I wonder if this is going to put some therapists out of business:

Breast enlargement surgery may help boost a woman’s self-esteem and feelings about her sexuality, according to a study conducted by a University of Florida assistant professor. …

On a 30-point scale of self-esteem, the score after breast enlargement surgery rose from 20.7 to 24.9 on average. In terms of sexuality, the study found there was a 78.6 percent increase in sexual desire, an 82 percent increase in arousal and a 57 percent increase in satisfaction.

So, really, what we’re talking about is magic headlamps. Rub them and the sexual genie appears. Only drawback? Some installation required ……

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It’s February 14, and love is in the air. Sleet, however, is on the ground, so the kids will be home from school for the foreseeable future. Which means that our mid-winter holiday of love is strictly an academic and culinary issue in this corner of the greater Allentown metropolitan area.

You probably know that many of our modern holidays were superimposed onto existing pagan holidays — Christmas, Easter, Halloween, Fourth of July …

Okay, just kidding about the last one.

What I didn’t know until just this morning is that even St. Valentine’s Day is based on a Roman festival called Lupercalia:

February occurred later on the ancient Roman calendar than it does today so Lupercalia was held in the spring and regarded as a festival of purification and fertility. Each year on February 15, the Luperci priests gathered on Palantine Hill at the cave of Lupercal. Vestal virgins…

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I don’t follow pro football closely — in fact, I follow it so not-closely that I only watch the Super Bowl for the commercials, and take my bathroom breaks when play resumes. But even I know that this is the first Super Bowl involving two African-American coaches.

My older brother and I listened to the Chicago-New Orleans game as we were driving out of St. Louis Sunday afternoon, and one of the first things the radio announcer said when the game ended was that the Chicago coach, Lovie Smith, would be the first black coach to take a team to the Super Bowl.

I think the story line should be that Lovie Smith is the first person named “Lovie” who wasn’t laughed out of his profession. But that’s just me.

So, with thoughts of identity politics already percolating in my head, I read this in yesterday’s New York Times, about the…

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In TC Luoma’s Atomic Dog column on T-nation last week, he brought up this point about female beauty:

While it’s often said that beauty is ever changing, skin-deep, and superficial, that line of thinking is largely bunk. Regardless of cultural preferences, two things remain timeless and irrefutable markers of beauty: facial symmetry and the mystical .7 waist-to-hip ratio, or WHR. If you haven’t heard of the WHR before, Professor Devendra Singh of the University of Texas at Austin originated the concept in a paper he wrote in 1993.

Quite simply, the .7 WHR reflects the size of the waist to the size of the hips. Non-obese men, obviously, have a WHR closer to 1, while non-obese women, more wasp-waisted, have a WHR smaller than 1, the ideal being close to .7.

Singh came to the conclusion that across the ages, across cultures, regardless of body fat levels or preferences for fuller breasts…

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Ah, crap. This is not what I wanted to hear:

Circumcision reduces the risk of HIV infection by half, according to a new study conducted among nearly 8,000 adult males in Kenya and Uganda, researchers reported Wednesday.

Circumcision proved so effective that the study was halted a year early and the procedure was offered to all study participants.

Previous research has suggested that circumcision is beneficial, but the new trial is “definitive,” according to Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which cosponsored the study with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

“It’s not a magic bullet,” said Dr. Kevin De Cock, director of the World Health Organization’s department of HIV/AIDS, but it has the potential to prevent “many hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of infections over coming years.”

I apologize, but my inner third-grader can’t pass up the opportunity to note that the doctor’s name…

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If I were a man living in India, I don’t think I’d want this news getting much play:

A survey of more than 1,000 men in India has concluded that condoms made according to international sizes are too large for a majority of Indian men.

The study found that more than half of the men measured had penises that were shorter than international standards for condoms. It has led to a call for condoms of mixed sizes to be made more widely available in India.

The two-year study was carried out by the Indian Council of Medical Research. Over 1,200 volunteers from the length and breadth of the country had their penises measured precisely, down to the last millimetre.

Josh Marshall writes:

There must be some globalization joke in here. But I’m afraid to find it. Maybe about outsourcing?

That’s a good start. I’d also look for some yuks in the area of customer…

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Continuing with today’s theme that voters chose moderation over extremism, and echoing last week’s post about the numbskulls in our government who think it’s their place to preach abstinence to unmarried American adults, there’s this:

Most Americans, regardless of their political leanings, favor comprehensive sex education in schools over abstinence-only programs, researchers reported Monday.

Currently, the federal government champions the abstinence-only approach, giving around $170 million each year to states and community groups to teach just-say-no sex education. This funding precludes mention of birth control and condoms, unless it’s to emphasize their failure rates.

However, critics point out that studies have failed to show that abstinence-only education delays sex or lowers rates of teen pregnancy.

This latest study, according to the authors, suggests that the federal government is out of step not only with research, but also with public opinion.

Of the nearly 1,110 U.S. adults they surveyed, 82 percent supported programs…

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This news doesn’t come as a huge surprise:

Monogamy is dominant across the world, but multiple partners are more common in rich countries, according to the study published in the Lancet. This was despite developing countries having higher rates of sexually transmitted infections and HIV.

London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine researchers gathered data from 59 countries for the study. They said factors such as poverty and mobility had more of a role in sexually transmitted infections than promiscuity had.

So people in wealthier, more industrialized countries have sex with more partners, but suffer fewer consequences. And the study also found that teens in developed countries don’t start having sex earlier than their counterparts in poorer countries — in the U.K., the average age of first intercourse is 16.5 for men and 17.5 for women. Across the globe, the study says, the kids start getting their jollies between the ages of…

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If you ever found yourself in a conversation about pornography with a lockstep feminist back in the ’70s or ’80s, her opening gambit would be something like this: “Pornography is bad because it objectifies women.”

The problem with that argument is that it plays a lot better with women than with men. It’s human nature to celebrate beauty, and while one man’s celebration might be another man’s whacking material, it’s hard to demonize objectification in the abstract.

Sooner or later, the feminist would pull out the trump card: “Pornography leads to rape.”

But, again, that’s a tough argument to make with an actual consumer of erotica. I subscribed to Playboy back then, and I guarantee there was nothing about looking at pictures of naked women that inspired violence. I always figured the opposite occurred, and that a guy who spent too much time with his private collection would spend less time and energy…

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Sexual images affect your brain, even if you can’t consciously see them:

In an experiment, 40 men and women were shown erotic images that had been manipulated to bypass conscious detection. The participants consisted of both heterosexual and homosexual individuals. …

In general, the erotic images attracted or repelled attention depending on the gender of the nude model and also the sexual orientation of the subject. For example, heterosexual males tended to perform better on the pattern task when it followed the presentation of an invisible female nude than a male nude. Gay males, in contrast, showed more enhanced performance when exposed to invisible male nudes compared to female nudes.

“We didn’t predict that,” study team member Sheng He of the University of Minnesota told LiveScience. “We just wanted to see if invisible images can attract your attention or not.”

For women, the results were more mixed. Heterosexual females performed better after exposure…

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