Sexual pleasure among young adults (ages 18-26) is linked to healthy psychological and social development, according to a new study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Here’s Dan Savage getting very excited about the thesis as he interviews author Christopher Ryan on his podcast [with the usual explicit language].  Not for everyone, but…if it’s for you, there’s more where that came from on Ryan’s Psychology Today blog .

New psychological research finds that many women with low sex drives reported greater sexual satisfaction after taking a placebo and participating in a clinical trial…Expectations to improve sex and a willingness to work on sexual problems appear to be key toward obtaining greater sexual satisfaction.

NYT Business article about the efforts to make and market a female sex pill.

Regulators and doctors tend to be less tolerant of side effects in quality-of-life drugs than they are in medicines intended to mitigate life-and-death diseases. Some industry critics, meanwhile, contend that in the quest to find new and treatable quality-of-life problems, drug makers are not so much identifying unmet needs as they are stoking existing social anxieties to weld to their medicines.

While people who are more religious and those who are more politically conservative do tend to oppose recreational drugs, in both study samples the predictive power of these religious and ideological items was reduced nearly to zero by controlling for items tracking attitudes toward sexual promiscuity.

Unplanned pregnancies were four times higher among single obese women…Obese women were 70% less likely to use birth control pills and eight times more likely to use less effective methods, such as withdrawal….

[M]any experts say that unlike sexual dysfunction in men — which has an obvious physical component — sexual problems in women are much harder to diagnose. And among doctors and researchers, there is serious medical debate over whether female sexual problems are treatable with drugs. Some doctors advocate psychotherapy or counseling, while others have prescribed hormonal drugs approved for other uses.

Some people sleepwalk; others talk in their sleep. Now a study finds that 1 in 12 patients with sleep disorders reported having had sex while they were asleep.

Yes, there’s a website on the subject: sleepsex.org.

[M]en who were moderately active – walking briskly just 30 minutes a day, four days a week, or the equivalent — were about two-thirds less likely to have sexual dysfunction than their sedentary counterparts.

Can you have herpes but never even know it? Can the herpes simplex virus spread even if you don’t have symptoms? And how do you navigate the maze of sex and dating when you know you are infected with herpes?