Mary Roach: 10 things you didn't know about orgasm

In her talk “10 things you didn’t know about orgasm,” Roach digs deep into scientific research in sexuality — much of it recent, much of it ancient — and shares several hilarious and disturbing thoughts. It’s simply a must-watch. This week’s TEDWeekends on the Huffington Post digs deeper into the talk, with essays from Roach and several others. Read some selections here.

Mary Roach: Let’s Talk About Orgasm

In 2009, I walked onto the TED stage and gave a talk that included video of a Danish pig inseminator. The topic of the talk was orgasm, and the video related to a centuries-old debate over “upsuck”: that is, whether the contractions of the uterus during orgasm serve to draw the semen toward the egg and boost the odds of conception. In pigs, research suggests, this is the case. The inseminator up on the screen was practicing the Five-Point Stimulation Plan, a technique developed by Denmark’s National Committee for Pig Production, following research that showed a 6 percent higher farrowing rate among titillated sows. In other words, as a group, they produced 6 percent more piglets than sows inseminated while idly standing around the sty.

William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the pioneering sex researchers of the ’50s and ’60s, were upsuck skeptics. They didn’t believe orgasm facilitated conception, at least not in humans, and they worried that the belief might be hobbling fertility research. So they set out to prove their case. Read the full essay >>

Marnia Robinson: Why Stop Orgasm Research at Climax?

Mary Roach’s irreverent orgasm trivia reminds us that researchers, like porn makers, tend to snap their notebooks shut right after the money shot. Yet some of the most intriguing findings about orgasm may lie beyond its brief fireworks. Post-O data could one day help solve all kinds of mysteries, such as why lovers’ libidos often go out of sync — especially after those initial“honeymoon poppers” wear off.

After a rat satiates himself sexually (which is how rats normally mate, and requires an average of 2.5 hours and up to 7 ejaculations), he exhibits a pronounced 4-day cycle. He’s a bit fragile. His sexual motivation (libido) is nil-to-sluggish, and he’s hyper-reactive to a range of drugs. Why does this happen? Read the full essay >>

Robert Koehler: The Sex Closet

Mary Roach’s TEDTalk is about … well, our giggling, collective discomfort with the human body and its processes.

While we can publicly talk about sex in all its thrilling messiness with a little more candor than we could a few generations back, we still live most of our lives within an invisible envelope of politeness. What interested me about the video at least as much as the actual stuff I learned — for instance, that the longest ejaculation of sperm Dr. Kinsey ever measured was 8 ft. — was the fact that the TED audience (and I) laughed at it all. Why is this so funny? Why does explicit commentary on sexual arcana summon up the public guffaws? Read the full essay >>

• Suleika Jaouad, who writes about being young with cancer, talks about the embarrassing but very real prospect of being a sexually active cancer patient. [The NYTimes Well Blog] For other unconventional responses to cancer, watch Ananda Shankar Jayant’s talk on fighting cancer with dance.
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• Data visualizationist and programmer Olivier H. Beauchesne maps Wikipedia geotags to uncover some unexpected connections across the tome. [Collaborative Cybernetics]

Leslie Morgan Steiner: Why domestic violence victims don't leave

• Read Leslie Morgan Steiner’s CNN article, “Why abused women stay in bad relationships,” in which she calls on lawyers to provide pro bono work to victims of domestic violence. [CNN] Make sure to watch her TED Talk on the same topic.
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• An 18-minute documentary on the future of interactive design, along with eight insights. [Co.DESIGN]
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• Soren Kierkegaard’s Valentine’s Day ode to his love — a pen. [The American Reader]
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• On Tuesday night, TED Fellow Jon Lowenstein‘s documentary about gun violence in Chicago aired on Channel 4 News in the UK, before the U.S. State of the Union address. [Channel 4] See our annotation of Obama’s speech, in TED Talks and playlists.
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• How moshing taught a physics grad student about the dynamic of human collective motion. [The Atlantic]
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• Here, 34 tips from the Vimeo Video School on shooting a video promo for a nonprofit. The featured lesson was created by the film production crew, What Took You So Long?  [Vimeo] They also happen to be behind this video chat with Hans Rosling from the TEDxSummit in 2012.
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• Simply sublime watercolors accompanying stories by beloved Italian author Italo Calvino. [Brain Pickings]
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• Don’t feel bad if you’ve failed the famous invisible gorilla test. Eighty-four percent of radiologists, who seem to have superhuman attention spans, fail, too. [NPR]
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• Is a wearable wrist computer on the horizon? Will we soon all be wearing iWatches? Perhaps so.  [NYTimes Bits blog]

Photo: Anne Francey

Esther Perel: The secret to desire in a long-term relationship

For a fascinating look at why we’re experiencing this “crisis of desire” (hint: it’s the first time in history when we’ve expected marriage to be about passion) and how we can boost out erotic intelligence within the space of a great relationship, watch this talk. And below, more great TED Talks in the areas of love, passion and sex.

• Helen Fisher: The brain in love
• Mary Roach: 10 things you didn’t know about orgasm
• Hannah Brencher: Love letters to strangers
• Helen Fisher: Why we love, why we cheat
• Jenna McCarthy: What you don’t know about marriage
• Thomas Dolby: “Love Is a Loaded Pistol”
• Isabel Allende: Tales of passion

Helen Fisher: The brain in love

Inspired by Helen Fisher’s classic TED Talk, “The brain in love,” we invited three speakers with big ideas on relationships, sex and family to our New York office for a TED@250 salon, part of a program to tackle timely topics. Love was certainly in the air.

After a screening of the incredibly sweet office-romance film “Post-It Love,” Christian Rudder stepped to the stage. The co-founder and editorial director of OKCupid, Rudder set out to parse some of the data pouring into the site at all times from its users. For example, Rudder shared that when a man on the site writes a woman without any previous interaction, he has a 25% chance of getting a response from her. Meanwhile, women cold-writing men through the site have a 40% chance of a reply. Rudder shared another interesting tidbit — that half of responses are sent to a message are sent with seven hours. As Rudder put it to a big laugh, “Seven hours is basically the half-life of your hopes and dreams.”

But Rudder shared an inspiring bit of news. Every day, 500 people deactivate their OKCupid profiles because they met someone through the site. “All it takes is one,” says Rudder. This sentiment was echoed in the ahhhh-worthy Google video, “Parisian Love,” which tells a moving love story via search.

Bruce Feiler, author of Walking the Bible and the new book The Secrets of Happy Families, stepped up next to share the surprising thing that has revolutionized his family life: agile programming. A method of software development, agile breaks down large projects into small, do-able bits — allowing people throughout the process to give feedback as they go. Agile was developed in opposition to the “waterfall method,” where people in charge determine the flow of the project and people inside the process have no input.

Applying this to a family means creating detailed daily checklists. “You can’t underestimate the power of making a checkmark,” says Feiler. “It works in offices and it works with kids.” Agile in the home also involves having weekly meetings to talk about what went well over the course of seven days and what needs improvement. And Feiler reveals a surprising fact about his twin 8-year-olds: that they’re able to pick their own punishments and they generally give themselves harsher ones than their parents would have picked.

Finally, we heard from Esther Perel, author of Mating in Captivity, who spoke about keeping passion in long-term relationships now that human beings “live twice as long” as we used to. Perel nailed the basic challenge of modern relationships — that, on the one hand, they must satisfy our deep-seated need for security, dependability and permanence while at the same time meeting our equally strong need for adventure, mystery and the unexpected.

“Can we want what we already have?” Perel asked. The answer is yes. But because Perel sees desire as the space between the self and the other, she reveals that this can be achieved in some counter-intuitive ways — in part by being more selfish and savoring moments of absence. Her thoughts were truly surprising and inspiring.

Stay tuned for these great talks on TED.com and the TED Blog in the upcoming weeks. And a special thanks to Built It Green, who donated the wood for the beautiful backdrop you see in these images.

Photos by Cloe Shasha

“The birds and the bees” and “the facts of life.” These are the terms adults have come up with when it comes to talking to kids about sex. At TED2012, writer John Bohannon showed dismay at the fact that adults don’t feel comfortable talking to kids about sex, or drugs for that matter, without resorting to scare tactics. In an acrobatic performance — choreographed by Carl Flink, danced by Black Label Movement and scored by celloists Jelloslave — the talk calls for adults to address about these difficult subjects in the same way they would have wanted to hear about them when they were teens.

On Monday, December 17, Bohannon and Flink sat down for a live Q&A with the TED Conversations community, asking everyone to share what they remember of the sex talk they got as a teen. Read the full discussion — and see some of the most interesting interactions below.

Jordan Reeves stated:

I’m gay, but my parents talked to me about how sex works between a man and a woman. I wonder if any of you parents will talk to your kids about heterosexual AND homosexual relations. I mean, many of these kids already have preferences, but for those that do not, I think it’s important to inform them about sex in the most general terms (between two people that are in love or two people that are attracted to each other — not just between a man and a woman). Does that make sense?

John Bohannon responded:

My sense is that society has a long way to go before any but the most liberated heterosexual parents will talk to their kids about homosexuality. But I hope that will change fast.

And Carl Flink chimed in:

Fantastic question, Jordan. This is something that we have already had multiple conversations about in our household. The various debates around so-called “Marriage Amendments” prompted us to have talks with our daughters about what marriage is and how we as parents think about it. It was so interesting to hear from my 10-year-old before we ever said anything to them about this, “Dad, I don’t understand why I can’t marry anyone that I love and want to be with.” Wow, from the mouths of babes.

Shobit Puri wrote: 

I remember: my father took me to a separate room and asked me some questions before he actually explained me everything literally. I remember few of them. The first question was: did you ever feel something when you woke up in the morning? It was followed by another one: he asked me to try and remember if I saw any beautiful classmates of mine in my dreams?

The conversation was pretty much direct. I really appreciated that. I am proud that it happened and I came to know everything from my father, instead of friends telling different stories.

I think, being a doctor, it was easier for him and he was comfortable talking to me about it. I agree that normally it’s rare.

To which Carl Flink responded:

Thanks for sharing this Shobhit.

I know it’s not on the topic of sex, but I want to also say that John Bohannon is a fearless TED Speaker. How many TED Speakers are there who would be willing to do their entire TALK while being moved upside down, laying on people’s heads, etc. He’s a brave man!

Carl Flink stated:

Something that occurs to me as we have this conversation is that there are many facets to this conversation to consider. There is learning about how we reproduce, there is learning about how our particular reproduction can be pleasurable and there is talking about the enormous spectrum of sexuality that is happening with no goal of reproduction. These are all things to consider talking about with our children and have differing layers of discomfort for us as parents and educators.

To which Lauren Baker responded:

I think that’s one more reason why it shouldn’t be one “talk” but rather be an open topic to talk about as more questions come up.

The wonderful Cindy Gallop — whose TEDTalk “Make Love Not Porn” offers a frank look at our online-porn-obsessed culture and what we can do about it — today launches MakeLoveNotPorn.tv.

What’s the new site for? Gallop writes:

“… to make #realworldsex socially acceptable and socially shareable; to build a platform and tools for sexual social currency; to achieve the one thing we’d like everyone to do when it comes to #realworldsex — talk about it. To each other. While you’re having it. While you’re not. Openly, honestly, in a way that will improve everybody’s sex lives, and lives generally.”

Watch Cindy’s TEDTalk, “Make Love Not Porn” >>
Read Cindy’s TED Book, Make Love Not Porn: Technology’s Hardcore Impact on Human Behavior >>