Study Reveals Everything You Ever Needed To Know About Sex

A study released today reports that men with the biggest penises live in New Orleans. Good to know. But seriously, how many of these “studies” do we need? A lot, apparently! Can’t get enough of ’em! Must get laid!

Custom-fit condom outfitter Condomania has helpfully ranked U.S. cities according the penis size; this data was gathered according to the sizes ordered from the company, and where they were being shipped to. While this might not be the most reliable way of quantifying information, I doubt the men of New Orleans really care.

Anyhow it doesn’t matter whether these statistics are even remotely accurate; we, the media-devouring public, have an insatiable hunger for studies that purport to reveal something, anything about the opposite sex. And it’s much less embarrassing to glean insights from a “scientific study” than, say, Cosmo. So in mankind’s never-ending quest to take off our pants, we’re fed a constant diet of research-driven insights. And my God, what we’ve learned! Take a look at the past year alone and bask in the wealth of your sexy knowledge.

March 24, 2010:
Single Women Still Face Social Stigma: Study
According to researchers at the University of Missouri, “never-married women’s social environments are characterized by pressure to conform to the conventional life pathway. This pressure was manifested in women feeling highly visible and invisible. Heightened visibility came from feelings of exposure and invisibility came from assumptions made by others.”

March 23, 2010:
Stress Broadens Men’s ‘Mating’ Tastes
A German study finds that “Men have a tendency to approach dissimilar mates and to rate these to be more pleasant when they are acutely stressed. (But) we are not sure how this might reflect in true mating decisions.” Mighty big catch there!

March 19, 2010
Effect of Manipulated Prestige-Car Ownership on Both Sex Attractiveness Ratings
Ignore the sleepy headline on this one (it comes from a journal, after all). The study put “same target model (male and female matched for attractiveness) expressing identical facial expressions and posture in either a ‘high status’ (Silver Bentley Continental GT) or a ‘neutral status’ (Red Ford Fiesta ST) motor-car. Results showed that the male target model was rated as significantly more attractive when presented to female participants” when the men were seated in the Bentley versus the Fiesta. Score one for men in their mid-life crises.

March 17, 2010
Sickly Women Love Manly Men
Even we weren’t able to resist covering this Darwinian study: “Certain environmental factors shift the balance when a woman is choosing a mate, and health is one of those. If a woman lives in an environment where there are lots of pathogens and disease, they are more likely to trade off a good investment in favour of better health for their children. In places where health is less of an issue, women are not so willing to do that.” Whether you realize it or not, pretty much everything you desire is related to your need to breed.

March 10, 2010
Four in 10 Men Over 75 Say They Are Still Having Sex
But only 2 out of 10 women! “Researchers say there is a simpler explanation. Men tend to marry women younger than themselves and die sooner; more women are widowed and thus lack a partner with whom to have sex. Men can therefore look forward to longer active sex lives than women, though women seem unperturbed by it. The study estimates for the first time the ‘sexually active life expectancy’ of men and women at different ages. It shows that at the age of 30, men have a sexually active life expectancy of nearly 35 years; for women it is almost 31 years. At age 55, the expectancy changes to almost 15 years for men and 10 years for women.” Bummer.

February 15, 2010
Survey Finds Many Men Complaining of Ill-Fitting Condoms
“Nearly 45% said they’d used a condom that fit poorly the last time they had sex during the previous three months. These men were more than 2.5 times more likely to say their condom broke or slipped compared to those who said their condoms fit well. And they were five times more likely to say they experienced irritation to the penis.” And nobody wants a cranky dick! But really, this bodes well for today’s study from the custom-fit condom makers.

January 26, 2010
Truth About Sex: 60% Of Young Men, Teen Boys Lie About It
Duh. Still, this is a “finding!” According to an online survey of boys aged 22 and under, “45% said they were virgins; 60% said they had lied about something related to sex; 30% lied about how far they have gone; 24% lied about their number of sexual partners; and 23% claimed not to be a virgin when they were; 57% of sexually active respondents said they had had unprotected sex; 78% agreed there was “way too much pressure” from society to have sex.” That last statistic made me go “aw” just a little.

January 23, 2010
Couples’ Sex Survey Results Revealed
A treasure trove of random stats from this Australian report: “About 85 percent of women in their 30s said they wanted more sex compared to 75 per cent of men in that age group. They want a return to their 20s – 60 per cent of women that age said they were having sex at least every second day compared to 31 per cent of women in their 30s. more than half of women wished for more interesting sex compared to 15 per cent who said more sex. Of men in their 30s, 21 per cent said more sex. Twenty-one per cent of all women said “longer-lasting sex”. Only seven per cent of men gave this response. Thirty-one per cent of women in their 30s would rather go out with friends. Only 10 per cent of men in that bracket gave that answer. The survey found that men are two to three times more likely to initiate sex – except for the over 50s where it is more likely to be a joint decision. Yet barely half of men remained faithful by the time they reached that age.” And so on, and so forth.

January 20, 2010
The 4 Big Myths Of Profile Pics
The folks from the online dating site OkCupid sifted through some 7,000 member photographs to find that 1. You should smile. 2. You shouldn’t take your picture with a webcam or phone. 3. Guys should keep their shirts on. 4. The older you are, the less you should show your cleavage. This common-sense wisdom is supported by lots of charts and graphs. Update: This piece is written kind of awkwardly, so I misread a bit. But it seems to assert that SOME people should smile, the phone-cam pic works perhaps because it shows more cleavage, if you’ve got great abs, gentlemen, show ’em off (but only if you’re young!); and showing your cleavage as you age will at least help work against the fact that you are no spring chicken. Anyhow, my point here is that it’s another damn study.

October 28, 2009
Why Men Will ALWAYS Pick ‘Curvy’ Scarlett Johansson Over ‘Size Zero’ Victoria Beckham
Why, if that headline doesn’t reel you in, will anything? Researchers at St. Andrews University “found that men really do prefer ‘normal’-sized women with a few curves to those who are fashionably thin.” Always and forever.

October 19, 2009:
Hardness Is the Way to Happiness: Sex Survey
“84 percent of men surveyed believe the most important element of a man’s sexual confidence is his ability to please his partner sexually, while almost three quarters of women questioned agreed. However, more than a third of women believe their partner would like to experience harder erections in order to improve their sex lives.” Conveniently, this comes from a study conducted by the Viagra-makers at Pfizer.

Sept 29, 2009:
German Men Are “World’s Worst Lovers” With English Men In Second Place
This is determined by some online poll that asked women around the world to rate countries based on their bedroom skills. They were also asked to explain their reasoning — German men, it seems, got slammed because of their b.o. Americans are “too rough,” by the way, and Welshmen were “too selfish.” That’s unfortunate; I rather fancy Prince Harry.

September 4, 2009
People With Thin Thighs Die Sooner, Study Finds
And besides, we already know men prefer the curvy types. This is all about body fat and where it’s located; “pear-shaped people may have lower risks, even if they have more body fat overall,” because it’s abdominal fat that is the problem. So if you’re stick-legged and carrying your fat around the waist, bad news. “Those with the thinnest thighs – less than 18 inches – were more than twice likely to have died within 12 years” of the study.

September 3, 2009:
Men Lose Their Minds Speaking to Pretty Women
The Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology reports that “men who spend even a few minutes in the company of an attractive woman perform less well in tests designed to measure brain function than those who chat to someone they do not find attractive … The reason may be that men use up so much of their brain function or ‘cognitive resources’ trying to impress beautiful women, they have little left for other tasks.” If men are dumb, it’s your fault, hottie.

August 12, 2009:
Study Shows Single Women Prefer to Date Attached Men
More Bullock-esque queasiness here: “Researchers told half of the participants that the person with whom they were matched was single. They told the other participants that their “match” was currently in a romantic relationship. Surprisingly, single women were much more interested in pursuing a relationship with a committed man than with a single man. Specifically, when researchers described the man as single, 59 percent of single women were interested in pursuing him. However, when they described the exact same man as being in a committed relationship, 90 percent of the single women were interested.” So should we be buying leashes or something?

June 29, 2009:
Big Surprise: Men Find Thin, Seductive Women More Attractive, Study Finds
I’m not even going to bother cutting and pasting the research from this one (because really, did this actually require research?), but it’s from a Wake Forest study that brings us to…

June 27, 2009:
Rating Attractiveness: Consensus Among Men, Not Women, Study Finds
According to researchers at Wake Forest and Queens College, “Men’s judgments of women’s attractiveness were based primarily around physical features and they rated highly those who looked thin and seductive. Most of the men in the study also rated photographs of women who looked confident as more attractive. As a group, the women rating men showed some preference for thin, muscular subjects, but disagreed on how attractive many men in the study were. Some women gave high attractiveness ratings to the men other women said were not attractive at all.” Of course, they note this has “implications for … dating marketplace.”

June 3, 2009
Gay Men on Campus: Smart, Studious, Involved
According to the journal Economics of Education, “Gay men do incrementally better at college than straight men, while bisexual women do worse than their peers.” Good to know!

May 22, 2009
Women Find ‘Feminine-Looking’ Men Most Attractive!
Not to be confused with sickly women liking masculine men, mind you. “Women have a soft corner for feminine-looking men, suggests a new study, which found that ladies find males with higher arched eyebrows, smaller jaws and large eyes most attractive. Therefore, “Women perceive feminine men as honest, kind and even as good parents. So it makes good sense that women find these caring and sharing men attractive when thinking about a long-term partner.”

May 21, 2009
What Job Says About Your Sex Life
In a victory for tech nerds everywhere, an anonymous study in Britian concluded that “computer geeks make the best lovers. They were found to be the most selfless in the sack, the most adventurous and more likely to use love gadgets. Seventy-eight per cent of techies that were questioned also claimed that sex toys were part of their love life. And a further eight out of ten tech workers said that sex toys played an important part in their sexual relationships. Eighty-two per cent of IT workers also claimed to consider their partners sexual needs above there own, the highest result from all of those asked.”