Study Session #23: What's Trending in Sex Research?

We're rolling up our sleeves and taking a deep-dive into the turbulent world of sex education in today's episode. With insights right from the frontline of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality conference, we're tackling the shocking rise in rough sex, heavily influenced by internet pornography and social media. We share some staggering statistics and discuss these distressing trends with our esteemed guest, researcher Dr. Renee Rena Evans Paulson. She highlights the pivotal role of critical media literacy as a safeguard, stressing the need for open dialogues with young individuals about their digital consumption.

Switching gears, we shift focus to the importance of comprehensive sex education and its much-needed societal adoption. Remember GPT-3? We're exploring its potential footprint in sex education, celebrating some successful initiatives like Rhode Island's Department of Health's comprehensive sex ed app, and dissecting a study that reveals the overestimation of sexual health knowledge among college students. Our key takeaway? Comprehensive sex education is not just an option; it's a necessity to bridge the knowledge gap and promote safer sexual behaviors. Join us as we champion the power of research evidence and its crucial role in advocating for comprehensive sex education to policymakers. Tune in, get informed, and help us rewrite the narrative.

Follow us on social @sexeddebunked or send us a message at sexeddebunked@gmail.com

Transcript

Shannon: 0:03

This is Study Sessions brought to you by Sex Ed Debunked In these mini-sodes.

Christine: 0:07

We'll discuss a myth suggested to us by listeners. Like you, Like what?

Shannon: 0:11

you hear, want to hear more? Follow us on Instagram, facebook and Twitter at Sex Ed Debunked to suggest new myths. Provide your own show notes and give us ideas for what to talk about next.

Christine: 0:20

Now take some notes. The study group is in session. Hi, this is Study Sessions, a bi-weekly mini-sode where we cover topics brought to us by Sex Ed Debunked listeners.

Shannon: 0:38

On this week's episode we are taking these study part of study sessions literally and talking about some of the trending research topics in sex education. So not necessarily brought to us directly by Sex Ed Debunked listeners, but definitely brought to us by people who would be interested in listening.

Christine: 0:53

This is so true and you guys, our listeners, might recall that we had a similar episode last year when they came back from the Sexuality Conference in Vancouver, canada. Well, they had another annual conference this year, this time in New Orleans. New Orleans, the big, easy, and the official name of the society is the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, otherwise known as QUADES, and they bring together literally sex researchers from all over the world to present what's new and up-coming in research to sex educators, sex therapists, counselors and people who are just generally interested in getting more information about what's going on, especially in light of what's going on in our country and the world these days.

Shannon: 1:43

Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough, and I think you know every year. I'm sure there are similar topics that are discussed, but what we thought would be fun and intriguing for this study session is to talk about some of the topics that maybe we haven't thought about so much. So we're going to give you a top five hottest and trendiest in coming in from the big sleazy.

Christine: 2:05

No, no, no. The big easy which is what I said.

Shannon: 2:09

I said what I said. All right, I said what I said.

Christine: 2:12

So I'm going to start with one that maybe is a little bit sobering, but also really, really important and that we really we've only touched on. We had the one episode on pornography not being real sex, but the plenary of the distinguished speaker and researcher at this conference was Debbie Hermanick, who is researching for many years out of the Kinsey Institute in Indiana University, and she had a talk on the rise of rough sex, what we've learned and what sexuality researchers, educators and clinicians need to know.

Shannon: 2:46

Interesting. So what do we mean by rough sex and tell me how we know it's on the rise.

Christine: 2:51

Well, it's first of all, one rough sex is beyond what we might think of as BDSM and kink. It is choking, punching, slapping, spanking, hitting, tying, restraining, but in a way that's not necessarily part of quote unquote BDSM or kink, but actually in a way that's become quite mainstream. And that's the part that's a little bit troubling, and troubling because it seems to be a global trend. So this isn't research that was just done in the US. This was done across the world and what they're saying. And just listen to these statistics, which are really stunning One in four teens have sent or received a sex and 80% of young adults, including college students, have engaged in rough sex 80. Oh, my gosh, 80.

Christine: 3:54

And I will say anecdotally, I have a group of students who are presenting this week on pornography use and I said to them hey, you know which I'm sure is the other half of your question why? And the answer is internet, pornography and social media. And I said you know, it really has increased rough sex, things like choking. And these students, these three very bright students, said to me that came from porn. It's like basically what we do all the time. Oh, yeah.

Shannon: 4:26

But okay, okay, so, okay. So the woman who is presenting on this you're using the plenary speaker was on those talks talking about this. Yeah, debbie Herbanek, and she's from the Kinsey, which some of our listeners may remember. The Kinsey scale on. The Kinsey Institute continues to do work in sex research, but 80% Oof.

Christine: 4:45

Well, and this is so. This is the title of her new book. It's called yes, you're Kid, and the book is actually much broader than rough sex. It's actually a book designed to help parents who have young teens and, you know, to help around sexual communication, because parents think that's happening to other kids, and the interviews of young college students that were done as part of this book said that most learned about rough sex between eighth and tenth grade.

Shannon: 5:25

Oh boy, that is disheartening at best.

Christine: 5:29

Well, except except that this book offers a real, good, solid guide to communicating and makes parents aware of it.

Christine: 5:39

So, the idea is like if you're armed with knowledge, then you can find the tools to actually talk to your students, your kids which leads me to the second study that I wanted to mention, and it was not, as it was, a presentation, not a big plenary speech, but there was a researcher, dr Renee Rena Evans Paulson, phd, who had a presentation also looking at the connection between pornography use and sexual violence and dating violence, and found that the buffer against that connection was critical media literacy.

Shannon: 6:24

Yeah, yeah that makes sense.

Christine: 6:27

But it means that to the extent that we teach our young you know, children, nephews, nieces our young people to look at what they see on the internet and porn and social media and TikTok with a critical eye, it actually works as a protective factor, which I think is kind of encouraging that if parents and adults and caregivers can get the courage to have these conversations, yeah, Research suggests that it can make a substantial difference.

Shannon: 7:02

Yeah, it's interesting not to derail that particular point, but I remember when I was doing research in my communications master's program, one thing we talked about was the importance of engaging in that critical media lens. You know, because parents who let their kids watch a lot of TV get a lot of flack right Because, like, oh, they're not going to learn, they're going to poison their brains. Actually, if they watch TV but you engage in critical discussions about it, it can be really good for them and helps them develop theory of self. That helps them develop critical thinking. So, similarly, yeah, if you watch yeah, I mean you're going to if you don't have the ability to critically analyze information, then of course you are going to be more easily succumbing to mistruth.

Christine: 7:45

Well and like we had the episode on the myths that porn sex is real sex. Right, and we know that's a myth, but if you are in eighth grade, maybe you don't. If you have, if you're not getting comprehensive sex education in your school, you might think that what you're seeing on the internet is actually closer to reality than it really is. To your point, Shannon, that's one of the recommendations in Debbie Hervinick's book is, if something is too difficult to talk about it, find some media and talk about it in the context of the media that you're watching as a framework for communication.

Shannon: 8:20

Interesting. Pretty, yeah, it's. It's rough, though. I like the name of the book though. Yes, you work it, not somebody else's.

Christine: 8:29

Shannon, I literally when, as soon as I got back from the conference, I literally went on Amazon and bought it, and then I also emailed the librarian at Wesleyan to make sure it would be on the shelves at Wesleyan University. So it's that important. But let's shift to something a little lighter and interesting that we can talk about Something that's not as rough.

Shannon: 8:50

You might say Not as rough, no, a little more gentle. Great Love that.

Christine: 8:56

And actually something that I absolutely never really thought about in a comprehensive way, which is saying a lot. It was a talk on eco-sexuality.

Shannon: 9:06

Well, that is really interesting. Yes, it was so cool. Sex it's good for the planet.

Christine: 9:11

Well, we talk. We did talk a little bit about sustainable sex toys when we had our episode on Love Not War, where they made you know environmentally friendly sex toys, but this took it to a whole new level. So Dr Amanda Morgan was talking about the idea of not as the earth, being your earth mother, but being your earth lover. If you treated the earth in the same way you treated a lover, we would be much more likely to be, to be kind to the earth and to do things that are going to sustain it. So that was kind of like her foundation and her framework. Thank you, and I will. I've emailed her to try to get her slides, because then she went through all these ways. Like, for a lot of people, they want to be eco-friendly. Right, we hate the idea of climate change. We want to make a difference. Well, she went through a list of eco-friendly sex toys based on how they're made, what the materials that they come from. There's. Actually, it was an eco-friendly butt plug, believe it or not, made of wood.

Shannon: 10:23

Oh no, I don't believe it.

Christine: 10:25

But made of wood, but made of wood that had a very natural laminate to it. That was actually really kind of sustainable and healthy. It sounds kind of nice. It was actually if you could put it on your mantle and no one would know it was a sex toy but also eco-friendly lube, eco-friendly condoms, all those things that are being naturally so, looking at both the materials that are used and also how they are created in terms of a sustainable, a sustainable corporation, a sustainable manufacturing, all of that which I thought was really interesting.

Christine: 11:09

But then there was one area that was really kind of outside the box, shall we say, talking about actual eco-sexuality and two researchers out in Las Vegas who want a movement to have the E be added to the LGBTQ as eco-sexual meaning, and she showed all of these clips of people, basically naked, rolling around in the dirt. I am one with the dirt, so for any of our listeners who are curious, she also showed a clip from Greenpeace, which, as you know, is like the climate environmental activist group, called Forest Love, and it was images of the forest and the overlay was love making sounds. It was out of the blue.

Shannon: 12:03

Oh, I mean it's weird. It's like a weird mix between ASMR, but also kind of like you know, there are a lot of wellness practices, of course, around the earth and sustainability right, like mud baths or thing.

Christine: 12:22

And she actually said that. You know, if you think about it and I know that we've experienced it when you go out and you see, like this amazing sunset, and you go, oh, and it's that feeling of awe which is almost erotic and almost sexual, so that it's not necessarily you don't have to take it literally as the earth, as your lover, but certainly you can have a very erotic, sensual experience being in touch with the earth, and there are a lot of people who practice that on a regular basis. Just might not call it eco-sexuality, yeah.

Shannon: 13:03

I got. Okay, no, I'm bought, I'm bought, I get it. I mean, sustainability is a huge part of the modern consumer. It might as well be a huge part of the modern bedroom too, well, or?

Christine: 13:16

well, outdoor bedroom.

Shannon: 13:18

Yeah, interesting.

Christine: 13:20

So it was pretty cool. So, and coming back again, looping back to the issue of consent, right, so we were talking about porn and how that impacts, you know, consent and dating violence and all of that. So there was one researcher, anna Thrasch, who had a poster and I was attracted to it because the title of the poster was hey, chat GPT, what is sexual consent?

Shannon: 13:50

Oh, I really want to believe that it said good things. I really want to believe that it said good things Well it did. Oh my God, Okay great.

Christine: 13:59

And I know you know more about AI than I do. But if AI is, if someone's asking these questions of the AI and the AI comes up with an answer that is current, currently talking about, you know, enthusiastic consent, all the fries things we've talked about, right, Really, given specific can be withdrawn at any time. What does that mean to you, oh, AI expert?

Shannon: 14:26

Well, it means that the aggregate information that is being pulled by AI is all pointing to accurate definitions of consent. I'm actually flustered over how well the robots did on this one, yes, well, and let me say I've actually been on another podcast talking about the problems with AI and there are a lot of ethical issues with AI, but that's because a lot of the internet is problematic and so you know. Again, because AI is based on aggregate data, you often get the bias towards whatever the majority perspective is. So to hear that. The reason why I'm excited if anyone doesn't totally put this together is that it means that the majority of information that's on the internet about consent is about informed consent and is actually pulling in the true definition of consent. Not just merely saying no, but actually getting that affirmative yes.

Christine: 15:20

Exactly, and there was a whole series of questions around consent and you know there were even questions about, you know, scenarios. You know if somebody had X amount to drink and, you know, appeared drunk, could they consent? No, I mean, like they got the answers right and I think it shows that some of these messages are actually, I think, becoming the majority. So that's pretty great, I think, and pretty great from this perspective of maybe a young person, a teen, saying oh okay, I'm going to ask chat, gpt what consent is, and they get the right answer.

Shannon: 15:59

I'm not sure who it is that you think talks like that. I'd like to meet them, but point taken, fair enough.

Christine: 16:10

So I think we had two more we wanted to discuss briefly. So the one of the ones that I thought was really interesting because it was based in Rhode Island, hey, hey, I was chatting with a researcher from the who was commissioned by the Rhode Island Department of Health to work on a new survey measure for gender, because, as we, as we know, and me and you obviously as researchers you get the question of what is your gender? Male, female, yeah, clearly, clearly not appropriate. And this researcher was actually tasked with the with the job of saying well, how many trans, gender diverse people live in Rhode Island, and basically she said I got nothing to measure that I don't know that.

Christine: 17:04

So it's very much a still a work in progress, but what their efforts are is to take what used to be a very bad one question scale, which merged into a sort of better two question scale, which generally is something like what sex were you assigned at birth and then what is your current gender, to add a third step which allows for open ended responses and, really importantly, on the question of what is your gender, allows people to answer and check more than one checkbox. Nice, so Rhode Island is is making progress. Hopefully they're hoping that they're going to do one more. I think, when I talk to her, they're going to do another round of, you know, testing of the data and testing of the scales, but they're hoping they're going to have something, something done and up and running within the next year or so.

Shannon: 18:01

You know, something I really have loved about doing this podcast is realizing that our little state does try its best to lead the way in a lot of things. Like, of course, we did the interview last year with the Rhode Island Department of Health and they're launching of that you know, comprehensive sex ed app. Yeah, yeah, and, like you know, it makes me. It makes me proud of our little state, because if if you can't get the little people to start doing it, then you're not going to get the big ones to start doing it either.

Christine: 18:26

Well, and some of this, and actually the researcher, one of the researchers on the chat GPT one was from, was affiliated with Brown. So there's some good stuff coming out of Rhode Island and I'm proud of it. Little Rody too.

Shannon: 18:41

All right, what's the last one? What are we wrapping up with?

Christine: 18:43

Well, the last one is is one more push, and because of our, because of the nature of our podcast is, you know, sex ed debunked and pushing the need for more comprehensive sex education. Well, a study was done by A number of researchers at James Madison University. Looking at the title, an unsurprising and scary study overestimation of sexual health knowledge of college students regardless of previous sex health education. So, basically, what they did is it's like your classic if you've ever heard of Dunning-Kruger right, people know a heck of a lot less than they think they know.

Shannon: 19:28

Yeah. So to put that in lay person's terms for anyone who was like wait, what does that mean? It means that people are assuming they know more than they actually do about sex ed.

Christine: 19:38

Right, and so the way they structured this survey is they asked participants, college students. They asked them to first take a series I think it was like a series of four or six questions about how much do you think you know about you know sexual anatomy, sexual pleasure, all these things and rate how confident you are in that knowledge. And the participants had a high rating for what they thought they knew 85%, very high. However, then they gave them a 30 question test on sexual health knowledge based on actual questions.

Christine: 20:16

Yeah, and scores were about 17.9%.

Shannon: 20:24

This is giving Alabama and their estimations of certain sizes of things energy. You don't know as much as you think you know.

Christine: 20:36

Yeah, so, and the bottom line is they said that most 68% rated their sex knowledge as high as high, but they show actually scored less than 50%, and yeah.

Shannon: 20:55

So what does that mean? Like, let's boil that down, because we do feel like the reason people are estimating that presumably is because they are getting sex education. So what do we pull away from that? They're getting sex education, but the sex education isn't matching up with actual sexual knowledge.

Christine: 21:11

Well, I think two things. I think college students think that they have sexual education because they either have sexual experience or they have watched a lot of social media and internet porn.

Christine: 21:25

So, they think they know things simply because they have watched it and absorbed it from other ways. A flip side of it is that they haven't gotten actual comprehensive sex education that would cover these 30 questions. I mean, looking at the tests that they used on sexual knowledge, these were not hard questions. These were basic questions that if you had comprehensive sexual education between K and 12, you would know the answers to these questions. I was talking about this study to my roommate just before we went on the podcast and she was saying that she was looking at I think she was relaying a conversation that she saw on social media, but the gist of it was that a guy was talking to his girlfriend and the girlfriend started laughing hysterically and she said oh my God, I'm laughing so hard I'm going to pee in my pants. And this college guy was like well, how can you do that? You have your period, aren't you wearing a tampon? So did you actually realize that they were separate?

Shannon: 22:34

Oh yeah, no, that's scary, I would say.

Christine: 22:39

It is scary, but it's important to realize that we cannot assume that just because students, and maybe our kids or our nieces, nephews, whoever, just because they're in college, they actually have a base of knowledge. And I can confirm that when I was teaching psychology of human sexuality at UConn, I had grown. A grown ex-military guy come up to me and say, oh my God, I never learned this stuff.

Shannon: 23:10

Yeah, and it's scary. And it's scary is like one word for it, but it's also disappointing and, as we've talked about on the show, there's just such a ripple effect of that not having that education, overestimating that education. It really can lead to unintentionally much riskier sexual behaviors when you don't know what you don't know.

Christine: 23:31

Well, it does and it's true. But I also think that this type of research, shannon, really is really underlining even more and emphasizing even more the need to have comprehensive sex education, because you can't assume that simply because someone reaches the age of 18, 19, 20, 25, and they have the actual sexual knowledge they need to really explore sex in a healthy, safe and pleasurable way. And I think that, although you kind of use that adjective of scary for some of this research, I guess for me, being in the research field, I say this is evidence.

Shannon: 24:11

I came out of the research field.

Christine: 24:13

And now I'm in the research field and this is evidence. This is evidence to take to policymakers at every level to say we still need this, we're still doing a terrible job. And if we want to reduce stigma, reduce suicidality for sexual and gender minorities, if we want to reduce dating violence, if we want to reduce sexual assault, if we want to reduce situations of non-consent, education really is the answer and that's what this research is all across the board, this whole conference. The bottom line is the more we know, the more we know and the more we educate, the better off we're all going to be, at every single level of our society.

Shannon: 25:01

Boom Boom, absolutely, yeah, no, that makes sense. It's good to know that you have empirical evidence to support that. There is still work that needs to be done.

Christine: 25:13

Well, and the work is being done and you know what the chat GPT study says. The work is getting done because at least on consent it's getting out there. So maybe we'll just keep shouting from the podcast To the podcast rooftop, that's right and say keep doing it and we'll try to influence what chat GPT funds and AI funds, yeah, and then we'll go into the algorithm.

Shannon: 25:37

It'll all be good.

Christine: 25:38

It's all about that algorithm. Hey, we're getting so close to those 20,000 downloads. People Just keep listening to this one over and over again.

Shannon: 25:45

Yeah, yeah, find our shortest episode and listen to it about 20 times and we'll be in business. We'll be all set Awesome. Well, that is our recap of just some of the trending research in sexuality and sexual health right now. Maybe some surprises for you, maybe some topics you'd like to hear more about? So let us know, we can continue to share the research and, as usual, we will be back next Wednesday with another episode of Sex Ed Debunked.

Christine: 26:10

Take care everyone. Bye now. Sex Ed Debunked is produced by Trailblaze Media in Providence, Rhode Island. Our sound producer is Ezra Winters, with production assistance from Shea Weintra.