Deseo erótico y excitación: diferencias entre hombres

When It Comes To Sex, Some Men Are From Mars, Others From Venus

Apr. 17, 2008 — A study by researchers at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University finds that men report a variety of different experiences involving sexual desire and arousal.

Men participating in focus groups expressed a range of experiences and feelings relating to such matters as the relationship between erections and desire, the importance of scent and relationships, and a woman’s intelligence. The Kinsey Institute study, appearing in the April issue of the journal “Archives of Sexual Behavior,” is unique because few studies so far have examined how closely the findings of decades of laboratory studies on sex actually reflect the experiences of men.

“We have a lot of assumptions about how men think and feel and behave sexually,” said Erick Janssen, associate scientist at the Kinsey Institute. “We use all kinds of methods to measure men’s sexual responses; in addition, we use questionnaires and surveys to ask about sexual behaviors. It’s less common to sit down with men and ask them to talk about their experiences.”

The focus groups involved 50 men divided into three groups based on their age (18-24 years, 25-45 years and 46 and older). Below are some examples of the different experiences reported by the men:

* Some factors, such as depression or a risk of being caught having sex, were reported by some men as inhibiting sex, while other men found that they can enhance their desire and arousal.
* An erection is not the main cue for men to know they are sexually aroused. Most of the men responded that they can experience erections without feeling aroused or interested, leading researchers to suggest that erections are not good criteria for determining sexual arousal in men.
* Many men found it difficult to distinguish between sexual desire and sexual arousal, a distinction prominent in most sexual response models used by researchers and clinicians.
* The changes in the quality of older men’s erections had a direct effect on their sexual encounters, including, for some, a shifting focus to the partner and her sexual enjoyment. Older men also consistently mentioned that as they aged, they became more careful and particular in choosing sexual partners.
* The sexual history of women also mattered to the men — but differently for different age groups. Sexually experienced women were considered more threatening by younger men, who had concerns about “measuring up,” but such women were considered more arousing for older men.

Viagra y problemas del corazón

Before you pop that Viagra, read this
Nayer Khazeni, M.D.
Sunday, April 20, 2008

If you’re a man past 40 experiencing impotence, consider it a sign you may need a medical evaluation. With the easy availability of Viagra and other drugs to counter impotence, men now have a way to “fix the problem.” But there may be an underlying problem you’re not aware of that might need fixing too. An increasing number of studies show that erectile dysfunction may be an early warning of coronary artery disease.

A study described in the February 2008 American Journal of Cardiology found that men with erectile dysfunction and no history of heart disease were more likely to have cardiac stress test findings that put them at increased risk for heart attacks and cardiac deaths. What’s the connection? Coronary artery disease (the type of heart disease that causes angina and heart attacks) occurs when vessels that supply blood to your heart get clogged and damaged. The same lifestyle habits (unhealthy diet, lack of exercise, smoking) and risk factors (high blood pressure, diabetes, genetics) that can contribute to clogged arteries and damage heart arteries can block arteries in other parts of your body, too.

Anticoncepción para mujeres mayores de 40 años

More Contraception Choices for Women 40+

By MIKE STOBBE, AP Medical Writer
April 4, 2008
ATLANTA — Birth control choices are wider these days for women 40 and older — a group that once viewed its options as pretty much limited to tube-tying surgery and condoms. For them, the pill is back. So is the IUD. Both are safer than they used to be. There’s even a nonsurgical method of tube-tying.

This variety of methods has long been needed, experts say, because 40- and 50-somethings are a complex group. Some have had several children and are willing to have sterilization surgery. Others may want children, but not right now.

Traditionally, women 40 and older are the least likely to use birth control. Along with adolescents, they have the highest rates of abortion. At the same time, these women are more experienced at using contraception and follow instructions better.

When it comes to contraceptives for women 40 and older, “one size definitely does not fit all,” said Dr. Vanessa Cullins, vice president for medical affairs of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

A review of the current science of contraception and women 40 and older was published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine. The author, University of Florida gynecologist Dr. Andrew Kaunitz, noted that the risk of dangerous blood clots rises sharply at age 40 for women who take birth control pills containing estrogen.

Errores históricos de la planificación familiar

March 23, 2008
Birth Control for Others

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

FATAL MISCONCEPTION

The Struggle to Control World Population.

By Matthew Connelly.

Illustrated. 521 pp. Harvard University Press. $35.

The first large-scale scientific test of family planning took place in Khanna, India, beginning in the early 1950s. Backed by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health, researchers asked 8,000 villagers how often they had sex, whether they wanted to conceive and the details of the women’s menstrual cycles. The researchers met the villagers monthly and provided contraceptives, while closely monitoring another group that was given no contraceptives. After five years, the women given contraceptives had a higher birth rate than those who hadn’t received any assistance.

That initiative was an early warning that population policy can be very difficult to get right. In “Fatal Misconception,” Matthew Connelly, an associate professor of history at Columbia University, carefully assembles a century’s worth of mistakes, arrogance, racism, sexism and incompetence in what the jacket copy calls a “withering critique” of “a humanitarian movement gone terribly awry.”

Efforts to control population have long been ferociously controversial, and the United States under George W. Bush refuses to provide a penny of funding for the United Nations Population Fund because of its supposed (but in fact nonexistent) links to forced abortion in China. Critics of family planning programs will seize gleefully upon this book, and that’s unfortunate, because two propositions are both correct: first, population planners have made grievous mistakes and were inexcusably quiet for too long about forced sterilization in countries like India and China; and second, those same planners have learned from past mistakes and today are fighting poverty and saving vast numbers of lives in developing countries.

“Fatal Misconception” is to population policy what William Easterly’s “White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good” (2006) was to foreign aid: a useful, important but ultimately unbalanced corrective to smug self-satisfaction among humanitarians. Connelly scrupulously displays a hundred years of family planners’ dirty laundry, but without adequately emphasizing that we are far better off for their efforts. One could write a withering history of medicine, focusing on doctors’ infecting patients when they weren’t bleeding them, but doctors are pretty handy people to have around today. And so are family planners.

Problemas para conseguir la viagra femenina

A Dose of Desire
The Race Is On to Create ‘Pink Viagra,’ But Some Women Aren’t in the Mood for It

By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 12, 2008; C01

Viagra turns 10 this month, and didn’t time just fly? It seems like only yesterday we started guffawing at the Symbolism for Dummies ads on TV for the little blue pill and its “erectile dysfunction” rivals — footballs tossed through tires, faucets erupting. The spots ended with a list of potential side effects that sounded like a satire of potential side effects. “More than four hours ?” we winced. “Ouch.”

However discomfiting the commercials, the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of Viagra — on March 27, 1998 — is a landmark day in the history of sex. It seemed at the time like a biomedical revolution was upon us all, and about five minutes after word of the magical med went global, the question first was asked: Where is the women’s version of Viagra?

The short answer: They’re still working on it. A bunch of companies have tried and failed to create “pink Viagra,” as it’s often called. Other companies have drugs in late stages of clinical testing, including a gel that recently began a make-or-break nationwide study with several thousand women. Give us five years, maybe less, say the most optimistic researchers and doctors. Though it’s unclear exactly how many women would ask for a prescription, no one doubts that the first company that gets to market a remedy for female sexual dysfunction, as it’s formally known, will earn a fortune.

But as this race reaches what could be its final lap, not all of the spectators are cheering. Some, in fact, are booing as loudly as they can.

África, Occidente y la lucha contra el sida

From The Times Literary Supplement
March 5, 2008
AIDS and evangelists in Africa
There is no single answer to the problem of HIV/AIDS, but solutions cannot be imposed from the outside
Steven Epstein

Helen Epstein
THE INVISIBLE CURE
Africa, the West and the fight against AIDS
326pp. Viking. £16.99.

On one of her many trips to Africa in recent years to investigate the state of the AIDS epidemic, Helen Epstein (no relation) visited the main hospital in a district known for its tea plantations, about 200 miles from Uganda’s capital, Kampala. There was one doctor at the facility, and on occasion some nurses. The X-ray machine could be powered up for an hour a day at best. Those patients not sleeping on the floor were sharing beds. The bathrooms had been gutted and served “as aviaries for the finches that made their nests in the porcelain scraps on the floor”. Some patients had AIDS; others, suffering from onchocerciasis, or “river blindness”, had long parasitic worms that formed wriggly lumps beneath the skin.

To write about AIDS in Africa for a Western audience is to confront a sharp narrative dilemma. How do you tell stories – often painful, sometimes overwhelming – without re-inforcing a sense of awful inevitability about Africa’s many problems? How do you convey the startlingly different logic by which life operates there, without trafficking in myths and stereotypes, and without solidifying a perception of Africa as radically “other”, and thus unknowable and unreachable? Epstein, a scientist turned essayist, has been piecing this account together for more than a decade in a series of lucid articles published in the New York Review of Books. Collecting that material between the covers of a single volume is a tremendous service – even if, as so often is the case for books with such origins, she has failed to eliminate distracting repetition across chapters or solve some basic problems of exposition. (Why are elementary facts about AIDS treatment and testing in Africa relegated to an appendix?) But her keen eye for detail, suspicion of conventional wisdom, and compelling prose carry the reader along. She does not shy away from telling horror stories about East and Southern Africa, home to about 40 per cent of the world’s cases of HIV infection. There are stories not just of deplorable conditions, tragic missteps and profound institutional failures, and sometimes of the hideous things that people do to one another – like the case of the South African teenage boys who stoned to death their neighbour, an HIV-positive AIDS counsellor, because she had brought “shame on the community”. But Epstein also juxtaposes failures with impressive accomplishments. Though her portraits are vividly painted, her desire is not to describe but to explain. And if she succeeds better than most in avoiding the standard portrayal of Africa as unfathomable and unchangeable, it is because she interweaves her storytelling with careful analysis. She shows how human efforts to control disease often fail but sometimes succeed, and by placing outcomes and actions squarely in their historical and cultural context – including, not incidentally, the long historical ripple effects of Western colonialism that continue to promote the spread of disease while hindering its containment – she shows us why people believe what they believe or do what they do. Finally, by linking what happens in Kampala and Pretoria to what goes on in Geneva, Washington, DC, and elsewhere, Epstein shows how the intractable dilemmas that come to seem quintessentially “African” are often caused, or compounded, by forces and agendas that originate elsewhere and over which Africans themselves exercise limited control.

Control de la natalidad en Gran Bretaña

 

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Albion@h-net.msu.edu (February 200

Kate Fisher. _Birth Control, Sex, and Marriage in Britain, 1918-1960_.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 294 pp. Figures, bibliography,
index..
$125.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-926736-1.

Reviewed for H-Albion by H. G. Cocks, Department of History, University of
Nottingham

Getting Off at Mill Hill

Historians have long been puzzled by the decline in fertility which took
place in Britain between about 1870 and 1939.  Specifically, they have
wondered how exactly it happened, and have tended to assume that it was
the consequence of three interlocking factors: the spread of contraceptive
education by pioneers like Marie Stopes, leading to a wider awareness of
mechanical birth control methods; the gradual emergence of less
patriarchal, more “companionate” marriages in which women’s interests were more
readily voiced and discussed; and the consequent ability of wives to take control
of decisions about birth control and family size.  All of these, it is often
suggested, were a constituent part of modern attitudes to sex, fertility,
subjectivity, and society itself.  In particular, the increasing use of
birth control has been seen as a rejection of the “traditional” and
fatalistic belief that conception, and hence the future, could not be
controlled.  In contrast, small families and fertility control appear to
represent a revolutionary moment in the making of modernity, one in which
people began to develop a “modern” mentality of trying to control
uncertainty through careful planning.

A number of related assumptions accompany this narrative: first, that
women were empowered by taking control of contraceptive decisions–what was in
effect their natural province; second, that new methods of birth control
required more marital communication and hence were the key cause of the
decline in patriarchal marriages;  and finally, that the adoption of
increasingly reliable appliance methods occasioned the demise of birth
control techniques which historians have seen as unreliable, unsatisfying,
and harmful to the sex lives and psyches of those practicing them.  In
this account, the vagaries and frustrations of coitus interruptus are replaced
by more predictable condoms, caps, and pessaries.  This story is also central
to the rise of women’s sexual, moral, and political autonomy, a
narrative in which key obstacles to female sexual enjoyment–ignorance, insensitive
masculinity, unreliable contraceptive methods, and the possibility of
conception itself were gradually removed.

Investigaciones sobre el orgasmo

Carnal Knowledge: They give pleasure; science asks why

By Faye Flam

Inquirer Staff Writer
There are some natural phenomena whose wonder only deepens upon scientific investigation.

Take the orgasm. Scientists know it involves muscle contractions. They know it makes your pupils expand, and heart rate and blood pressure surge.

But why do orgasms feel good?

I was surprised to find that this is still something of a scientific mystery - though one that a few intrepid researchers are just starting to unravel.

“Really and truly, people don’t know,” says Julia Heiman, director of the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research and coauthor of Becoming Orgasmic.

Right now, says Heiman, there’s a big debate over how the female orgasm evolved. Researchers would also like to know just how different the female kind is from the male.

“Why is it easier for women to have multiple orgasms than it is for men?” Heiman asks. “How does it interact with attachment issues?”

There are lots of other questions, she says, but oddly, in our supposedly sex-obsessed society, it’s nearly impossible to get funding for sex research.

Another complication: The orgasm question touches on some profound mysteries about how feelings and consciousness can emerge from the brain.

Sobre los besos

January 31, 2008
Affairs of the Lips: Why We Kiss
Researchers are revealing hidden complexities behind the simple act of kissing, which relays powerful messages to your brain, body and partner

By Chip Walter

When passion takes a grip, a kiss locks two humans together in an exchange of scents, tastes, textures, secrets and emotions. We kiss furtively, lasciviously, gently, shyly, hungrily and exuberantly. We kiss in broad daylight and in the dead of night. We give ceremonial kisses, affectionate kisses, Hollywood air kisses, kisses of death and, at least in fairytales, pecks that revive princesses.

Lips may have evolved first for food and later applied themselves to speech, but in kissing they satisfy different kinds of hungers. In the body, a kiss triggers a cascade of neural messages and chemicals that transmit tactile sensations, sexual excitement, feelings of closeness, motivation and even euphoria.

Not all the messages are internal. After all, kissing is a communal affair. The fusion of two bodies dispatches communiqués to your partner as powerful as the data you stream to yourself. Kisses can convey important information about the status and future of a relationship. So much, in fact, that, according to recent research, if a first kiss goes bad, it can stop an otherwise promising relationship dead in its tracks.

Some scientists believe that the fusing of lips evolved because it facilitates mate selection. “Kissing,” said evolutionary psychologist Gordon G. Gallup of the University at Albany, State University of New York, last September in an interview with the BBC, “involves a very complicated exchange of information—olfactory information, tactile information and postural types of adjustments that may tap into underlying evolved and unconscious mechanisms that enable people to make determinations … about the degree to which they are genetically incompatible.” Kissing may even reveal the extent to which a partner is willing to commit to raising children, a central issue in long-term relationships and crucial to the survival of our species.

Se adelanta la pubertad

Girl, you’ll be a woman sooner than expected

Puberty is arriving ever younger in American females — 8 is no longer considered abnormal.
By Susan Brink, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
January 21, 2008

AT 8 or 9 years old, the typical American schoolgirl is perfecting her cursive handwriting style. She’s picking out nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in sentences, memorizing multiplication tables and learning to read a thermometer.

She’s a little girl with a lot to learn.

And yet, in increasing numbers, when girls this age run across the playground in T-shirts, there is undeniable evidence that their bodies are blossoming. The first visible sign of puberty, breast budding, is arriving ever earlier in American girls.

Some parents and activists suspect environmental chemicals. Most pediatricians and endocrinologists say that, though they have suspicions about the environment, the only scientific evidence points to the obesity epidemic. What’s clear, however, is that the elements of female maturity increasingly are spacing themselves out over months, even years — and no one quite knows why.

While early menstruation is a known risk factor for breast cancer, no one knows what earlier breast development means for the future of girls’ health. “We’re not backing up all events in puberty,” says Sandra Streingraber, biologist and visiting scholar at Ithaca College. “We’re backing up the starting point.” She has examined the research on female puberty and compiled a summary in an August 2007 report called “The Falling Age of Puberty in U.S. Girls.” The report was financed by the Breast Cancer Fund, an advocacy group interested in exploring environmental causes of that disease.

Earlier breast development is now so typical that the Lawson Wilkins Pediatric Endocrine Society urged changing the definition of “normal” development. Until 10 years ago, breast development at age 8 was considered an abnormal event that should be investigated by an endocrinologist. Then a landmark study in the April 1997 journal Pediatrics written by Marcia Herman-Giddens, adjunct professor at the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, found that among 17,000 girls in North Carolina, almost half of African Americans and 15% of whites had begun breast development by age 8. Two years later, the society suggested changing what it considered medically normal.

The new “8″ — the medically suggested definition for abnormally early breast development — is, the society says, 7 for white girls and 6 for African American girls.

El hombre desnudo: estudio del cuerpo masculino

The meaning of Desmond Morris’s hair-do

11/01/2008

Jan Moir reviews The Naked Man: A Study of The Male Body by Desmond Morris

In his new book Desmond Morris points out that the hair that grows on top of a man’s head is one of the strangest features on his body. Indeed it is! Back in the jungle, man was the only primate to grow a mop on his roof. In the days before combs, scissors and Carmen rollers we must have been a frightful sight, yet this covering served an important purpose.

Head hair was our species signal visible from afar or, in Mick Hucknall’s case, outer space. However, thousands of years of evolution have proved that a lack of hair is equally as fascinating as a surfeit of the stuff. Why, Mr Morris’s own tonsorial arrangements have been the subject of much contemplation and discussion over the decades.

At the height of his fame, he chose to disguise his own lack of thatch with increasingly elaborate camouflage techniques. This bizarre ‘display’ behaviour is surely worthy of proper scientific investigation from a zoologist of his standing, but seek and ye shall not find.

Morris has been far too busy investigating the evolutionary success story of mankind to look skywards and check out the social upheavals that have taken place on his own pate. Therefore it falls to me to commemorate a famous hairstyle once regaled as the most fanciful comb-over in the business; a Charltonesque black skein unravelling from ear to ear over a clear dome of pink skin otherwise untroubled by follicle.

Anticoncepción y adolescencia

Teen sex habits revealed in survey
Wed Jan 9, 2008 3:54pm EST

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A “substantial minority” of 15-year-olds have had sexual intercourse, according results of a survey of 33,943 adolescents from 24 European and North American countries.

In additions, 13.2 percent of the sexually active 15-year-olds surveyed reported that they used no form of contraception during their last intercourse episode.

The good news, Dr. Emmanuelle Godeau, from Service Médical du Rectorat de Toulouse, France, told Reuters Health, is that among these sexually active teenagers, the vast majority (82 percent) is acting responsibly, “protecting themselves and their partner against pregnancy with age-appropriate contraception (condoms and/or pills).”

“Our results — in line with the rest of the scientific literature in this domain — show that, on the whole, teenagers are well protected against pregnancy but that there is room to improve the promotion of responsible sexual behavior among adolescents in several countries,” Godeau said.

The percentages of 15-year-olds who said they had sexual intercourse varied by country ranging from 14.1 percent in Croatia to 37.6 percent in England. Boys were more apt than girls to report having had sexual intercourse.

Condoms were the most popular means of contraception reported by young teens; however, condom use varied widely between countries, ranging from 53 percent in Sweden to 89 percent in Greece.

¿Fracasa la formación sexual?

¿Fracasa la formación sexual?

Mikel Resa Ajamil - Sexólogo y profesor
EL PAÍS - Opinión - 07-01-2008

Mientras leía el reportaje “El aborto se dispara“, mi estómago se encogía. Siempre he defendido que aquí residen los sentimientos más humanos. Pero se encogía no sólo por los datos, que realmente son duros de digerir, sino por ver cómo culpabilizamos a las jóvenes y, lo peor de todo, cómo se tiran balones fuera.
El mundo sanitario, políticos e incluso la Iglesia, atribuyen estos aumentos de las interrupciones voluntarias del embarazo a múltiples razones, pero cada uno lo lleva a su territorio y habla de cosas diferentes. Se dice en el reportaje: ¿Fracaso de la formación sexual? Y yo me pregunto: ¿Pero a cuál se refieren? ¿A los programas de prevención que sólo reparten preservativos? ¿A la transversalidad que nunca nadie llegó a creérsela y a desarrollarla? ¿A los programas socio-sanitarios que sólo informan sobre los métodos anticonceptivos?

Tengamos pues las cosas claras. Lo que falla son los parches puestos uno tras otro. Una verdadera educación sexual no ha podido fallar porque jamás ha sido desarrollada coherentemente. Apostemos por la educación sexual reglada en nuestros centros educativos y no tratemos de educar a nuestros/as hijos/as con parches partidarios.

Abortos en 2006

El aborto se dispara

Una de cada 100 españolas interrumpe su embarazo - Fracasa la formación sexual

EMILIO DE BENITO / MÓNICA C. BELAZA
EL PAÍS  -  Sociedad - 04-01-2008

Una de cada 100 mujeres de 15 a 44 años (el periodo considerado fértil) aborta en España cada año. La cifra no deja de crecer desde la despenalización del aborto en 1985. Casi el 40% son menores de 25 años -y el 14% no llegan a los 19-. Cada vez se interrumpen más embarazos y a una edad más temprana, según los datos de 2006 hechos públicos ayer por el Ministerio de Sanidad en su web. Las interrupciones del embarazo se han duplicado en los últimos 10 años. ¿Se usa el aborto como un método anticonceptivo más? ¿Se ha perdido el miedo a abortar? ¿Por qué los jóvenes de la sociedad de la información no usan anticonceptivos? “Un aborto es un fracaso educativo y asistencial”, señala Guillermo González, presidente de la Federación de Asociaciones de Planificación Familiar. “Pero también hay que tener en cuenta que ahora los jóvenes tienen más relaciones sexuales y que las mujeres han asumido su derecho a interrumpir un embarazo cuando no se ven capaces de afrontarlo. Y lo hacen. Aunque ahora precisamente estamos viviendo una campaña que puede volver a instalar el miedo de 20 años atrás”.
Las cifras del ministerio llegan en un momento de especial beligerancia en contra del aborto. Con médicos y enfermeras en prisión preventiva por unos presuntos abortos ilegales realizados en Barcelona a mujeres en avanzado estado de gestación y con una fuerte campaña de grupos antiabortistas contra las clínicas que llevan a cabo interrupciones de embarazos.

Condones a medida

German Invents ‘Spray-On’ Condom to Fit All Sizes

Good news for men whose penises are either so large or so small that they can’t find a condom to fit them: A German inventor has come up with a sprayed-to-measure system that should ensure a snug fit for even the most unusual sizes.
A German condom expert has developed a “spray-on condom” system in the form of a pump that squirts out liquid latex through a multitude of nozzles that cover the erect member with a latex sheath in a matter of seconds.

“If you go into a drug store to buy condoms, the ones they sell are mainly suited to men with the average penis length of 14.5 centimetres (5.51 inches), but a lot of people have penises that are smaller or larger than that,” Jan Vinzenz Krause, director of the Institute for Condom Consultancy, told SPIEGEL ONLINE.

“We thought why not come up with a condom that fits the man rather than vice versa? This would represent a revolution in the condom market,” said Krause, whose institute gives sex education as well as providing advice on AIDS prevention and contraception.

Descuida, cariño, tomo la píldora