Men who took erectile dysfunction drugs such as Viagra were more likely to become infected with sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

This infection rate was higher even in the year before the men got their prescriptions filled, which suggests the risky behavior came first, the researchers reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The study shows that even middle-aged men need advice about spreading and catching STDs, especially AIDS, which is deadly and incurable, Dr. Anupam Jena of Harvard Medical School in Boston and colleagues wrote.

“Users of ED (erectile dysfunction) drugs had higher rates of HIV, chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis in the 12 months before filling their first ED drug prescription, although only HIV and chlamydia were statistically significant in this period,” Jena’s team wrote.

“At a minimum, use of ED drugs seems to correlate with higher-risk sexual behavior, either in the number or type of sexual encounters.” Read the rest of this entry »

Teenage girls do not tend to masturbate as automatically as boys do.

Of course, plenty of girls do discover that they get pleasant feelings from their genitals at quite an early age. And many of these girls do discover how to masturbate to orgasm in their mid to late teens.

But many girls and young women simply do not feel many strong sexual urges.

Indeed, it’s quite common for a woman not to reach orgasm until she is about 19 years of age. And there are plenty of females who don’t reach one for years after that – either through sex with a partner, or by masturbating.

When we wrote our book The Big ‘O’, our research showed that a few women did not learn to achieve orgasm until their 40s – but when they did, they were very pleased about it and quickly made up for lost time! So it’s never too late to learn. Read the rest of this entry »

Two of the common sex problems that men experience can be helped to some extent by masturbating.

Premature ejaculation (PE), which is a condition where the man ejaculates too quickly whilst he’s having sex with a partner, is an enormously common problem.

PE usually needs some sort of specialist help, but some men are able to help themselves to some degree by gaining more control over their climaxes, while masturbating.

For such a man, he should practise beginning to masturbate and allow himself to get almost to the point of no return. But he should then stop and calm down a bit, before carrying on.

If a man can do this several times before giving in and having a climax, it may well help him to develop the necessary control he’s been lacking to delay his climax during intercourse – especially if he practises this stop-start technique on a regular basis. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a worrisome uptick in the incidence of certain head and neck cancers among middle-aged and even younger Americans, and some experts link the trend to a rise in the popularity of oral sex over the past few decades.

That’s because the human papillomavirus (HPV) is a major trigger for these cancers, and HPV can be transmitted through this type of sexual activity.

“It seems like a pretty good link that more sexual activity, particularly oral sex, is associated with increased HPV infection,” said Dr. Greg Hartig, professor of otolaryngology–head and neck surgery at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison. Read the rest of this entry »