” he says. “I feel healed.” I’m sure that’s exactly what he feels.

Rinaldi can’t seem to decide why she’s doing all this. The project is her “rebellion.” Or “a search for fresh, viable sperm.” Or a “bargaining chip.” Or “an elaborate attempt to dismantle the chains of love.” Or just a “quasi-adolescent quest for god knows what.”

If exasperation could give you orgasms, this book would leave me a deeply satisfied reader.

One of her oldest friends calls her out. “How is sleeping with a lot of guys going to make you feel better about not having kids?” she asks. Rinaldi’s answer: “Sleeping with a lot of guys is going to make me feel better on my deathbed. I’m going to feel like I lived, like I didn’t spend my life in a box. If I had kids and grandkids around my deathbed, I wouldn’t need that. Kids are proof that you’ve lived.” It’s a bleak and disheartening rationale, as though women’s lives can achieve meaning only through motherhood or sex.

For all her preoccupation with feminine energy, Rinaldi seems conflicted over feminism. “I would die a feminist,” she writes of her collegiate activism, “but I was long overdue for some fun.” Later, she pictures women’s studies scholars judging her submission fantasies, and frets over “those Afghan women hidden under their burqas” who could be “beaten or even killed right now for doing what I was so casually doing.” But when she finds a sexual connection with a woman who backs away because of “emotional issues,” Rinaldi channels her inner alpha male: “I was drawn to her body but shrunk back when she expressed unfettered feeling. . . .  It only took sleeping with one woman to help me understand the behavior of nearly every man I’d ever known.”

When the year runs out, Rinaldi returns to Scott, even though she soon starts an affair with a project flame. She’s no longer so upset about the vasectomy, regarding it as a sign that Scott can stand up for himself (though it may also mean she now cares less about him, period). No shock that post-project, their chemistry is off, and when Rinaldi makes a casual reference to their time apart, Scott finally explodes. “Do you know how many nights I cried myself to sleep when you moved out!?” he asks. “Do you care about anyone’s feelings but your own!?” She was “too stunned to reply.” But the fate of this marriage, revealed in the final pages, is anything but stunning.

“These are the sins against my husband,” Rinaldi recounts. “Abdicating responsibility, failing to empathize with him, cheating and lying.” After blaming him for so long, “in the end, I was the one who needed to ask forgiveness.”

In a rare moment of heartbreaking subtlety, the book’s dedication page simply says “For Ruby,” the name Rinaldi had imagined for a baby girl. Except, “there is no baby,” she writes at the end. “Instead there is the book you hold in your hands.”

And that is a frustrating book, with awkward prose, a perplexing protagonist and too many eye-rolling moments. Yet it is also a book I see launching book-club conversations and plenty of pillow talk — not just about sex and marriage, but about the price and possibility of self-reinvention. You don’t have to write a great work to cause a great stir.

Does Rinaldi reinvent herself? She survives the aftershocks and even seems to discover some happiness, however fragile she knows it to be. So maybe she needed this after all. Or maybe sometimes “empowerment” is just another word for self-absorption.