Drinking a cap-full of bleach will not stop the spread of HIV/AIDS. It will, however, turn your insides into mulch. Guess they didn’t teach teens in Florida that in abstinence education class. [ABC Action News]

Experts say that women take 10 to 20 minutes to have an orgasm once, you know, they get goin’. So Glamour put that theory to the test using three women and then charted their Big-O’s progress with this handy-dandy chart. See the deets in full at Glamour.com. What I thought was interested was that all three women were having sex with a partner, rather than, you know, themselves. A far more fascinating comparison might have included a woman on a solo mission, you know what I’m sayin’?

Hippies are lovable, hairy, and the reason you can get soy milk at most coffee shops. While the world needs all the help it can get, hippies usually need a bath.  But now they finally have science on their side. A study, conducted at the University of Missouri, tested 16 hair samples, eight washed and eight unwashed, over a 24-hour period. Researchers found that the un-shampooed samples were able to absorb seven times as much ground level ozone as the cleaner strands. While ozone exposure is attributed to respiratory problems and a rise in deaths, unwashed hair usually leads to a decrease in sex appeal.  So, we’re torn between our lungs and our looks—guess it all depends on if you want your breathing to be just as shallow.  [New Scientist]

Seventy-percent of college aged women say they’ve had a man mistake their friendliness for a come on. (We speculate that by the time you hit 30, that could easily be raised to 100%.) What is it with guys?  Just because we’re trying not to be a bitch conductor 24/7, doesn’t mean we want them to ride our caboose. But then again the opposite problem is worse—when we’re trying to get it on with a dude and he just thinks we’re being nice. Ugh, so frustrating! Well, in either case, a new study has proven that it’s not your outfit, your make-up, or your personality’s fault.  According to the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, men have trouble reading non-verbal clues whether they are sexual or just plain polite. 

In today’s “Like, duh?” news, a new study suggests that teaching teens about safe sex not only might lead to less teen pregnancy, but also does not increase the number of sexually active teens or incidents of STDs. Not that the debate over abstinence education versus sex education is going to be over any time soon. [News-Medical.net]

What if your Big O was shifted into overdrive?  Sometimes getting lucky isn’t lucky at all claim four women recently interviewed by ABC News. They all suffer from Persistent Sexual Arousal Syndrome (PSAS), a disorder that was diagnosed only six years ago but has been affecting some women since birth.  Like the Greek Myth about Sisyphus, the king forced to push a rock uphill for all eternity, these women feel the same burden from a constant “throbbing, pulsing, or tingling without the persons sexual desire,” as Dr. Irwin Goldstein describes it.  Worst of all, even after they climax, there is no relief. “It works at the moment, but as soon as you stop, it’s right back there again,” one woman said. Since PSAS has only been recently identified, treatments are still being explored.  Some women use an anti-depressant, some women fill a condom with ice, and some even go for electro-shock. While there is no cure yet, there is help through the PSAS Support Group.

Who doesn’t like a good spanking? Turns out even your kid eventually will.  If that grosses you out—or explains some things—then a new report, which links childhood penalties with adult sexual behavior, will come as no surprise. Elizabeth Gershoff, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor who has reviewed almost a century’s worth of research on spanking, claims people “may internalize [spankings] to mean that in loving relationships sometimes there’s pain or physical aggression.” Although the effectiveness of raising a hand to discipline a child is still up for debate, as of a 2007 study, 85% of people claim to have been spanked. So let’s face it—all (well, most) of us need to be punished. [ USA Today]

Scientists are searching for the elusive G-spot as if they were Indiana Jones going after the Holy Grail, and new research published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine suggests that they may have found it. In a study of 20 women, the ones who were able to achieve vaginal orgasm had thicker tissues between the vagina and the uretha. However, some women might not have G-spots. “If a woman spends all her time worrying about whether she is normal, or has a G-spot or not, she will focus on just one area, and ignore everything else,” Dr. Petra Boynton, a sexual psychologist at University College London told the BBC. “...telling people that there is a single, best way to have sex…isn’t the right thing to do.” Ain’t that the truth. [BBC]

Love is one of those things that has a million different precious expressions about it: Absence make the heart grow fonder. All you need is love. When it comes to matters of the heart, it’s the heart that matters most. Love is a many splendored thing…. The list goes on and on. Despite how cool they sound in song, most of the altruisms are unproven. Although, researchers at UCLA, just like the sexy boy band Louis XIV, are “Finding Out True Love Is Blind.”

No pressure if you’re just keeping a relationship together to score a sweet present on Valentine’s Day, but according to the Wall Street Journal, neuroscientists in New York have been able to prove that you can love someone forever. While a group of pessimistic psychologists were trying to plot the decline of passion in couples over the course of two decades, they accidentally discovered there were a handful of couples who were still horny, er, in love with each other. 

Earlier this week, the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology reported that two cups of coffee a day prevents pregnancy and doubles the risk of miscarriages for pregnant women thereby making it one of the cheapest and tastiest alternative to Roe vs. Wade. But like a pharmaceutical commercial where you’re promised a cure that also happens to make your butt leak, just a few days later another medical report was published claiming that coffee will make you fat.  That’s right, those cappa-frappa-mocha-mmm’s can contain 1/3 of your daily caloric allowance.  So what is a girl to do: let a baby or coffee wake you up? [Reuters, Guardian U.K., and MSNBC]
 

Aside from the usual defense that “it’s all pink in the middle,” researchers in Canada and the US monitored hundreds of couples to find out if there were any differences in the level of commitment between civil unions and marriage. The two studies published in the January issue of Developmental Psychology gathered evidence to support the integrity of civil unions and have challenged the traditional, truly antiquated, claim that same sex relationships are more dysfunctional than heterosexual ones. In one study, researchers working together from the Universities of San Diego, Vermont, and Washington found that, in general, same sex couples fought less and felt better about their partners than their heterosexual counterparts. Moreover, the study conducted at the University of Urbana-Champaign learned that lesbians were, “especially effective at resolving conflict.”  Bonus points for the ladies! After years of scrutiny, both research teams concluded that gay couples in civil unions and married straight couples were equally committed to their romantic relationships.  Now if only the rest of the world could see them as being created equal! [Forbes]

Going green has made its way to the bedroom. According to a new study conducted at Michigan State University, the divorce rate is taking its toll on the environment because single living spaces require as much energy as a shared home. From air conditioners to appliances, the strain on electricity production and natural resources has had a negative impact on all 11 countries that were studied. That, of course, includes our very own land of the free, which has attributed over 10 billion dollars a year in excess energy costs to 16.5 million single residences. So in the end, if enviro-windbags Larry and Laurie David were really serious about saving Mother Earth, they’d soldier on for eternity in the tormented hell of their loveless marriage.

In an attempt to spice things up, a 50-year-old man bought a vibrator for his wife, but now she seems to have lost interest in him. The husband knows she uses the vibrator, so he thinks it’s the vibrator’s fault that she doesn’t want to have sex with him anymore. This is kind of sad because he was only trying to bring her pleasure by introducing a toy, but maybe he should have known that women are more likely to orgasm from masturbating than from having sex. An Australian study found that 56 percent of women who were sexually active without a partner had an orgasm every time they masturbated, compared with 24 percent of women having sex with a partner. Also, was this his wife’s first vibrator? If so, we’re definitely sadder for her that she missed out on all the fun for 50 years. [The Guardian]

There’s a news story to support the headline above nearly everyday, but the latest has the most expansive evidence that abstinence-only education does not affect sexual behavior in teenagers. The non-partisan group National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy conducted the study and concluded:

“At present there does not exist any strong evidence that any abstinence program delays the initiation of sex, hastens the return to abstinence or reduces the number of sexual partners among teenagers.”

Currently there’s a bill before Congress that would put $141 million into abstinence-only education funding. Um, yeah. In a few weeks, we’ll be debating the issue of whether, despite the evidence, abstinence education is still the way to go when it comes to teaching minors about sex. Um, we know where we stand if you couldn’t read between the lines, but we’re eager to hear from our experts and from you Frisky girls as well. [MSNBC]

We love it when science supports our guilty habits. According to psychologists with the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, checking out members of the opposite sex (or same sex, if you’re gay) is totally natural at work—but controlling how far you take that urge to ogle is what separates humans from animals.