A decade ago, this topic seemed relatively fringe and unlikely to appeal to very many people. Now, it seems this is almost becoming a movement. More and more people are identifying as asexual.

This is an interview from Salon with the author of a new book on the topic, The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality (September 2, 2014).

You’re about as sexually attractive to me as a turtle: Coming out as asexual in a hypersexual culture

The author of a new book on asexuality talks about growing up without desire and dating without physical intimacy

Tracy Clark-Flory 
Tuesday, Sep 16, 2014 

Julie Sondra Decker

At age 14, Julie Sondra Decker found herself delivering the cliché line “It’s not you, it’s me.” Only, really, she meant it. She wasn’t attracted to her first boyfriend but kissed him anyway “because I was expected to,” she says. People told her, “One day you’ll like it” — and she believed them.

But by age 16, nothing had changed. “I simply had a complete lack of interest in sex and anything related,” she writes. “I’d just never been sexually attracted to another person. Not my boyfriend, not the hottest people in school, not the heartthrob movies stars. I wasn’t interested. Period.” Her high school boyfriend nicknamed her “Miss Non-Hormone” and she began referring to herself as “nonsexual.” That’s when people started offering their opinions — things like, “That’s not normal. You need to get checked out,” “You’re going to die alone with a houseful of cats” and “Shut up and admit you’re gay.”

Shortly after Decker graduated from college, David Jay founded the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network in 2001 and media attention soon followed. “I started describing myself as ‘asexual’ instead of ‘nonsexual’ to connect myself with the awareness efforts,” explains Decker, a 36-year-old author living in Tampa, Florida. Now she’s taken it a step further, writing a book, The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality, to demystify the overlooked orientation. She spoke with Salon about our hypersexualized culture, masturbation and what non-asexuals have to learn from asexuals about love and relationships.

Let’s start with the most basic thing here: How do you personally define asexuality?



Asexuality, most broadly, is a lack of sexual attraction. However, it’s a pretty diverse spectrum, and some people prefer to say they aren’t interested in sex, don’t like sex or feel that sex isn’t intrinsically rewarding. Many asexual people, including me, will describe it as nobody seeming sexy to them or nothing happening in reaction to someone being sexy.

When did you discover that you were asexual?



I was about 15 years old when I first started calling myself “nonsexual.” That was in the mid-1990s, before there were Internet-based asexual communities — well, really before there was much of an Internet. For me it was almost a joke term at first; everybody else I knew found sex intriguing and had their own complicated relationship with it, but to me it seemed like a complete non-issue. I could tell if people were physically attractive in a normative way, but that didn’t inspire any reaction for me or any desire to be closer to them, possess them somehow or touch them. I had no fantasies that involved sex or physical intimacy, no dreams that I could recall on the subject, and certainly didn’t enjoy the overtures others made toward me in that regard. So I used the “nonsexual” term with the full understanding that I was fairly young and with an expectation that I would grow and change. I did grow and change. But that part of me didn’t.

Have you had romantic relationships?



Just a couple, both in high school. I dated two boys —one in ninth grade, one in 11th. The first boy was basically an experiment, I guess, because I’d never been asked out before and I figured I’d see what it was like, but all I found out was that we didn’t have much in common and I didn’t like French kissing. The second boy, who was older, pursued me relentlessly for a year or so before I finally agreed to date him — my naive little 16-year-old heart thought letting him date me might boost the poor guy’s self-esteem — but he turned out to be the type who thought he could change me and believed it was his own failure when he couldn’t. Dating him involved some unpleasant experiments that he more or less pressured me into, and I went through with more physical intimacy than I was comfortable with, though we did not have sex. I — again, naively — thought “keeping an open mind” would only require trying something once and then he’d have to leave me alone since I’d given it a shot.

I learned through that experience that no amount of entertaining others’ expectations is actually enough unless I change. They’ll always say I didn’t give it a chance, or ruined it by expecting to hate it, or didn’t try with the right person, or with the right gender, or at the right time. I decided since then to trust myself as the arbiter of what’s “enough” and have turned down plenty of offers since, and because I have yet to feel any sexual attraction to anyone, I have never allowed anyone else to talk me into anything I know I don’t desire. I think I’d recognize it if it happened to me. Most other people find it unmistakable. If a food smells delicious to everyone else but bland or bad to me, I don’t owe anyone the demonstration of actually eating it before I’m “allowed” to say I don’t want to eat the dish.

Was there a coming out process?



Not really. I tell people I’m asexual all the time, so I suppose each of those has been a mini coming-out, and sometimes people have a slew of questions that I’m usually happy to answer if they’re presented in an appropriate context. But everybody who knew me when I was dating in high school knew I wasn’t into it, and everybody who’s known me since has seen me demonstrating my happiness with my situation even when I didn’t have anything to call it, so there was never any kind of official “coming out” to close people in my family and friend groups. I know plenty of asexual people who have had coming-out experiences, though.

I know many asexuals masturbate, correct? How do you differentiate between sexual desire and the desire for physical release? 



Some asexual people masturbate and some don’t. It’s about the same as in non-asexual populations. Because we don’t always have the same experiences as other orientations even when we date and have sex, we tend to pick things apart so we can analyze what we’re experiencing and what we’re not. In this case, we describe a difference between sexual arousal, sex drive and sexual attraction. Sexual arousal suggests a physiological response, sex drive suggests a desire to respond to arousal or a desire to pursue sex, and sexual attraction suggests an experience of finding someone sexually appealing. An asexual person might have a libido and be able to get aroused, but not have those experiences directed at anyone. 

It’s fairly common knowledge that very young children often masturbate, and they are not “thinking about sex” just because they’re enjoying touching their genitals. They don’t even know what sex is, they just know it feels good. A maturing or mature asexual person will have a more complicated understanding of masturbation if they’re engaging in it — so this is not to imply that they necessarily masturbate the same way an infant might — but I’m saying it because it’s one very obvious example of how masturbation can be “not about sex.”

In short, enjoying a physical sensation is not the same thing as finding other people sexually attractive, and it’s attraction, not behavior, that defines this orientation.

 We hear “But masturbation by definition is sexual!” all the time from detractors, usually followed by some pseudo-scientific twaddle about why we can’t be asexual if we “are sexual” through masturbation, but the very simple fact is that we don’t care if some of us “count as sexual” by some incredibly broad definition. It doesn’t change anything about what we’re describing as our experience.

What’s the worst thing about being asexual?

For me, the worst thing about being asexual is other people trying to fix me all the time. They develop this completely inappropriate obsession with my sexual and romantic life, which can manifest as anything from aggressively propositioning me for sex to searching for what’s “really” wrong with me through invasive questions. Some of them maintain that these attempted interventions are about my health and happiness, apparently unaware that they’re compromising both by refusing to respect my identity.

What’s the best thing?

For me, the best thing about being asexual is getting to meet other people on the asexual spectrum and offering them support while learning about how they navigate their lives.

What’s it like being asexual in such a hypersexualized culture?

Sometimes being left out of an experience that’s considered by so many to be central to life is isolating and a little lonely, but only in a sort of distant sense, because I honestly do not wish I was like everyone else. Sometimes sexually motivated advertising seems ridiculous to me — though I understand a lot of people think so too despite not being asexual — and if a movie or television show relies on the sexual attractiveness of its actors to magnify its audience’s appreciation, that will be lost on me. 

It really only gets to me when people fixate on changing me and pressure me to “try” to be something — anything! — else. I’ve had wannabe partners condescendingly mutter about what a waste I am or whine unattractively about how unfair it is that I won’t give them a shot — how close-minded I must be to deny myself the supposed pleasures of sexual relations with someone who’s literally as sexually attractive to me as a turtle. This preoccupation others sometimes have with “converting” me — and their belief that it would be for my own good, not their own benefit — is a symptom of a hypersexualized culture in which they literally cannot imagine a sexless or unpartnered life being fulfilling. I wish they’d just stop projecting once in a while.

Do you ever feel left out of pop culture? Do you wish to see asexuals better represented?



Asexual people are not commonly featured in media. It would definitely be nice if more celebrities frankly acknowledged their asexuality — though you see it once in a while with folks like Janeane Garofalo or Paula Poundstone — and it would be great if more mainstream media included asexual characters. The fact that we never see ourselves represented in the wider world is a contributing factor to our isolation and difficulty coming to terms with our identity. We need both stories that blatantly feature asexuality and its discovery — like a subplot of the New Zealand soap opera “Shortland Street,” in which a biromantic asexual man found his label on the Internet and explored what it meant — as well as stories that feature asexuality incidentally, like a one-off mention of asexuality spoken by a minor character on the American drama “Huge,” in which a camp counselor casually identified as asexual while watching a movie and described her aromanticism. We need “issue books” as well as asexual best friend characters and incidentally asexual romantic partners and specific but normalized inclusion of asexuality in all venues where sexual diversity would normally be discussed.

Often enough, I think people feel helplessly at the whim of their sexual desire. When you don’t have sexual desires driving you in that way, is there some other force that replaces it?

I can only speak for myself here, but I don’t see my passions as driving me “instead of” sexual desire. I think everyone chases their passions. I’m an artist, a singer, a reader and a passionate writer, but I don’t feel I do those things as a substitute for sex any more than an Olympic skier attacks those slopes “instead of” playing basketball. I’m happy to say that I’m a fulfilled and productive person, but there are plenty of asexual people with no so-called extraordinary passions or achievements, and it’s also true that non-asexual people are responsible for most of the world’s innovations and accomplishments even though they also have sexual passions that drive them. It’s really not a tradeoff.

Does the asexual community have any particular political causes — like recognition of non-traditional families or something along those lines?

Absolutely! Sorry, but this is going to get long.

 Some of our political causes are along the same lines as any typical LGBTQ group, since a huge percentage of asexual people are also LGB+ and/or trans or non-binary, we of course would benefit from marriage equality and broader gender recognition and protection. And even those who are cisgender and heteroromantic or aromantic may be affected negatively by heteronormative expectations. For instance, there are still some places that have consummation laws. In these places, a partner who desires sex can legally annul a marriage if the expected intercourse is not allowed or not possible, and this affects sex-repulsed and sex-reluctant asexual people, among others.

Similarly, since sex is expected for a marriage to count as “real,” it can cause problems for international couples. Invasive questions about a couple’s sex life are sometimes brought up in interviews to help determine whether a marriage is falsified to let one person stay in the country. And since some people insist that marriage must always include sex, this prejudice has even gotten in the way of adoption attempts by asexual people. In one anecdotal case, an asexual couple reported that they were adopting partly because they did not want to have sex to conceive a child themselves, and they were told they were not eligible to adopt because “if you’re asexual, you’re not fit to be married.”

Asexuality is explicitly listed as a protected orientation in New York State — we’re protected from hate crimes, discrimination, et cetera, through this mention, and supposedly if we were wrongly fired or discriminated against because of our orientation, we could invoke this law. We would like to get asexuality listed as a protected orientation anywhere that lists sexual orientations, and we have taken steps to make this happen through our interaction with the lawmakers of ENDA — the Employee Non-Discrimination Act — which is federal legislation.

We’d also like to see better anti-rape legislation. Especially in spousal rape cases, asexual people are at a much higher risk for being coerced or forced into sex by a partner only to be told that being in a relationship or being married renders them in a constant state of consent and that they, not the assaulting partner, are “abusing” their mate if they withhold sex. Because societal expectations will often back up the more sexual partner’s desires and insist that they are deserving of sex, asexual people often feel no power to report or win cases involving their rape.

And finally, we experience discrimination from mental health professionals. This is changing somewhat since recent lobbying from our community and championing by some asexuality researchers managed to get us somewhat legitimized in the DSM-5. But mental health and even physical health practitioners are prone to assuming that asexuality is only understandable as a disorder, and vulnerable asexual people who do not have their own terms and knowledge for it yet have often been subjected to medical treatments — testosterone supplements, for instance — and psych professionals urging them to experiment with, embrace or tolerate sexual encounters under the mistaken assumption that no one is healthy unless they are sexually active.

Do you think there’s anything non-asexuals could stand to learn from asexuals? About sex, relationships or anything else, for that matter?



Because asexual people may feel some types of attractions but not others, we’ve created or adopted existing terminology to better describe what we are experiencing. For instance, some of us are romantically attracted to people even if we’re not sexually attracted to them, and some of us may experience sensual or aesthetic attraction, among others. We’re not the only ones who experience these things; non-asexual people generally have a romantic orientation too, but since their sexual attractions so often correspond to their romantic ones, they can just say “attracted to” and expect that phrase to stand for a whole host of feelings. We don’t have that shorthand. The result has been discussion and language that can certainly be used outside asexual circles. For instance, there have been straight people who feel very confused about the fact that they may be sexually and romantically attracted to different-gender partners but seem to also be experiencing a romantic attraction to someone of their own gender. Wondering if that means they’re therefore gay or bi, they don’t know what to call it, but with terms like heterosexual biromantic, they can have words for their feelings.

Asexual people are also more likely than non-asexual people to have what’s called a queerplatonic partner; people of any sexual orientation might have someone in their lives to whom they feel committed and close but wouldn’t call that relationship either “romantic” or “friendship.” Our distinction between sexual arousal, sex drive and sexual attraction has been useful to some, and we’ve even had some great discussions about decoupling BDSM and kink from necessarily “sexual” associations; there are kinky asexual people whose satisfaction does not depend on sexual attraction to partners, and sometimes through use of the vocabulary popularized in our communities, non-asexual people can further understand and guide their less typical fetish experiences.

And of course, if any non-asexual person would like to have a romantic relationship with an asexual person, they will learn more about compromise — notably, that compromise isn’t entirely about whether and to what extent they can get their asexual partner to tolerate or engage in sex. Along with negotiating sexual activity, some “mixed” partnerships have adopted non-monogamous lifestyles, as well as focused more on other intimate activities that make a romantic relationship the exclusive and beautiful partnership it is.

Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon. Follow @tracyclarkflory on Twitter and Facebook.

J Hoberman Reviews Lars von Trier’s "Nymphomaniac" (New York Review of Books)

Lars von Trier has created yet another strange and sexually outrageous film. And yes, as you have no doubt read, the sex IS real, but there are body doubles (porn stars) and prosthetics to protect the big-name talent in this film. 

Making return engagements to von Trier's sexual wonderland is Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe, both of 2009's Antichrist, a very strange and mesmerizing film.

Sex: The Terror and the Boredom

By J. Hoberman

March 26, 2014 | New York Review of Books

Christian Geisnaes/Magnolia Pictures | A scene from Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac

The Danish director Lars von Trier has made several great films (Dogville, Melancholia). He has also orchestrated a number of provocations, the strongest of which is The Idiots (1998), a movie that anticipates Borat, Jackass, and other recent movies in pushing regressive behavior beyond all acceptable limits. His newest film, Nymphomaniac, belongs with these audience-baiters—it’s similar, but less ghastly in its various affronts than Antichrist (2009), which also centered on the dour, ascetic Charlotte Gainsbourg.

In Antichrist (2011), Gainsbourg played a woman driven mad by grief; in Nymphomaniac she is the eponymous case study, known simply as Joe. A middle-aged good Samaritan named Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) finds her lying beaten and bleeding in a back alley and, as she refuses his offer to call the police or get an ambulance, brings her back to recover in his monastic apartment. There she lies on a narrow bed, he sits by her side and, after describing herself as “bad person” (a category that he reflexively rejects), she proceeds to tell him her story from the very beginning: “I discovered my cunt as a two-year-old.”

For a child, as we know, all is sex. Joe’s colorful (if gravely recounted) picaresque career as a sexual being and a sexual adventuress—set in an abstract, unidentified region of England—is punctuated by Seligman’s well-meaning, post-Freudian comments and woolly digressions. Joe’s tale also features a vast array of sex acts, both simulated and actual. (The credits list a half dozen “sex doubles.”) The movie is, then, a two-handed version of the Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom with Seligman, the erudite lover of the arts and stereotypical liberal—tolerant, secular, feminist, hypocritical—attempting to understand Joe’s self-identified nymphomania as she oscillates between pride and self-loathing and also between present-day battered Joe and her dewy younger self (Stacy Martin).

Like Joe or the sadist she solicits in the movie’s second half, Nymphomaniac is at once excessive and withholding. Although the film is said to exist in a five-and-a-half-hour director’s cut, its distributor has released a shorter “international version” in two parts of 117 and 123 minutes each; the film is further subdivided into eight more-or-less chronological chapters. This two-stage delivery may or may not be a valid economic strategy, but it is a dubious aesthetic one. For what it’s worth, Nymphomaniac demands to be endured in a single sitting. As with Melancholia (2011), which represented the run-up to the end of the world, it’s experiential.

Although too capricious (or should we say promiscuous?) to be a taxonomy, the movie is designed to illustrate and exhaust every popular theory of nymphomania, including, of course, the idea that the condition exists only as a male fantasy—My Secret Garden or The Sexual Life of Catherine M notwithstanding. In various chapters, Joe’s motivations are variously ascribed to her sexual curiosity, desire to exercise traditional male sexual prerogatives, rejection of love, unresolved oedipal feelings, narcissism, loneliness, pathological low self-esteem, depression, frigidity, guilt, and masochism.

At least initially, Joe subscribes to the Sadean notion that she is simply “selfish”—that is, motivated by absolute egotism and a desire for absolute pleasure—although, unlike the Marquis, she does not see this as a virtue. Nor is she bound by logic, explaining at one point that she became a nymphomaniac by choice (“I was an addict of lust rather than need”) and refusing at another, in a memorable set piece, to accept the label “sex addict.”

Christian Geisnaes/Magnolia Pictures Charlotte Gainsbourg in Nymphomaniac

Von Trier declines to judge his protagonist. Unlike Steve McQueen, whose hellish portrait of a male sex addict was called Shame, or the didactic moralist Michael Haneke (who, in his adaptation of The Piano Teacher, completely missed the comic elements in Elfriede Jelinek’s novel of nymphomaniacal compulsion), von Trier has a sense of humor. However lumpy and tasteless it may be, his gruel is not without its raisins. There is a very funny montage in which young Joe tells a succession of lovers that they have given her her first orgasm; a tumultuous sequence in which an abandoned wife (Uma Thurman), accompanied by her young children, confronts the home-wrecking young Joe, volubly and at great length; a charming religious vision that, among other things, satirizes von Trier’s erstwhile model, Andrei Tarkovsky; and a scurrilously farcical scene in which mature Joe is sandwiched between two squabbling slices of male bread.

Much of the time, however, Nymphomaniac is dogged in its pursuit of what the academic film theorists of the 1970s used to call “unpleasure.” Or at least, that is how it seemed to me. Writing in The New Yorker, David Denby, not hitherto an admirer of von Trier, praised the movie as a “pornographic work of art” which means, I suppose, that it was some sort of turn-on.

Alienation, or the absence of feelings, is for von Trier a source of anxiety. But so is empathy. Antichrist which, above all, strove to make pain visceral, was ultimately only numbing; Grace, the scapegoat protagonist of Dogville (2003), suffered in part because of her generosity: she felt too deeply and wreaked a terrible vengeance as a result. Nymphomaniac’s most graphic sequence is not sexual but rather the miserable circumstances in which Joe’s father, hospitalized, delirious, and incontinent, meets his end. “When he died, I had no feelings left,” she tells Seligman—and not for the last time. The movie’s first part concludes with her loss of sexual sensation. “I can’t feel anything,” she wails after a long, unsatisfying bout of intercourse with her ardent and loving husband (Shia LeBeouf).

Von Trier is frequently accused of abusing his female protagonists. Joe gets more than her share, not least in a particularly graphic form of self-abuse, but essentially von Trier respects her as an enemy of society—her punishment, as well as her philosophy, is really a way of punishing the spectator. Like Alfred Hitchcock, von Trier enjoys directing his audience. He is however far less efficient and far more fretful than Hitch; rather than manipulate viewers he pranks them, as when, in one sequence of Nymphomaniac, he teases fans by threatening to restage a catastrophe out of Antichrist complete with Handel aria.

Despite a common monotony, Nymphomaniac’s two halves are quite different. With one large exception, the first part is consecrated to spectator enjoyment—derived either from the spectacle of the sexual antics involving the beautiful, frequently naked Stacy Martin (a twenty-four-year-old Franco-English actress who has the great good fortune or catastrophic luck of making her debut as a featured act in the von Trier circus) or else from the spectacle of Joe successfully defending her erotic rights in a man’s world or, possibly, from both. But the fun is paid for with interest in the movie’s second half by the debasing sexual escapades endured by the more mature and less conventionally appealing Gainsbourg.

Although variously a parody of Freudian analysis or a gloss on the Arabian Nights, Nymphomaniac most closely resembles an eighteenth-century novel about a young woman’s sexually-driven rise and fall or fall and rise; indeed, the first scientific study of female hypersexuality, Nymphomania, or a Dissertation Concerning the Furor Uterinus, was published by a French doctor in the late eighteenth century. Joe, however, is neither De Sade’s oft-violated Justine (for whom the protagonist of Melancholia is named) nor her sister, the sexual terrorist Juliette (although she shares some of her traits). Neither is she Pamela, Clarissa, or Moll Flanders.

In the end, she is the artist. Von Trier is proud of his provocations yet concerned that the audience may too easily indulge him or, pace David Denby, actually become aroused. Indeed, that, in a sense, is the movie’s punchline. Anxious that he will no longer be able to top himself, von Trier is willing to end Nymphomaniac—if not his career—with a cheap stunt meant to rebuke his admirers, as if to prove that he still can.

Nymphomaniac is in theaters now.

Kissing is a nearly universal trait in human cultures, but scientists have never been clear on why it is so prevalent and what role(s) it serves. A new study by Oxford University researchers (published in two separate papers, Archives of Sexual Behavior and Human Nature) suggests that kissing helps us size up potential partners and, when we are in a relationship, kissing may also be the glue that persuades a partner to stay.

While I am not convinced this study fully explains the complexity of kissing as a feature of human relationships, one of the more interesting results from this research is that frequency of kissing is a better indicator of relationship health than is frequency of sex.

Journal References:

1. Wlodarski, R. & Dunbar, R.I.M. Examining the Possible Functions of Kissing in Romantic Relationships. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 2013 DOI: 10.1007/s10508-013-0190-1
2. Rafael Wlodarski, Robin I. M. Dunbar. Menstrual Cycle Effects on Attitudes toward Romantic Kissing. Human Nature, 2013; DOI: 10.1007/s12110-013-9176-x

Kissing Helps Us Find the Right Partner – And Keep Them

Oct. 10, 2013 — What's in a kiss? A study by Oxford University researchers suggests kissing helps us size up potential partners and, once in a relationship, may be a way of getting a partner to stick around.


"Kissing in human sexual relationships is incredibly prevalent in various forms across just about every society and culture," says Rafael Wlodarski, the DPhil student who carried out the research in the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University. "Kissing is seen in our closest primate relatives, chimps and bonobos, but it is much less intense and less commonly used.

"So here's a human courtship behavior which is incredibly widespread and common and, in extent, is quite unique. And we are still not exactly sure why it is so widespread or what purpose it serves."

To understand more, Rafael Wlodarski and Professor Robin Dunbar set up an online questionnaire in which over 900 adults answered questions about the importance of kissing in both short-term and long-term relationships.

Rafael Wlodarski explains: "There are three main theories about the role that kissing plays in sexual relationships: that it somehow helps assess the genetic quality of potential mates; that it is used to increase arousal (to initiate sex for example); and that it is useful in keeping relationships together. We wanted to see which of these theories held up under closer scrutiny."

The researchers report their findings in two papers, one in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior and the second in the journal Human Nature, both published by Springer. They were funded by the European Research Council.

The survey responses showed that women rated kissing as generally more important in relationships than men. Furthermore, men and women who rated themselves as being attractive, or who tended to have more short-term relationships and casual encounters, also rated kissing as being more important.

In humans, as in all mammals, females must invest more time than men in having offspring - pregnancy takes nine months and breast-feeding may take up to several years. Previous studies have shown women tend to be more selective when initially choosing a partner. Men and women who are more attractive, or have more casual sex partners, have also been found to be more selective in choosing potential mates. As it is these groups which tended to value kissing more in their survey responses, it suggests that kissing helps in assessing potential mates.

It has been suggested previously that kissing may allow people to subconsciously assess a potential partner through taste or smell, picking up on biological cues for compatibility, genetic fitness or general health.

"Mate choice and courtship in humans is complex," says Professor Robin Dunbar. "It involves a series of periods of assessments where people ask themselves 'shall I carry on deeper into this relationship?' Initial attraction may include facial, body and social cues. Then assessments become more and more intimate as we go deeper into the courtship stages, and this is where kissing comes in."

He adds: "In choosing partners, we have to deal with the 'Jane Austen problem': How long do you wait for Mr Darcy to come along when you can't wait forever and there may be lots of women waiting just for him? At what point do you have to compromise for the curate?

"What Jane Austen realised is that people are extremely good at assessing where they are in the 'mating market' and pitch their demands accordingly. It depends what kind of poker hand you've been dealt. If you have a strong bidding hand, you can afford to be much more demanding and choosy when it comes to prospective mates.

"We see some of that coming out in the results of our survey, suggesting that kissing plays a role in assessing a potential partner," Professor Dunbar explains.

Past research has also found that women place greater value on activities that strengthen long-term relationships (since raising offspring is made easier with two parents present). In the current study, the team found that kissing's importance changed for people according to whether it was being done in long-term or short-term relationships. Particularly, it was rated by women as more important in long-term relationships, suggesting that kissing also plays an important role in mediating affection and attachment among established couples.

While high levels of arousal might be a consequence of kissing (particularly as a prelude to sex), the researchers say it does not appear to be a driving factor that explains why we kiss in romantic relationships.

Other findings included:

• In short relationships, survey participants said kissing was most important before sex, less so during sex, was less important again after sex and was least important at other times. In committed relationships, where forming and maintain a lasting bond is an important goal, kissing was equally important before sex and at times not-related to sex.    

• More frequent kissing in a relationship was linked to the quality of a relationship, while this wasn't the case for having more sex. However, people's satisfaction with the amount of both kissing and sex did tally with the quality of that relationship. 

• In a companion paper in the journal Human Nature, the researchers report that women's attitudes to romantic kissing also depend on where in their menstrual cycle and their relationship they are. Women valued kissing most at initial stages of a relationship when they were in the part of their cycle when they are most likely to conceive. Previous studies have shown that hormonal changes associated with the menstrual cycle can change a woman's preferences for a potential mate. When chances of conceiving are highest, women seem to prefer men who display supposed signals of underlying genetic fitness, such as masculinized faces, facial symmetry, social dominance, and genetic compatibility. It appears that kissing a romantic potential partner at this time helps women assess the genetic quality of a potential mate, the researchers say.

Being Human 2013 - Human Relationships with Helen Fisher, Ph.D.

Human Relationships from Being Human on FORA.tv

Human Relationships

Sexual behavior, romance, and partnerships are among the strongest human social drives. In this session we delve into the biology of sexual behavior and such topics as love addictions, serial monogamy, clandestine adultery, hookup culture, and how human partnering psychology is reflected in our animal cousins.

	Session led by: Helen Fisher, Ph.D., Professor of Anthropology, Rutgers University
	Justin Garcia, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Gender Studies, The Kinsey Institute, Indiana University
	Laurie Santos, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, Director of the Comparative Cognition Laboratory, Yale University

Helen Fisher

Helen Fisher (author of Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray [1994] and Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love [2004], among many other books) is an anthropologist specializing in the study of interpersonal romantic attraction. Her research into love and behavior leads her to the conclusion that the desire for love is a universal human drive, stronger than even the drive for sex. She has conducted extensive research into the evolution of sex, love, marriage, gender differences, and how your personality shapes who you love. Fisher believes that there are three main systems in the brain that deal with mating and reproduction: the sex drive, romantic love, and long-term attachment. Understanding the different qualities and goals of these three systems is crucial for navigating the ins and outs of love and relationships. It’s especially important to realize that the evolutionary background of love relationships is all about reproduction of the species, which at times may conflict with our wishes and expectations. As Fisher puts it, “I don’t think we’re an animal that was built to be happy; we are an animal that was built to reproduce.”

Justin Garcia

Justin Garcia (co-author of Evolution and Human Sexual Behavior, 2013) is an evolutionary biologist, specializing in the study of how human evolution has shaped our sexual and romantic behavior. His research focuses on the evolutionary and biocultural foundations of human behavior, particularly romantic love, intimacy, and sexuality. He is especially interested in notions of commitment and attachment in romantic and sexual relationships. Garcia has said that "the most consistent feature of human sexuality is the remarkable diversity which exists among individuals and cultures." He notes that environmental and cultural forces contextualize and shape our sexuality in unique ways; for example, his research explores the development of a new Western "hook-up culture" that is accepting of casual sex. Garcia is also a scientific advisor at the dating site Match.com.

Laurie Santos

Laurie Santos researches the evolutionary background of the human brain by studying non-human primates in her Comparative Cognition Lab at Yale. In a series of fascinating experiments, Santos’ team has investigated economic decision making in capuchin monkeys. Researchers created a form of money: tokens that the monkeys could trade for food. They found that the monkeys made consistently irrational decisions, mirroring the same bad financial choices that people make. For example, the monkeys demonstrate the same loss-aversion behavior—treating losses as more important than gains— as human beings. This suggests that some of the core biases of the brain that shape human behavior were also present in our remote pre-human ancestors, and have been maintained through evolution. Santos believes that understanding the built-in biases of the human brain is crucial to encouraging rational behavior. As she puts it, “...the irony is that it might only be in recognizing our limitations that we can really actually overcome them.” She is currently researching whether primates have a precursor to theory of mind, the ability to imagine the thoughts and feelings of others. In 2012, she spoke at the Being Human conference in San Francisco.

Madness Radio: Healing Sex with Staci Haines

Staci Haines is the author of Healing Sex: A Mind-Body Approach to Healing Sexual Trauma, a sex-positive approach for women healing from sexual trauma. In this segment of Madness Radio, she talks about her book and about her work in transformative justice and liberating society from child abuse.

Madness Radio: Healing with Sex Staci Haines

First Aired 7-1-2012

Childhood sexual abuse is pervasive in our society, leaving lifelong wounds that affect men as well as women. Is it enough to hold perpetrators accountable, or are there deeper causes of abuse? Do police, courts, and child protection services help heal -- or lead to more trauma? And how can body-oriented approaches move beyond the limits of talk therapy? Child sexual abuse survivor Staci Haines, author of Healing Sex: A Mind-Body Approach to Healing Sexual Trauma and co-founder of Generation Five, discusses transformative justice and liberating society from child abuse.

Useful links:

• From sexual trauma to healing sex / Author Staci Haines opens up to Violet Blue about sexual healing after incest, rape or abuse
• Generation Five
• Generative Somatics - Somatic Transformation and Social Justice
• Staci Haines, Integrating Personal and Social Transformation

• Rt/Ctrl-clck download

An Evening with Jeanette Winterson

At the Sydney Opera House for the Sydney Writers' Festival, Jeanette Winterson reads from her new memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? and talks about books, life, love, death, madness and creativity.

Jeanette Winterson is the author of 10 novels including Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, The Passion, and Sexing The Cherry; a book of short stories, The World And Other Places; a collection of essays, Art Objects, as well as many other works including children’s books, screenplays and journalism.

I was especially fond of her collection of meditations on art, literature, and identity, Art and Lies. The novel that launched her from a relatively unknown postmodern academic author to critical and public acclaim was Written on the Body, a fascinating novel with a nameless, genderless narrator.

Presented by Sydney Writers' Festival, May 2012. Duration: 01:00:42

Authors@Google: Ogi Ogas (A revolution in the scientific study of sexual attraction)

Interesting stuff . . . . From Google Talks. Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam are the authors of A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire.

Two bold young neuroscientists have initiated a revolution in the scientific study of sexual attraction. Before Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, the only researcher to systematically investigate sexual desires was Alfred Kinsey, who surveyed 18,000 middle-class Caucasians in the 1950s. But Ogas and Gaddam have studied the secret sexual behavior of more than a hundred million men and women around the world. Their method? They observed what people do within the anonymity of the Internet.

Here is the publisher's description of the book (via Amazon):

Two maverick neuroscientists use the world's largest psychology experiment-the Internet-to study the private activities of millions of men and women around the world, unveiling a revolutionary and shocking new vision of human desire that overturns conventional thinking. 


For his groundbreaking sexual research, Alfred Kinsey and his team interviewed 18,000 people, relying on them to honestly report their most intimate experiences. Using the Internet, the neuroscientists Ogas and Gaddam quietly observed the raw sexual behaviors of half a billion people. By combining their observations with neuroscience and animal research, these two young neuroscientists finally answer the long-disputed question: what do people really like? Ogas and Gaddam's findings are transforming the way scientists and therapists think about sexual desire.


In their startling book, Ogas and Gaddam analyze a "billion wicked thoughts" on the Internet: a billion Web searches, a million individual search histories, a million erotic stories, a half-million erotic videos, a million Web sites, millions of online personal ads, and many other enormous sources of sexual data in order to understand the true differences between male and female desires, including:


•Men and women have hardwired sexual cues analogous to our hardwired tastes-there are sexual versions of sweet, sour, salty, savory, and bitter. But men and women are wired with different sets of cues.


•The male sexual brain resembles a reckless hunter, while the female sexual brain resembles a cautious detective agency.


•Men form their sexual interests during adolescence and rarely change. Women's sexual interests are plastic and change frequently.


•The male sexual brain is an "or gate": A single stimulus can arouse it. The female sexual brain is an "and gate": It requires many simultaneous stimuli to arouse it.


•When it comes to sexual arousal, men prefer overweight women to underweight women, and a significant number of men seek out erotic images of women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s.


•Women enjoy writing and sharing erotic stories with other women. The fastest growing genre of erotic stories for women are stories about two heterosexual men having sex.


•Though the male sexual brain is much more different from the female sexual brain than is commonly believed, the sexual brain of gay men is virtually identical to that of straight men.


Featuring cutting-edge, jaw-dropping science, this wildly entertaining and controversial book helps readers understand their partner's sexual desires with a depth of knowledge unavailable from any other source. Its fascinating and occasionally disturbing findings will rock our modern understanding of sexuality, just as Kinsey's reports did sixty years ago.

You can read an excerpt from Chapter One here.

Authors@Google: Ogi Ogas - The Neuroscience of Sexual Attraction

Via Google Talks Authors@Google series:

Two bold young neuroscientists have initiated a revolution in the scientific study of sexual attraction. Before Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, the only researcher to systematically investigate sexual desires was Alfred Kinsey, who surveyed 18,000 middle-class Caucasians in the 1950s. But Ogas and Gaddam have studied the secret sexual behavior of more than a hundred million men and women around the world. Their method? They observed what people do within the anonymity of the Internet.

The Body and the State - Session Two: The Sexual Body - The New School for Social Research

As promised, another installment in the THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH conference on The Body and the State. This one is cool - some very interesting topics.

The Body and the State - Session 2 - Part 1
THE SEXUAL BODY

Moderator: William Hirst, Professor of Psychology, The New School for Social Research

How do various forces compete to impose their conception of what is "normal" sexual behavior? How do we come to see particular sexual practices as legitimate (or not) and therefore legally acceptable? Cross-cultural comparisons and case studies.

HISTORY
Understandings of gender and the sexual body change. These changes are reflected in art, literature, and myth, as well as in policy. What can the history of discourse about the sexed body contribute to contemporary discussions about policy questions concerning sexuality?

God's Body: Historical Conflicts over the Representation of the Sexual Body of the Hindu God Shiva
• Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions, University of Chicago Divinity School

Does Sexuality Exist Without the State?
• Sharon Marcus, Orlando Harriman Professor of English, Columbia University

GENDER
What are the policy implications of the forces shaping contemporary understandings of gender and the male or female body, including feminism, transsexuality, genital mutilation, and debates about gender and biology? Is a gender-neutral legal system possible?

Verdicts of Science, Rulings of Faith: Transgender/Sexuality in Contemporary Iran
• Afsaneh Najmabadi, Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University

Securing Gender: States, Bodies, and Identity Verification
• Paisley Currah, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Brooklyn College, City University of New York (Paper co-authored by Tara Mulqueen)

The Body and the State - Session 2 - Part 2
THE SEXUAL BODY

RACE AND CLASS
Race and class are often tied to reproductive rights, access to health care, and sexual violence (e.g. rape, human trafficking). How is the struggle for race and class justice connected to struggles surrounding policies concerning the body?

Body Politic, Bodies Impolitic
• Charles W. Mills, John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy, Northwestern University

Violence and Humanity: Or, Thinking Vulnerability as Political Subjectivity
• Anupama Rao, Associate Professor of South Asian History, History Department, Barnard College

SEXUAL BEHAVIOR
Who we are, what we do, and with whom affect how sexual behavior is controlled and judged. How does this play out in different cultures and legal systems?

Sexual Orientations, Rights and the Body: Immutability, Essentialism, and Nativism
• Edward Stein, Vice Dean, Professor of Law, and director of the program in Family Law, Policy, and Bioethics at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University

Gender Pluralism: Muslim Southeast Asia Since Early Modern Times
• Michael G. Peletz, Professor, Department of Anthropology, Emory University

Tags: The Body and the State, Session Two, The Sexual Body, The New School for Social Research, body, society, gender, sexuality, history, rights, law, behavior, Michael G. Peletz, Edward Stein, Anupama Rao, Charles W. Mills, Paisley Currah, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Sharon Marcus, Wendy Doniger, religion, culture, male, female, bodies, feminism, transsexuality, genital mutilation, biology, transgender

The Kids Are Alright - Exploring Religion, Youth and Sexuality (in the UK)

This study was done in the UK, but my guess is that young adults there are not much different than they are in the United States. This press release summarizes the findings of Religion, Youth and Sexuality: Selected Key Findings from a Multi-faith Exploration - the link takes you to a full PDF of the study summary.

I think this is an interesting and highly relevant study - and I like that they allow the young people to speak for themselves - a more open-ended qualitative approach rather than using a pre-written measure that shoe-horns them into fixed categories.

In my quick reading of the findings, I am heartened to see an emphasis on monogamous sexuality, a desire to see heterosexuality and homosexuality as equally valid forms of sexual relationship, and "(48.2%) of the participants considered themselves ‘liberal’/‘very liberal’," while only "a quarter of them (25.1%) considered themselves ‘conservative’/‘very conservative’."

Then were the religious views (a mixed bag):

In terms of religious participation, the majority of the participants (65.1%) were involved in a religious community .... Religious faith was by far the most important source of information for the participants’ sexual values/attitudes and sexual practices. Religious texts, parents/caregivers, friends, the internet and the media also played a role in this respect, but less significantly.

The entire executive summary is posted at the bottom, after the press release. There is a also a video presentation on the study and its findings:

And here is the press release summary (just the beginning - follow the link to read the whole thing):

Exploring religion, youth and sexuality

28 February 2011 Nottingham, University of

Sexuality and religion are generally considered uncomfortable bedfellows. Now, for the first time, a team of researchers from Nottingham have carried out a detailed study around these issues and how they affect and influence the lives of British 18 to 25 year olds.

Led by The University of Nottingham, in collaboration with Nottingham Trent University, experts spent two years investigating the attitudes, values and experiences of sex and religion among young adults.

The study, which involved nearly 700 young people from six different religious traditions; Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Sikhism as well as young adults of mixed-faith, highlights the challenges they face in reconciling their sexuality and their religion and the concerns they have about the stigmatisation of religion and the increasingly sexualised culture in British society today.

The project Religion, Youth and Sexuality: a Multi-faith Exploration received funding of nearly £250,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council.

Dr Andrew Kam-Tuck Yip and Dr Sarah-Jane Page, in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at The University of Nottingham and Dr Michael Keenan from Nottingham Trent University’s School of Social Sciences asked all the participants to fill in online questionnaires. Some were also interviewed individually and recorded week-long video diaries.

Young adults were asked to talk about their sexual and religious values, attitudes, experiences and identities. As well as looking at their family background, social and cultural expectations and participation in religious communities the researchers also examined young people’s experiences of living in British society and how they understood and managed their gender identity in relation to their religious faith.

Executive Summary (from the PDF of the study outcomes and analysis.

1. This report presents selected key findings from an AHRC/ESRC-funded project entitled Religion, Youth and Sexuality: A Multi-faith Exploration, undertaken between January 2009 and February 2011. The research team are committed to data dissemination within academic and non-academic user communities. This report is written primarily with non-academic users in mind. Academic outputs have been planned for the near future, including a book provisionally titled Religious and Sexual Journeys: A Multi-faith Exploration of Young Believers (Yip, Keenan and Page, Forthcoming). Up-to-date information about the project is available at www.nottingham.ac.uk/sociology/rys.

2. The research set out to explore the lives and identities of religious young adults, aged between 18 and 25. Specifically, it studied the sexual and religious values, attitudes, experiences and identities of young adults from different religious traditions, namely Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Sikhism. The research also investigated the significant factors (for example family, social and cultural expectations, religious institution) that inform their decision-making in these areas, and the diverse ways they managed their religious faith and sexuality. In addition, the research also aimed to examine these young adults’ experiences of living in British society; and how they understood and managed their gender identity in relation to their religious faith.

3. The research consisted of three stages: (i) An online questionnaire was completed by 693 participants between May 2009 and June 2010; (ii) 61 participants of diverse religious faiths and sexual orientations were interviewed individually between November 2009 and June 2010; (iii) 24 participants respectively recorded a video diary over a period of approximately seven days between February and November 2010.

4. 455 (65.7%) participants were female, 237 (34.2%) were male, and one participant was transgendered. Further, 57.1% of participants were Christian, 16.6% Muslim, 7.5% Jewish, 6.8% Hindu, 4.5% Buddhist, 3.8% Sikh and 3.7% identified with more than one religious tradition. In terms of sexuality, 74.3% were heterosexual, 10% were lesbian, gay or homosexual and 7.5% were bisexual.

5. 64.9% of participants self-identified as white, followed by those who self-defined as Indian (11.3%) and Pakistani (5.8%). 82.4% of participants were British citizens. With reference to participants’ geographic location, 83.8% lived in England, 7.6% in Scotland, 3.2% in Wales and 1.7% in Northern Ireland.

6. The majority of participants (65.8%) were single; 3.3% were married and 0.3% were in a civil partnership. Further, 25.4% were in an unmarried heterosexual relationship and 4.2% were in an unregistered same-sex relationship. 72.4% of the sample were students, 20.2% were employed and 4.6% were unemployed. In terms of highest academic qualification, the majority of the sample (60.3%) had achieved A-level qualifications, 25.4% had a degree, and 6.3% had a postgraduate qualification.

7. The participants held different meanings regarding their religious faith. These meanings were not mutually exclusive. Many considered being religious as having a belief in, and a relationship with, a personal God or a divine power. To them, this belief and relationship gave strength and meaning to life. In addition, some participants considered religious faith as a form of personalised spirituality and philosophy for life that promoted self-improvement and enlightenment.

8. The participants acknowledged the significant social dimension of religious faith which not only illuminated their personal lives, but also helped foster interpersonal and community connections. Some participants also emphasised the sense of ethnic and cultural belonging that their religious identification offered. However, some participants separated personal spirituality from institutional religiosity, considering institutional religion a social control mechanism that excessively regulated gender and sexual behaviour.

9. Almost half (48.2%) of the participants considered themselves ‘liberal’/‘very liberal’, and a quarter of them (25.1%) considered themselves ‘conservative’/‘very conservative’. In terms of religious participation, the majority of the participants (65.1%) were involved in a religious community in one way or another and just over half of the participants (56.7%) attended a public religious gathering at least once a week.

10. While the majority of participants used a particular label to identify their sexual orientation, some deliberately questioned the usefulness and accuracy of such labelling. On the whole, the participants were less reflective and articulate about their sexualities compared to their religious faiths, particularly heterosexual participants.

11. Fewer than half of the participants (43.1%) were sexually active. Further, 12.9% of the participants engaged in casual sex. Just over a quarter of participants who were single (28.7%) were sexually active. Further, 36% of participants in partnered but unmarried heterosexual relationships were not sexually active, perhaps reflecting their commitment to the religious ideal of ‘sex within marriage only’.

12. Most participants thought that the expression of one’s sexuality was desirable, and 29.9% thought that celibacy was fulfilling. While many participants thought that consenting adults should be allowed to express their sexualities, opinions varied on the ways in which they should do so, with some participants believing that consenting adults should be able to express their sexualities however they wished, while others believed sexual expression should be limited to marriage or a committed relationship.

13. The participants were almost equally split on the idea that sex should only occur within marriage, suggesting that some religious young adults had moved from ‘sex in marriage’ as the ideal to ‘meaningful or committed sexual expression’ as the ideal (but in diverse relational contexts). In addition, monogamy within a partnered relationship was highly valued.

14. About one-third of the participants (31.6%) believed that heterosexuality should be the only expression of human sexuality, and a bigger proportion (52.4%) thought that it should be the ideal for human sexuality. 58.1% of the participants were committed to treating heterosexuality and homosexuality on equal terms.

15. Just over half of the participants (54.8%) thought that their religions were positive towards sexuality issues. However, there was also a significant proportion who viewed fairly negatively the knowledge base of priests or religious leaders in relation to sexuality, particularly matters pertaining to youth sexuality. For lesbian, gay and bisexual participants, while some had successfully reconciled their sexuality to their religious faith, some reported the psychological and social costs of ‘coming out’ and managing their sexual and religious identities.

16. Religious faith was by far the most important source of information for the participants’ sexual values/attitudes and sexual practices. Religious texts, parents/caregivers, friends, the internet and the media also played a role in this respect, but less significantly. Only around 1% of the participants considered religious leaders the most important source of influence.

17. Further, in terms of sexual practices in comparison to sexual values/attitudes, the significance of the role of friends and the internet/the media increased, and the role of religious faith, religious texts and parent/caregivers decreased. This is likely due to the fact that friends and the internet/media were perceived to be the safer and more supportive sources to address the specific issues of how to practise one’s sexuality.

18. The participants’ experiences in connecting their religious faith and sexuality were diverse. There are three primary manifestations: (i) tension and conflict due to difficulty in managing these two dimensions; (ii) compartmentalisation of these two dimensions in order to minimise tension and conflict; and (iii) accommodation and harmonious acceptance of these two dimensions.

19. The participants identified a variety of challenges for them as young religious adults in secular society. These included: stigmatisation of religion, sexualised culture, drinking culture and consumer society. However the majority (67.4%) did not believe that being religious made their everyday life more difficult.

20. The majority of participants (68.5%) believed that religious people were stigmatised in Britain. 35.3% thought that it was difficult to talk about their religious faith with non-believers. Further, some felt that references to religion in society often took the form of jokes or gross generalisations.

21. The majority of participants (76.1%) believed there was too much focus on sex in mainstream society. Particularly, they considered sexualised culture and the prevalence of sexual promiscuity significant issues for religious young adults.

22. The majority of participants (63.4%) believed that their religions upheld gender equality in principle. However, some expressed concern that this was not the case in reality, with, for example, perceived gender inequality being evidenced at places of worship.

23. A high number of participants (73.2%) agreed with women being involved in religious leadership. This was particularly important for young women who saw women in leadership as role models.

24. Religious faith was considered the main factor influencing how the participants lived their lives as women or men. Some participants acknowledged that there were discrepant expectations for women and men particularly in the context of relationships and raising children. However, 65.6% of women and 68.1% of men disagreed that women should have primary responsibility for raising children. To them, it should be a shared responsibility.

25. Religious young adults can benefit from hearing the stories of their contemporaries to understand the wide range of experiences and negotiations in their religious and sexual lives. This knowledge could offer help in integrating religious faith and sexuality more successfully. Engagement with mainstream society may also encourage understanding and respect between non-religious and religious young adults.

26. Young religious adults desire an increased openness to discussions of faith and sexuality within their religions. Religious leaders and professionals should be open to such discussions, willing to reflect on young adults’ interactions with secular culture and to engage with secular youth workers and health professionals to find ways of providing support for religious young adults.

27.Training of practitioners working with young adults in secular contexts needs to recognise the role and importance of religious faith in some young adults’ lives. More collaboration is also needed between religious leaders and professionals who work with young adults in secular contexts, in order to formulate policy and practice that provides consistent advice and guidance.

Tags: Young Adults, Exploring, Religion, Youth, Sexuality, UK, Key Findings, Multi-faith, Exploration, University of Nottingham, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, mixed faith, monogamy, relationships, Andrew Kam-Tuck Yip, Sarah-Jane Page, Michael Keenan, sexual values, religious values, attitudes, experiences, identities, family background, social, cultural, expectations, religious communities, gender identity, religious faith