Possibly ruining my appreciation for the noble Swedes and their fine IKEA meatballs, a recent study has found that Swedish men with STDs think their infection is an affirmation of their manliness.

University of Skovde researcher Kina Hammarlund interviewed an unknown group of 16- to 30-year-old men and women for her dissertation and discovered it was only male participants who put on rose-colored glasses, seeing STDs like genital warts or gonorrhea as a rite of passage to manhood. It’s a telling statement about sexuality that men viewed STDs as something positive about their manhood, while women didn’t think it said anything about their womanhood. STDs could imply, even erroneously, that a guy is kind of a stud. But it’s hard to believe anyone would be proud of an STD. Could this study be bulls**t? [The Local via Feministing]

The blogosphere is still debating over whether or not Kanye West and Amber Rose are really broken up or if they’re secretly still shopping and sexing each other. I, on the other hand, am more interested in knowing if they were ever that close to begin with. Walking around like the remix to Prince and Apollonia is cute and all, but I think everyone is forgetting one important fun fact: Amber seems to really really like women…Read more

Just as the world is starting to get used to homosexuality, a new type of sexuality is introduced. Today, “Good Morning America” discussed interesting cases in which people love inanimate objects. Yes, we’ve heard of this before with the man who has sex with cars, but now there’s a name: Objectum-Sexuality. Take for instance Erika Eiffel, who had a commitment ceremony and recently changed her name to reflect her bond with the Eiffel Tower. And the French landmark isn’t the first thing she’s loved. “When other teenagers were dating each other,” said Erika, “I was dating a bridge.” [ABC News]

The awesome blog “25 Things About My Sexuality” compiles and posts the anonymous sexual confessions of its readers. Some are heartfelt…

“I’m not a prude, but I dislike talking about my sex life, even in therapy. I was raised in a household where sex and sexual issues were taboo even though my folks walked around naked and had five kids. That contrast is probably a big part of the reason I find it embarrassing to discuss sex.”

Gay men and straight women share some characteristics in the area of the brain responsible for emotion, mood, and anxiety, researchers from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute wrote in a study, and heterosexual men and homosexual women’s brain scans were not symmetric, with the right hemisphere slightly larger than the left. Following this study, which suggests that nature has a role in sexuality, researchers are wondering whether doctors will be able to look at the brains of newborn babies and predict their future sexual preference. Further investigation is needed, but this could make coming out to parents a whole lot easier. Child: I’m gay! Parent: We’ve known since you were a newborn! [Reuters]

Joyce McFadden, a New York City psychoanalyst, who runs a site called Women’s Realities, actively conducts studies where she asks women questions and then let’s them answer in their own words. As you’d expect, we ladies have sex on our minds. So, when prompted with, What do you want to know about your mother but would never ask?, the responses were overwhelmingly about their mother’s sexual history—from how she lost her virginity, to possible abortions, to if she had even ever questioned her sexuality. While the answers to this query may not be child-proof, as a teenager or adult struggling with our own sexuality and love life, this info could be a bit uncomfortable, but useful and potentially validating. Although, just a few days after buttering our moms up with Mother’s Day presents, we still can’t seem to ask.  [Huffington Post]

Whoa. We totally just found our favorite new blog (besides The Frisky, of course!)—a San Francisco writer named Casey is rereading and recapping the entire Sweet Valley High series. On the off chance a few of you readers weren’t fans of the series, it was the book series for tweens growing up in the ‘80s and provided loads of thinly veiled sexual innuendo that overwhelmed our sense of what life would be like once we got our period. The series followed identical twins (twins were a big thing in the ‘80s) Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield around their totally perfect town in California. Both of the twins were blond, with green-blue eyes and size-six figures, which permanently imprinted in our brains that a six was the size to be if we were going to be popular in high school.