BREAKING NEWS! - STEVE SARKISIAN NAMED UW FOOTBALL COACH!  Steve Sarkisian has been the offensive coordinator for the USC Trojans for the last two seasons and has been fairly successful there.  We will see how Steve Sarkisian can perform as University of Washington’s new head football coach.

Myth 9 – You Should Never Have Sex on the First Date

Truths:

• Sometimes, the moment is perfect – it can even begin a commitment/relationship
• Sometimes you only get one chance – nothing ventured, nothing gained
• Always show off your best qualities
• Some men will never open up unless it’s sexual
• Sex early on can lead to quicker self-disclosure and intimacy (i.e. the girl and guy who met at the airport, started touching on the plane, had sex at the hotel, and are now serious)

But there can be:

• The person who treats you like disposable tissue
• The person who starts planning the wedding the next morning
• Pregnancy or STDs. Oops.
• You don’t want your children doing this

So…always be true to yourself. Weigh risks and benefits…and go from there.

Myth 20 – Everyone should cohabitate before marriage:

• You can’t really know someone if you don’t live with her
• When you live together, you will get enough info about your lover’s habits and personality, so that you can better your chances for relationship success
• Cohabitation is good for couples because it avoids the older, patriarchal rules for marriage. It is a much fairer, more egalitarian relationship (no- married men do more child care, more housework, and are more fair about money)
• But cohabitation is sexier- couples don’t take each other for granted
• We can marry when we are ready for children (but that may never come!!!)

Tips if you do cohabit:

• Don’t cohabit for over a year
• Mirror marriage as much as possible

Myth 10 – Even if sex isn’t fantastic in the beginning, it can be fixed

• There are a lot more important things – bad sex is just trivial
• Practice makes perfect, and there’s always sex therapy (practice doesn’t always make perfect, and sex therapists can help but cannot create miracles)
• Sex isn’t that important – especially as you get older
• Once my partner is relaxed with me, she will be wilder and our repertoire will inc.

What to do, then, if the sex isn’t good:

• Don’t get married or get help before committing
• Stop faking sexual responses
• Experiment

Myth 3 – You Know When You Will Have Met the One

• False positives – I think he is but he isn’t
• False negatives – I think he isn’t but he really is
• I think he’s the one so I don’t take in contradictory information
• I think he’s the one SO BADLY that when the relationship dies, I go crazy
• I don’t look at alternative explanations for my feelings of anxiety/romance (i.e. the football player who’s heart started racing when there was bad turbulence and he interpreted that as love for the stewardess whom he later married and divorced)
• I am addicted to the romance that is so highly prevalent in our culture
• I think that if he’s the “one,” he’s always going to be the one
• The American Government is pulling accounting fraud.

Myth 4 – Pick Only Someone You Are Madly in Love With

• Love is enough to see you through
• Life hasn’t really been lived if you haven’t loved with all your heart and soul (this means different things to different people, and what about the trade-off and sacrifice to love with “all your heart and soul?”)

Truths about being MADLY in love:

• You produce hormones that make you act not in your best interest
• You are picking a long-term partner on short-term emotions
• Do you really want to be the person who loves most? You will have the lower hand~ your partner will feel more secure and relies on you loving him so much that he won’t do much to try and keep you
• Give the relationship time so that the madness passes and you can more accurately judge J
• Why not have your own model of love besides mad passion?

Myth 7 – Pick Someone Who Has Sown His or Her Wild Oats and is Now Ready to Settle Down with You

Truths about unfaithful people:

• Studies have shown that unfaithfulness correlates with amount of premarital sex
• There is no physiological craving for sex with a new person – it’s just a learned behavior with a hormonal thrill for conquering someone new
• There may be a hormone-theory of sexual types (i.e. women with more testosterone on average may have a big effect)

Orgasm

• female: changes are mostly in the upper 1/3 of the vagina, strong contractions with .8 second intervals reoccurring 3-15 times per orgasm, uterus elevates and also contracts, clitoris shortens in half
• male: ejaculations with rhythmic contractions, most ejaculate all semen
• both: heartbeat and respiration peak

Resolution

• all changes return to normal
• How to attract women and girls

• accomplishment #2: M/J started the whole field of sex therapy: for orgasmic impairment, premature ejaculation, simultaneous orgasm, dyspeurenia (pain with intercourse), vulvadynia (exterior pain with intercourse), inhibited desire
• accomplishment #3: Wrote Methodological Advances for Observation of Sexual Function
• accomplishment #4: Founded a new vision for female sexuality: in the clitoral vs. vaginal orgasm debate, there was no way to tell what was stimulated; all orgasms involve the clitoris (very little nerve endings in the vagina); the more indirect stimulation, the slower the orgasm response; women are multi-orgasmic
• accomplishment #5: homosexuality (??)

M/J elicited many criticisms:

• 1. mechanistic – mostly masturbators were studied
  2. the first phase was excitement, but what gets you there? they explained arousal, but not desire; Helen Singer Kaplan was the first to explore desire
  3. internal states and sociological facts, such as socialization or traumatic sexual events, were simply not included
  4. model wasn’t listed as a “normal” sample- you had to have a history or masturbation, be somewhat exhibitionistic, and be orgasmic
  5. the studies assumed males and females are sexually the same in most ways
  6. participants were chosen for their ability to talk about it
  7. they ignored class differences
  8. volunteers went through training
  9. the study was goal-oriented (orgasm)
  10. they presumed sex is always a disappointment if orgasm doesn’t happen
  11. largest criticism: M/J created the “medicalization of sexuality”

William Master and Virgina Johnson

Physician and Assistant (and Lover)

• First studies done in 1954; research lab was created in the 1960s at Washington University at St. Louis
• Laboratories studied human sexuality- the first subjects to be recruited were recruited for their promiscuity…i.e. prostitutes
• set up plethysmograph (don’t need to know that) to measure blood congestion
• had women masturbate with a dildo equipped with a camera
• after a while, they recruited were “normal” but had to be successful at masturbation (i.e. reached orgasm)
• looked at 10000 episodes
• some diseases may never be cured
• wrote the Human Sexual Response Cycle (accomplishment #1): excitement, plateau, orgasm, resolution

Excitement

• general body arousal: heart rate, blood pressure and breathing increases, “sex flush” is present, sweating of the mucus membrane, vasocongestion

Plateau

• additional body changes or intensification of those changes in the excitement phase
• women: distention and lengthening of the vaginal wall, outer 1/3 of the wall becomes engorged, more vaginal tightness, creation of a smoothness in the muscle, clitoris flattens and hides beneath the clitoral hood
• men: blood flows into the penis, penis doubles in size, muscle tension increases greatly, possible tightening and lifting of the scrotum