S'Mores: Sexual Mores: Orgasm Gaps/Female Pleasure, Declines in Sperm Counts, 50th Anniversary of 'Deep Throat'

Here's a compendium of three recent reports published in The Guardian for anyone who might be interested in some current topics connected by the authors to contemporaneous news.

Have a go at it!

Post-Note: The debates will rage on but Deep Throat’s name is assured immortality thanks to the man who waged war on pornography: Nixon. When reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein found a secret FBI informant for their investigation of the Watergate break-in and cover-up, which also marks its 50th anniversary next week, a Washington Post editor gave the source an alias: “Deep Throat”.

Orgasm gap: how Hollywood and science neglected female pleasure

Emma Thompson is right – more women are missing out on orgasms. Why?

(Daryl McCormack and Emma Thompson in Good Luck To You, Leo Grande.

Photograph: Nick Wall/AP)

 

Hannah Devlin

the Guardian |

Hollywood sex scenes tend to follow a predictable formula: hot, passionate and rarely anything short of euphoric. So the basis of Emma Thompson’s new film, Good Luck To You, Leo Grande, in which she plays a widowed teacher who hires a male escort in the hope of having her first orgasm late in life, is seen as truly boundary-pushing.

But while films do not tend to depict women looking tense, frustrated or simply a bit bored during sex, evidence suggests that in real-life many women share the experience of Thompson’s character. “Fifteen percent of women have never had an orgasm,” Thompson told ITV’s Lorraine Kelly, in a publicity interview this week, a figure that experts say is “plausible”.

“I’m thrilled that Emma Thompson is doing this movie because for many years the general public has been actively misinformed by Hollywood about how women have orgasm,” said Prof Elisabeth Lloyd, a biologist at Indiana University and author of The Case of the Female Orgasm. “That’s what makes this so special.”

Lloyd’s research has highlighted the “orgasm gap”, in which a far higher proportion of women do not orgasm than men – after extensive research she put the figure at about 10%. “I think that number represents a mishmash of women who haven’t had partners who wanted to pursue it, women who haven’t wanted to pursue it themselves and women who are physically unable to reach that state,” she said.

Dr Laura Jarvis, a sexual health doctor in Tayside, Scotland, said she saw patients with a range of reasons for not having an orgasm. “Most of these women don’t have a physical problem – nerve damage or something to do with their anatomy,” she said. “Most of the time it’s about their own relationship with their sexual self, about permitting themselves to having sexual pleasure... '

Continue reading >> https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jun/11/orgasm-gap-how-hollywood-and-science-neglected-female-pleasure

 

Cocktail of chemical pollutants linked to falling sperm quality in research

(There had been an alarming decline in sperm counts and concentration in western countries over decades, the scientists said. Photograph: The Science Picture Company)

 

Damian Carrington

the Guardian |

Study finds people have ‘astonishing’ levels of compounds thought to disrupt hormones

A cocktail of chemical pollutants measured in people’s bodies has been linked to falling semen quality by new research.

Chemicals such as bisphenols and dioxins are thought to interfere with hormones and damage sperm quality, and the study found combinations of these compounds are present at “astonishing” levels, up to 100 times those considered safe.

Bisphenol A (BPA) was responsible for the highest risks, the scientists said. The chemical is found in milk and tinned food as it leaches from the linings of the packaging. The key steps for healthy male sexual development occur during pregnancy, making the study results particularly relevant for expectant mothers, the researchers said.

Sperm counts and concentration had undergone an alarming decline in western countries for decades, the scientists said, with sperm counts halving in the last 40 years. Other male sexual disorders such as penis malformation, breast cancer and undescended testes have been increasing. Hormone-disrupting chemicals are a prime suspect and the study sheds new light on the potential for chemical cocktails to cause harm.

The study team, led by Prof Andreas Kortenkamp, at Brunel University London, said they “were astonished by the magnitude of the hazard index”, the measure of risk from the chemical cocktails. The team were also surprised that BPA was the most worrying chemical, as previous work had focused on phthalates, which are used in plastics.

Kortenkamp told the Guardian the research would allow better epidemiological studies to be done in people to assess the impacts. “But personally I think, with the evidence we’ve produced, there’s no reason to delay any regulatory action.”

The research, published in the journal Environment International, assessed measurements of nine chemicals, including bisphenol, phthalates and paracetamol (known in some countries as acetaminophen), in urine samples from almost 100 Danish men aged 18 to 30. It also used existing data, mostly from the European Food Standards Agency, to estimate people’s exposures to 20 other chemicals..."

Continue reading >> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/10/cocktail-of-chemical-pollutants-linked-to-falling-sperm-quality-in-research

 

Deep Throat at 50: the controversial film that pushed porn into the mainstream

Reviled by many and celebrated by others, the surviving children of those involved speak about a complicated legacy

(‘In America, people are very skittish about talking about anything that has to do with sex’ … a still of Deep Throat. Photograph: Damiani Films)

 

David Smith

the Guardian |

It intrigued celebrities, mortified conservatives, divided feminists and changed pornography forever. Deep Throat, which premiered in New York 50 years ago on Sunday, is probably the most controversial – and profitable – film of all time.

The X-rated movie starred Linda Lovelace as a sexually unfulfilled woman whose long-lost clitoris is found by a doctor buried in her oesophagus, prompting long, surreal and, some would say, boring scenes of fellatio with a series of men.

Deep Throat provoked a fierce backlash from an unlikely alliance of feminists and religious groups and drew scrutiny from the FBI. Its director was arrested and it was variously banned, unbanned and rebanned during obscenity trials that ensured more people were eager to see it (it was not shown at a British cinema until 2005) while its star claimed she was violently coerced into making it.

Half a century on, some regard it as a milestone in America’s cultural and sexual revolution. Others, even before the internet and #MeToo movement, viewed the 62-minute film as paving the way for the mass proliferation of pornography, exploitation and objectification.

Andrea Dworkin, for example, a feminist who at one point allied with Lovelace in an attempt to outlaw pornography, argued in a 1993 speech about its dehumanising effects that “when a woman has a penis thrust down to the bottom of her throat, as in the film Deep Throat, that throat is not part of a human being who is involved in discussing ideas”. Erica Jong said she was “appalled at how offensive” the concept was.

The film’s director, Gerard Damiano Sr, never set out to change the world but did think he was on the right side of history. The former hairdresser used to listen to his female clients discuss how difficult it was to express themselves sexually.

He went into film-making but, lacking access to big studios, settled for the underground scene in New York (with some financial help from the mob). He died in 2008 at the age of 80, as surprised as anyone that Deep Throat would be his legacy..."

Continue reading >> https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/jun/10/deep-throat-at-50-linda-lovelace-porn-mainstream