Adult Sexual Experiences Research Articles

Adult Sexual Experiences as a Mediator Between Child Abuse and Current Secretory Immunoglobulin A Levels.

The current study investigated whether a history of child abuse is a predictor of adult immune status, with unwanted adult sexual experiences as a proximal mediator. Participants included 89 young adult women (M(age) = 19.24) who were classified as having experienced no child abuse, child physical abuse, or child sexual abuse, based upon self-reported victimization history before 14 years of age. Participants also reported on unwanted sexual experiences in young adulthood and provided four saliva samples, which were collected over two consecutive days to determine secretory immunoglobulin A (sIgA). Age and negative life events were considered as covariates. The results indicated that adult sexual victimization partially mediated the relationship between child abuse (physical and sexual) and sIgA. Specifically, child abuse experiences predicted more adult sexual victimization experiences, which in turn predicted lower sIgA levels. These findings support long-term health effects of victimization, and suggest that the influence of child abuse on sIgA may be perpetuated through adult victimization. Prevention efforts should aim to empower child maltreatment survivors with skills to prevent adult re-victimization. By thwarting future unwanted sexual experiences in adulthood, individuals will be better protected from the health impairments associated with early abuse experiences.

Assessing the association between childhood sexual abuse and adult sexual experiences in women with sexual difficulties.

Self-report instruments for assessing sexual well-being in women with sexual difficulties have not to date been explicitly validated among women with a history of childhood sexual abuse (CSA). Given an extensive literature suggesting psychological differences between women with and without a history of CSA, it is possible that sexual well-being has a different meaning for these groups. Without validated scales, it is difficult to evaluate the impact of early sexual trauma on adult sexuality. The present study assessed whether the factor structure of widely used measures of sexual well-being were consistent across women experiencing sexual difficulties, with and without an abuse history, and to estimate effect sizes for the statistical effect of CSA on sexual well-being in this population. A sample of women with and without a history of CSA (N = 238) completed the Female Sexual Function Index and the Sexual Satisfaction Scale for Women. Structural equation models indicated generally consistent factor structures across groups, suggesting good construct validity. Effect size estimates indicated medium to large (0.53-0.72) effects of CSA on sexual well-being for women with sexual difficulties. These findings support and extend research regarding the potential effects of CSA that may inform treatment for this population.

Sex as moderator of early life experience: interaction between rearing environment and sexual experience in male guppies

The effects of learning have been neglected in studies of sexual selection because previous researchers have assumed, implicitly or explicitly, that sexual behaviour is genetically fixed. To understand the role of learning in sexual selection, it is important to investigate how early experience interacts with adult experience to determine the use of different mating strategies. We explored this interaction by comparing the sexual behaviour of male guppies, Poecilia reticulata, raised in different social environments before and after they gained sexual experience. Males raised with other males performed long courtship displays at first, but decreased their courtship after they had gained sexual experience. However, for males raised only with females, sexual experience did not modify courtship duration. Males raised exclusively with females exhibited high rates of forced copulation attempts in their first encounter with a female, but reduced this behaviour after sexual experience. In contrast, males raised with other males did not modify their forced copulations. Adult sexual experience appeared to mitigate the behavioural differences caused by variation in rearing environment. Sexual experience helps males to find an optimal balance between courtship displays and forced copulation attempts. We also show that more males exhibited male–male aggression after sexual experience if they had social interactions with other males early in life. This study highlights that courtship and other sexual strategies are not fixed, and that several potential sources of variation exist in the development of an animal's sexual behaviour. Importantly, juvenile and adult experiences can interact to shape sexual behaviour in males.

Sexual and Intimacy Health of Roman Catholic Priests

This study explores the sexual experiences and sexual health of Roman Catholic priests. The qualitative research design looked at priests' responses to the question, “Please share one or more sexual experiences in your lifetime.” The qualitative responses were analyzed and categorized into seven groupings: (a) Childhood and adolescent homosexual experiences; (b) Childhood and adolescent heterosexual experiences; (c) Both homosexual and heterosexual childhood and adolescent experiences; (d) Adult sexual experiences before ordination to the priesthood; (e) Adult sexual experiences since ordination to the priesthood; (f) Masturbation; and (g) Other sexual experiences. The data were analyzed by frequency of responses and percentages within each of the seven categories. The results indicate the need for early intervention and education during seminary, ongoing education after ordination, and psychotherapy support for priests.

Longitudinal Predictors of Change in Number of Sexual Partners across Adolescence and Early Adulthood

Although sexual risk behavior has negative consequences in adolescence and early adulthood, little is known about pathways of sexual risk across development and their correlates. Study goals were to examine trajectories of number of sexual partners across adolescence and into early adulthood, and to investigate hypothesized individual and family-level predictors. A subset of 8,707 white, black, and Mexican American participants in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health reported on their motivations to have sex, family warmth, and perceptions of maternal attitudes about sex at Wave 1 and on their sexual relationships at each year of age across the three waves of the study. Multilevel growth curves of number of sexual partners between ages 11 and 27 showed increases in sexual risk across adolescence and deceleration in early adulthood, but differed somewhat as a function of demographic characteristics. As expected, adolescent motivations to have sex and perceptions of permissive maternal attitudes about sex predicted more sexual partners in adolescence, whereas family warmth predicted fewer sexual partners across gender and racial/ethnic groups. Predictors did not differentiate youth as strongly in early adulthood. Interactions between predictors supported a cumulative risk framework, such that perceived permissive maternal attitudes or low family warmth combined with high adolescent motivations to have sex predicted the highest number of sexual partners in adolescence. This study advances our understanding of change in sexual behavior across development and the individual and contextual correlates of such change. Findings document the cumulative implications of individual cognitions, family experiences, and social contexts for adolescent and young adult sexual experiences.

A Genuinely Developmental Theory of Sexual Enjoyment and Its Implications for Psychoanalytic Technique

A small computer-assisted word frequency analysis, indicating the extent of explicit concern with sexuality in the psychoanalytic literature, has revealed an apparent decline of psychoanalytic interest in psychosexuality. The apparent decline may be related to the limitations of drive theory and object relations approaches in offering persuasive and comprehensive accounts of the psychosexual. A new model of human sexual experience is proposed, rooted in an integration of French psychoanalytic ideas with recent developmental observational research, that once again places sexuality at the center of psychoanalytic clinical inquiry. Because emotion regulation arises out of the mirroring of affect by a primary caregiver and sexual feelings are unique in that they are systematically ignored and left unmirrored by caregivers, sexual feelings remain fundamentally dysregulated in all of us. Adult sexual experience serves as a way of coming to organize the psychosexual. The model accounts for some aspects of the phenomenology of sexual arousal and suggests ways of understanding pathological distortions of sexual behavior. The nature of the psychosexual is explored in the analytic treatment of an adolescent boy.

Sexuality and Citizenship: Metamorphosis in Elizabethan Erotic Verse, and: Searching Shakespeare: Studies in Culture and Authority (review)

Reviewed by: Sexuality and Citizenship: Metamorphosis in Elizabethan Erotic Verse, and: Searching Shakespeare: Studies in Culture and Authority R. S. White Ellis, Jim , Sexuality and Citizenship: Metamorphosis in Elizabethan Erotic Verse, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2003; cloth; pp. viii, 292; RRP US$58; ISBN 0802087353. Cohen, Derek , Searching Shakespeare: Studies in Culture and Authority, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2003; cloth; pp. xv, 195; RRP US$53; ISBN 0802087787 Beginning in 1589 with Lodge's Scillaes Metamorphosis and ending abruptly with Beaumont's The Metamorphosis of Tobacco in 1602, the English epyllion or erotic narrative poem, is a fragile genre confined to the 1590s. Its best-known examples were partly a by-product of the theatre-closures due to the plague, when celebrated dramatists needed to use their 'brand names' in turning their hands to commercial publishing in order to earn a living. Marlowe, Shakespeare, Marston and Beaumont all produced examples of these poems. Invariably based on episodes from classical writing, often Ovidian metamorphosis in particular, the genre is generally marked by its comic and satiric tone. [End Page 163] Jim Ellis's book begins on firm ground, as he develops an argument that the poems were written with a readership drawn from the Inns of Court in mind. This is convincing since book stalls thronged around the Inns and, as the book demonstrates, both the study of law and the epyllia give a central place to rhetoric. The works also anticipate sophisticated readers with a thorough classical education and a witty, even cynical bent. Most of them, like the famous examples Venus and Adonis and Hero and Leander, focus on 'the metamorphosis of the youth', an innocent young man's sometimes comically abortive passage to adult sexual experience. As the young man is initiated into sexual desire, so his skill in rhetoric advances, with comic consequences in Marlowe's Hero and Leander. Such skill in its turn leads to a maturing subjectivity. Add to these ingredients erotic, indeed homoerotic, and sometimes pornographic elements (especially marked in Marston's Metamorphosis of Pigmalion's Image), and it is not difficult to see the poems being written to appeal to young and clever, male law students. While focusing on these relatively familiar issues, Ellis's account is a useful addition to commentary. However, when in the second half he turns to 'The Erotics of Political Fraternity' and consideration of citizenship and nationhood, his territory will strike some readers as less firm. The discussion of Beaumont's straightforward Salmacis and Hermaphroditus begins promisingly by examining the kind of scopophilia or 'sexual watching' that marks the genre, and develops by invoking the discovery of perspective in art, again something which is mirrored in an epyllion like Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece. But it may be strained and unnecessary then to use Lacan to argue for a new kind of 'political subjectivity' in the poem's ecphrasis. Similarly in the discussion of R.B.'s Orpheus His Journey to Hell, we hear the voice of Lacan rather more insistently than that of R.B.: 'That the stories of becoming a rhetorician (and thus a lawyer, legislator, humanist) are overlaid onto stories of erotic transformations suggests that the poems are involved in policing or renegotiating the boundaries of desire within their culture' (p. 171). On the other hand, Ellis's revaluation of three epyllia that deal with rape (including Shakespeare's), written at a time when the law was shifting this crime from the sphere of a crime against property and family to a violation, even a murder, of the self, is welcome. For too long The Rape of Lucrece has been persistently regarded as a 'mere' exercise in rhetoric. One might question Ellis's direction in finding an ideology of republicanism in its struggle against tyranny, while respecting the seriousness of his enquiry. However, in each chapter, by taking the extra step of locating in the epyllia 'a form of republican politics' (p. [End Page 164] 239), Ellis may be moving just beyond the playful, anti-Petrarchan, and in some ways anti-epic genre that the bulk of his book illuminates. 'Nation' in Shakespeare's plays is a subject that has been dealt...

Definitional Issues and Mediating Variables in the Sexual Revictimization of Women Sexually Abused as Children

This study examined the effect of child sexual abuse, defined three different ways, and three definitions of adult sexual assault on revictimization rates. Child definitions varied in the degree of contact; adult definitions varied in degree of contact and force used. Variables hypothesized to mediate the rate of revictimization included parental support, attributional style, coping style, severity of abuse, and involvement in psychotherapy. Subjects were 654 college females. Contact forms of child sexual abuse were associated with significant rates of revictimization, although noncontact child sexual abuse was not associated with revictimization. Revictimized women could not be discriminated from nonrevictimized women on the basis of the proposed mediating variables. Level of adult sexual experience was the best predictor of adult sexual assault. High levels of sexual activity is proposed as the link between child sexual abuse and adult sexual assault.

Behavior patterns and sexual identity of bisexual males

Bisexuality may be measured in terms of bisexual behavior or bisexual self‐identity. The relationship between the two is poorly understood. Data from a 1982 survey of readers of Playboy magazine are used to examine the identity and behavior of 6,982 men who acknowledged adult sexual experiences with both men and women. Of these, 29 percent described themselves as bisexual, 2 percent as homosexual, and 69 percent as heterosexual in identification. Those with a bisexual identity were more likely to have had homosexual experiences as adolescents and to describe their adult sexual behavior as predominantly or sometimes homosexual rather than predominantly heterosexual. The sexual behaviors reported by bisexual men would place them at intermediate risk of acquiring or transmitting sexually transmitted diseases—higher than exclusively heterosexual but lower than exclusively homosexual men. Results suggest that a definition of bisexuality based exclusively on identity would fail to capture most men with adult bi...

Male hamster investigatory and copulatory responses to vaginal discharge: An attempt to impart sexual significance to an arbitrary chemosensory stimulus

Hamster vaginal discharge elicits intense genital investigation and facilitates overt copulatory behavior toward anesthetized males (female surrogates) whose hindquarters have been scented with this material. The ability of an arbitrary chemosensory stimulus to acquire behavioral activity like that of vaginal discharge through association with maternal stimuli and/or adult sexual experience was examined in male hamsters. Vanillin was used as the arbitrary stimulus because it is attractive to hamsters, is not likely to be a natural constituent of hamster scents, is not known to exert any adverse physiological effects, and is a subliming solid with an extremely long persistence when used as an artificial scent. The males were reared by vanillin-scented or control solvent (water)-scented foster mothers, and in adulthood were paired repeatedly with vanillin- or solvent-scented receptive females. Behavioral testing with scented surrogates was performed one week preceding, and again following, the sexual pairings. Rearing by vanillin-scented mothers modestly but significantly increased the amount of time sexually naive males spent investigating the hindquarters as compared to other body regions of vanillin-scented surrogates. However, neither neonatal nor adult interactions with vanillin-scented females imparted to this stimulus the capacity to facilitate overt copulatory behavior. Also, regardless of the males' exposure history, only vaginal discharge caused the males to direct their investigatory behavior predominantly toward the hindquarters. The characteristic investigatory and copulatory responses exhibited by male hamsters toward vaginal discharge thus do not appear to be readily developed toward arbitrary chemosensory stimuli associated with particular females to which the males have been exposed.

Sexual preferences of male hamsters: Importance of preweaning and adult experience, vaginal secretion, and olfactory or vomeronasal sensation

Sexual preferences play an important role in such fundamental processes as the origin of species, the evolution of sexual dimorphism, and the establishment of social organization. An appreciation that sexually reproducing organisms discriminate and display preferences with respect to different characteristics of potential sexual partners is critical to a full understanding of reproductive behavior. The purpose of the present work was to examine experiential and sensory factors influencing the sexual preferences of male hamsters. The results of five studies indicate that male Turkish and Syrian hamsters are capable of discriminating females of their own species from females of a closely related species, and that they display a strong sexual preference for conspecific females. This preference is displayed by both virgin and sexually experienced adult males but is reduced or absent in animals reared by a female of a different but closely related species. A preference also is displayed to vaginal secretion from conspecific females; this preference, too, is independent of adult sexual experience. While vaginal secretion is sufficient for species discrimination and preference, it is not the only species-specific factor capable of sustaining such behavior. Bilateral removal of the main and accessory olfactory bulbs of male Syrian hamsters eliminated species preference, but section of the vomeronasal nerves alone had no effect.