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Your Brain is Your Biggest Sex Organ
Have you ever heard this? That your brain is actually more responsible for how you experience sex than your genitals. Nice to see folks like Dr. Buri looking at all the myriad reasons we do it...cause it ain't as simple as the monkeys on the Discovery channel that's for sure.
The brain as your biggest sex organ is good news on the one hand. It means that sex can be the mind-blowing experience that it can be because we make meaning out of it. (18 sounds like a nice number and I'd bet there's 18000 reasons, or perhaps as many reasons as there are people...imagine).
The down side is that *news flash* your brain isn't physically involved in this very physical activity. This means all that meaning can sometimes clutter and get in the way of what is ordinarily and clinically just two people triggering a physical reflex (or trying to).
This is why I have a job!
Get personal. Get real. Start talking in the Talk Your Heart Out Forum.
on animals and sex
You wrote, "When we look at animals, there’s not a whole lot more going on in sex than sex. For animals, sex is about copulation."
This isn't completely true. Bonobos and dolphins both clearly have sex for non-reproductive purposes. Other species of primates are thought to do the same, often having sex when not fertile, for example. Much as we'd like to think otherwise, there are few clear lines of demarcation between our species and other animals.
CPR
ADDICTED TO ARGUING
Right you are - there are 200,000+ species of animals on the planet and you found 2 that do it for pleasure. The rest of them do it to reproduce. The prof is right. Quit being picky.
Copulation
I don't know about Hpac's statistics, but all Doc B seems to be saying is that animals have sex for the sex, (when he said, "For animals, sex is about copulation"). Copulation simply means coitus or the act of sex, not reproduction. So there's no claim here that animals have sex only for reproduction, but rather that animals only have sex because of the physical stimulus (whether that be spring time, pheremones, the female's fertility, etc).
Humans, on the other hand, have sex for plenty of other reasons than because there is a physical stimulus, as his blog suggests.
237 reasons why people have sex
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-sex01aug01,0,649209.story
Your title of “237 reasons why people have sex” is MISLEADING
I read this article by Meston and Buss (2007) in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. Your title of 237 reasons why people have sex is misleading. The title of this research study is “Why Humans Have Sex” and it is a nice contribution to the literature.
The author’s fine tuned a list of 715 reasons for sex down to 237 distinct reasons. They arrived at a 237 item YSEX questionnaire. However, in the results section of this paper, the methodology of compiling and combining responses was not clarified, other than agreement by the two authors. Table 1 in the study shows the top 50 reasons why men and women have sex drawn from the 237 items. If you examine this table, it shows one of the weaknesses of this study. There are many responses that can be combined. For example, (#2) “I wanted to experience the physical pleasure,” (#3) “It feels good,” (#13) “I wanted the pure pleasure” are all related to Writer’s (Buri’s) point of pleasure being a motivation. While this study is a good one, it seems that this study has a list of thoughts as identified by the 203 men and 241 women as to why people have sex. However, these thoughts could be clustered together under a more specific category.
Absent from Buri’s explanation of his students’ discussions of why people have sex is probably comments like, “Oh, that is similar to this, etc.” In the process of a discussion in class, duplicates are excluded. And, strictly from a research process, a group of 20+ people (in a class) would probably eliminate duplicates more than two people who independently reviewed the reasons.
Meston and Buss (2007) did categorize the many thoughts into 4 factors and 13 subfactors. From this point of view, matching their 13 subfactors with Buri’s qualitative analysis/classroom discussion/motivation analysis would be most accurate. I matched up Buri’s first nine reasons with Meston and Buss’s (2007) 13 subfactors. 6 of them are the same – pleasure, sexual release (similar to stress reduction), love, affection, closeness (similar to love and commitment), expected (similar to duty/pressure), expression, and money (similar to resources). Buri’s seventh reason, Gift of Self could probably fit into the emotional factor items. That leaves two major reasons unmentioned in Meston and Buss’s (2007) list, “make up sex” and “reproduction.” I don’t know about any of you, but I wonder how 444 people could not name reproduction as a reason for sex. Either it was ruled out from the original 715 reasons by the authors or 444 people need to go back to Biology class.
It will be interesting to see Buri’s other nine responses. The common theme, of course, that Buri and Meston & Buss (2007) are saying is that there are many reasons behind why people have sex.
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