Week 2

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The Kinsey movie was a really interesting and fun way to be introduced to the world of research in sexuality. It would be a lie to say I am not very tempted to finish the movie on my own time. The hurricane is totally messing with me, trying to throw a whole week off before the rest of the movie.

Anyway, before this class I had never heard anything about any sex research or wondered about it either. I got curious about the types of questions researchers have and what research is already out there. So with the Kinsey movie in mind, I googled his name and started down the rabbit hole of the internet.

I came across a few websites with articles written about correlational research between funny things like emoji use and sexual activity, which made me almost laugh at the kind of things that can impact human behavior. I moved on past these things pretty quickly though since they seemed purely correlation based and I didn’t have easy access to the real study. Then I came across an abstract I found interesting: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jsm.12111

The authors were looking into how sexual activity impacted the already supressed state of the immune system in depressed individuals. They conducted (suprise!) a survey for their demographics, depression levels and sexual activity (no, seriously you can’t escape the awkward sex surveys if you participate in sex research). Saliva samples were taken for immunoglobulin, which fights against pathogens at mucous membranes and they found some interesting stuff. Women with high levels of partnered sexual activity and depression scores had lowered immunity, but not women with low depression scores. Men with higher levels of partnered sexual activity and depression scores had increased immunity, but not men with low depression scores. I just found it interesting that in one gender depression with lots of partnered sexual activity resulted in decreased ability to fight disease, while the other may have gained resilliance due to it.