(REUTERS) 11 April 2008:

Well, OK, not broken hearts, but damaged ones. It’s long been known that erectile dysfunction in men is a flag, a marker, for possible heart disease. Indeed, this is how Viagra was found, initially as a treatment for certain heart and arterial diseases.

Given that women’s pelvic bloodflows are the same as men’s, the researchers tried to find out whether an unhappiness with sex could also be an indicator of heart or circulatory problems, as with men.

The answer seems to be no: bad news for those pursuing the goal of a female version of Viagra perhaps?

(DAILY MAIL) 15 April 2008:

A top UK obstetrician has upset some with his views on childbirth. Dr. Michael Odent has been delivering babies for 50 years and has been present at 15,000 births. He doesn’t believe that men should be present at the delivery of their children. He thinks that not only do they hinder the women for getting at the task at hand, namely giving birth, but that the whole thing could cause the man to become emotionally disturbed.  He said,
“A woman in labor needs to be in a private world where she doesn’t have to think or talk. Yet, motivated by the desire to ’share the experience,’ the man asks questions and offers words of reassurance and advice.” He says he has watched women struggle to give birth and the minute their partners left the room, the baby came right out. The man’s anxiety can rub off on the laboring woman. He also points out that in the rest of the animal kingdom, no other male watches his sex partner give birth.

(THE AGE) 23 March 2008:

Most of us experience the trials and tribulations of the dating game at one point in our lives. Many women can attest to the fact that it’s difficult to find Mr. Halfway Decent, let alone Mr. Right. Deborah Frances-Wright, a British comedian, wants you to know that it is all actually very easy.

Just about any man is willing to have sex with just about any woman, she says. Thus the power in any relationship is actually with the woman.

True as all this may be, Frances-Wright doesn’t seem to have cracked the part of the problem that many women do want solved: how to get the man to stick around and be attentive afterwards.

(NEWS.COM.AU) 20 March 2008:

An Australian study has found that depressed women have more sex than content women, whether or not they are in a relationship. Results of a study presented at an international mental health conference concluded that depressed women who are depressed have a third more sexual activity than those who are not. They also had more sexually liberating thoughts, a larger variety of sexual experiences, and were more likely to engage in casual sex if they weren’t in a relationship. One of the study’s authors thinks that depressed people, “…feel more insecure about their relationships and concerned that their partner may not care about them or find them valuable. Having sex helps them feel that closeness and security.”

(NEW YORK DAILY NEWS) 12 February 2008:

An unamed retired math teacher from Canada narrowly survived sex play at a bondage club in New York that he frequents. He was found blue, hanging in a dungeon at the Nutcracker Suite sex club. Dressed in a dog collar and stilletos, he was paying staff to check on him every hour. His wife was told that he was found unconscious on one of the streets of New York. She said, “I thought New York was safe.”

(MEN’S NEWS DAILY) 17 January 2008:

In Down and Out in London and Paris, George Orwell wrote of his time researching poverty in London and Paris. One of the points he makes about real poverty (that is, absolute poverty, not just relative) is that one of the things a man is starved for is female company.

According to Orwell, there are almost no female “tramps,” almost no women at all on the very lowest rungs of poverty. And as women will very rarely, if ever, “condescend” (as Orwell puts it) to men of a lower economic status than they are, those men who are homeless are left entirely wihout the company of the other sex.

Orwell had spent time in this sort of poverty and described this lack of female companionship as perhaps the most painful deprivation of all.

(FOX NEWS) 2 January 2008:

What are the uses to which we can put sex surveys? Well, of course, we can find out what is “normal,” but when it comes to bedroom hijinks…what’s really normal? Perhaps the value is that the survey results allay the fears of those who worry about such things.

They can also give us insights into the human condition, for example, one survey (reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, so a real one) said that 34% of men and 10% of women have told a lie in order to have sex.

Which really goes to show that 90% of women and 64% of men lie when taking a sex survey.

(FOX) 2 January 2008:

Many of us think about running our own business, but it seems that men and women do so for different reasons. For men, being one’s own boss and being independent is the leading reason. For women, in contrast, it is the flexibility in allocating time which is the major draw.

Similarly there’s a difference (although it’s much closer) in the number who allow employees and associates to take part in decision making, with women allowing it more.

However, there is a certain amount of confusion evident, with each sex thinking that the other has it easier setting up a small business and each being more successful at marketing and attracting new clients. Someone has to be wrong there.

(DISCOVERYCHANNEL.COM) 19 December 2007:

“People aren’t the only primates who will pay for sex, new research shows. Male longtailed macaques exchange grooming for the right to mate with females whose fur they cleaned.

The findings, which have been accepted for publication in the journal Animal Behavior, present the first evidence that a “social market” influences sexual interaction in a non-human primate.

“I found that the amount of grooming a male performs on a female during a sexual interaction is related to the supply/demand ratio of females per male around the male-female pair at the time of the grooming,” explained Michael Gumert, who conducted the research.

Put another way, male monkeys — especially lower status ones — have to groom more to get more action when fewer females are around.”

(LIVESCIENCE.COM) 18 December 2007:

Female monkeys may shout during sex to help their male partners climax, research now reveals.  Female monkeys often utter loud, distinctive calls before, during or after sex. Their exact function, if any, has remained heavily debated. To investigate the purpose behind these calls, scientists at the German Primate Center in Göttingen focused on Barbary macaques for two years in a nature reserve in Gibraltar.  The researchers found that females yelled during 86 percent of all sexual encounters. When females shouted, males ejaculated 59 percent of the time. However, when females did not holler, males ejaculated less than 2 percent of the time.