sexscientists
The National Institutes of Health awarded approximately $31 billion in research grants in 2024. The portion of that budget allocated to the study of human sexual behavior, outside of HIV/STI prevention, was functionally a rounding error. The exact figure is difficult to calculate because NIH does not maintain a
sexscientists
The full internal anatomy of the clitoris was not mapped until 1998, when Australian urologist Helen O’Connell used MRI and microdissection of cadavers to produce the first complete three-dimensional model of the organ. The study was published in the Journal of Urology. It demonstrated that the clitoris was not
sexscientists
In 1981, the Centers for Disease Control published a brief report noting that five young men in Los Angeles had been diagnosed with Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, a lung infection so rare that the existence of five cases in one city was itself a medical event. All five men were gay.
Please enjoy this early draft section from "Tribes of the Edge: Sex, Identity, and Obsession in the Digital Age" - 😘. RZA 🧑🍳 Introduction: Something happened to how people fuck, what they call themselves, and how far they're willing to go. Twenty years ago, sex had a short
Your relationship model isn't biology—it's technology. And like all technology, it was built for problems that may no longer exist. Every culture that's ever existed has experimented with relationship structures. The nuclear family is about 70 years old. Lifelong monogamy as a romantic
Part 35 of 36 in the The 2026 Kink Field Guide series. Throughout this guide, we've touched on evolutionary explanations for various kinks—sperm competition, mate guarding, dominance hierarchies, signaling systems. Now let's pull that thread completely. The evolutionary psychology of kink is contested territory. Some
Batman doesn't have enemies. He has a rotating cast of intimate partners who each meet a specific psychological need that he can't get from any one of them. This isn't metaphor. Through the lens of attachment theory, every member of Batman's rogues
The Kids Are Alright Every generation panics about the next one. Every generation is wrong in the same way. The kids aren't broken. They're adapted to an environment you didn't grow up in and can't fully see. The behaviors that look like
Human intuition fails catastrophically with complex adaptive systems. Understand emergence, feedback loops, attractors, and why typical problem-solving approaches backfire.
Alfred Kinsey died in 1956, exhausted and under investigation. The U.S. Customs Service had been intercepting his mail for years, seizing the erotic materials he was collecting for the Indiana University Institute for Sex Research. The IRS was auditing the Rockefeller Foundation’s grants to his lab, applying pressure
In 1979, William Masters and Virginia Johnson published a book called Homosexuality in Perspective. The book claimed that homosexuality could be converted to heterosexuality through their standard two-week therapy protocol. The claimed success rate was extraordinary. The methodology behind the claim was, by the standards of their own earlier work,
They spent twenty years studying human intimacy before they tried it with each other. William Masters and Virginia Johnson married in 1971, fourteen years after she walked into his laboratory as a research assistant with no degree and a talent for making strangers comfortable talking about sex. The marriage lasted
The pivot happened because the data pointed at a door and the door led to money. Masters and Johnson had spent twelve years watching people have sex in a laboratory and mapping what the body does when sex works. They had accumulated thousands of observations of functional sexual response. They
The book was designed to be unreadable. William Masters made this decision with full awareness of what he was doing and why. Human Sexual Response, published in April 1966 by Little, Brown and Company, was written in the densest possible clinical prose, loaded with medical terminology, structured like a pathology
William Masters was not a rebel. He was a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist at Washington University in St. Louis, a man whose professional life was organized around the careful accumulation of institutional respectability. He published in the right journals. He attended the right conferences. He wore the right ties. His colleagues in
Kinsey has been dead since 1956. The attacks on him are healthier than ever. Every decade produces a new campaign to discredit his research, defund his institute, and retroactively erase his findings from the scientific record. The campaigns fail; the data survives; the institute continues; the findings hold. Then the
The third floor of the building that housed the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University contained a film studio. Kinsey had it built for the stated purpose of documenting human sexual behavior on camera. The documentation was part of the research program, officially. The subjects were recruited from the
In January 1948, a medical textbook publisher released an 804-page volume of statistical tables, cross-tabulations, and clinical prose so deliberately dry it could have been a report on soil composition. It sold two hundred thousand copies in two months. Bookstores couldn’t keep it on the shelves. Department stores stocked
Everybody knows the Kinsey Scale. Almost nobody knows what it actually measures. The scale has become a cultural shorthand for sexual fluidity, a meme format, a personality quiz result people share on social media. “I’m a Kinsey 2” has entered the lexicon the way “I’m a Virgo” entered
Alfred Kinsey collected gall wasps the way other men collected stamps or grievances. Obsessively. Systematically. With a taxonomist’s conviction that if you gathered enough specimens the data would eventually tell you something true whether the truth was comfortable or not. He spent twenty years at it. Traveled tens of
Nobody elected them. Nobody asked for volunteers. The researchers who built the modern science of human sexuality were a bug taxonomist from Indiana, a gynecologist from Missouri, and a woman with no advanced degree who turned out to be the smartest person in the room. They broke every rule the
