Posted on 05/08/2005 3:09:58 PM PDT by wagglebee
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - From bondage to "breath play" and zoophilia, it's not easy keeping up with society's fast-developing sexual trends.
That's why some of North America's top sexologists are hunkered down with academics and therapists at a Fisherman's Wharf hotel this weekend: to swap findings about everything from teens with underwear fetishes to transgender couples.
"These couples have problems that I didn't know how to deal with," said Olga Perez Stable Cox, president of the Western U.S. region of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. "You have to understand the culture, otherwise you're an outsider, and you don't get it."
The theme for the society's four-day conference is "Unstudied, Understudied And Underserved Sexual Communities." Presentations range from discussions from autoerotic asphyxiation, or "breath play," to zoophiles, or animal lovers, to more mainstream topics like sex motives of dating partners.
"Let me tell you, it was not easy finding these pictures," Hunter College professor Jose E. Nanin told his audience in a seminar about "specialized" sexual behavior among gay men.
Nanin's photos are more than an explicit how-to of exhibitionism and sadomasochism, he says; they are examples of safe alternatives to sexual intercourse that need to be de-stigmatized in order to fight diseases like HIV/AIDS.
Researchers say their greater goal is to help the medical community, the public and legislators figure out what behavior is merely out of the norm versus downright dangerous.
"As sex researchers, one of our concerns is distinguishing what can be harmful and what is not -- so that instead of being based on myth, public policy can be informed," said Charlene Muehlenhard, professor of psychology and women's studies at The University of Kansas.
When authorities caught a Midwestern U.S. teenage boy stealing girls' underwear, they immediately demonized his underwear fetish, Pennsylvania State University researcher Patricia Barthalow Kosch said. Many clinicians attribute the boy's crime more to broken family relations. The crime was theft, not his sexual fantasies, conference attendees said.
Teen sexuality draws sensational headlines, but suffers from a lack of academic study, researchers said.
Kim Openshaw, a psychology professor at Utah State University in Logan, Utah, who studies teenage sex offenders, said the limited amount of research so far has found that girls make up only 5 to 10 percent of all underage sex offenders.
The numbers are underreported, Openshaw says, because many people are reluctant to acknowledge the problem.
Victims of girl sex offenders tend to be in the immediate family circle. Most perpetrators are victims of family abuse. By contrast, boy sex offenders tend to be more macho, violent and attack outside of their immediate family.
You sick, twisted bastard.
How can you listen to calliope music? That ruins the whole mood for me.
BTW, it's always better to use jelly as opposed to marmalade for cleanup. The orange peel in the marmalade tends to stick if you miss anywhere with your prep work.
No, but those fluorescent tubes...oh, baby...
If everyone started doing it would it still be a fetish?
That's all right, I do it to myself all the time. It's kind of refreshing when an outside agency confuses me.
Yes. People have a really sick, really nasty Missionary Position fetish around here.
No, I said STRANGE fetishes.
They must've chosen SF for the nearby lab sessions and free seminars.
Just focus on the horsey going up and down, up and down...
You remember the guys who used to come in on Monday morning and say their weekend was "not baaaaaaaaaaaaaaad" ... zoophilia. It just sounds better than beastiality.
"The only thing I want to know is who is paying for all this."
I concur
who cares what these yoyos are babbling about. They can get their jollies on any discussion they like as long as it is not on my TAX dollar's dime
Quite odd! What is there to study??? The medical profession assumes sexual behavior is pure genetics, hard-wired from birth. Nothing to study here, right?
Could you give an example of not-so-perverse bestiality?
Just noting . . . you do know I was being sarcastic and just joking, right?
Perfect reply!
My exact thoughts.
Is there anyone here that can safely explain what "breath play" is?
It is the practice of asphyxiating one's self or someone else during sex or masturbation, this is done to increase pleasure during orgasm. However, people sometimes die as a result.
What's with all the sex threads on FR lately?
Anyway, I put it down to three categories:
1) 2 consenting adults doing what they want to each other = normal.
2) more than 2 consenting adults doing what they want to each other = sligthly less normal, increasingly abnormal proportionally to the number of plastic bags, whips, chains etc involved but still not worthy of state interference and only deserving psychiatric care IF the adults think they they have crossed the edge beyond what is acceptable (normal) to them.
3) 1 or more adult with 1 or more non-consenting adult or animal = warped pervert criminal.
The state should only be spending money on category #3.
,,, I could have predicted the collective of enlightenment would have met in San Francisco.
New York has been cleaned up!
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