People have been interested in sex since, well, forever — but in 2011, we couldn't seem to stop talking about controversial contraception methods, fake orgasms, and who was sexting whom.
During the past 365-or-so days, scientists, talking heads, and Americans everywhere have been heeding the sage advice of that early nineties hip-hop trio, Salt-n-Pepa: We talked about sex.
Yep, we talked about sex a lot. Whether our PG-13-rated conversations were spurred by scientific research (oh, so that’s why so many women fake orgasms), political debate (to change morning-after pill availability or not?), or high-profile cheating scandals (we’re looking at you, Governor Schwarzenegger), 2011 brought a slew of findings about sex, relationships, and love to light.
So we rounded up the top 10 sex and relationship stories that made the biggest, um, bang. How was 2011 for you?
This Is Your Brain on Sex
In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus discovered that the Earth moved. Isaac Newton theorized gravity in 1666. And in 2011, scientists mapped the female orgasm (in 3D, nonetheless!).
We nailed down the solar system and gravity years ago, but the female orgasm has been mystifying people throughout history. So to find out what really happens to our brains during the big O, researcher Barry Komisaruk, PhD, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University, used an MRI machine to record the brain activity of female participants during orgasm. At the Society for Neuroscience conference in Washington, D.C., Dr. Komisaruk presented a 3D, multi-colored film portraying the more than 80 regions of a woman’s brain that become activated during sexual climax. Among others, the brain’s sensory regions lit up, followed by the insula (an area that’s also active in pain, possibly explaining why women are less sensitive to pain when having an orgasm), the hypothalamus (which releases oxytocin, also known as the “love hormone”), and (finally!) the brain’s pleasure center, known as the nucleus accumbens.
Yep, Women Still Fake Orgasms
To all the men out there living in the dark, it's time you knew: Most women have faked an orgasm at some point in their sex lives (and that means there's a good chance that you — yes, you — have been duped). In fact, research shows that as many as two-thirds of females have 'fessed up to faking it.
But according to one headline-making study in 2011, the reason women bluff in the bedroom may surprise you. According to research published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior
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, many do it to keep their men faithful. After they interviewed 453 heterosexual women age 18 to 46, the researchers found that the women who had faked an orgasm with their current partner (more than half had) were more likely to be fearful of their partner cheating; these women also tended to carry out other "mate retention acts," such as telling potential romantic rivals to back off.
This isn't scientists' first attempt at figuring out why women put on orgasmic productions. However, this year did mark one of the first anti-fake-orgasm revolutions. In an October blog post on the Web site the Current Conscience, political and cultural commentator Yashar Ali made waves when he asked women to "put the fake orgasm out of business." Why? "It's time for women to seek the sexual pleasure that has been, for too long, absent or lost in their lives. And it's time for men to stop automatically assuming that they are fantastic in bed," he wrote.
Men Don't Really Think About Sex Every Seven Seconds
Here’s one stale myth that research published this year may help retire: Turns out, most guys don’t have one-track minds.
However, they do think about sex more often than women do, according to a study published in the Journal of Sex Research. To find out how often people think dirty thoughts, researchers from Ohio State University asked nearly 300 male and female college-aged participants to keep track of how often they thought about sex, sleeping, and eating for a week. The results? On average, a man’s mind wandered to sex 19 times a day (much less than the rumored “every seven seconds,” which would add up to a whopping 8,000 times a day, according to the researchers).
By comparison, men thought about food about 18 times a day and sleep about 11 times a day; women reflected on sex 10 times, food 15 times, and sleep 8.5 times every day on average.