Bering in Mind
A research psychologist's curious look at human behavior
Are Straight Women and Gay Men "Natural Allies"? An Evolutionary Account
Not every gay man has a female best friend, nor does every straight woman have a gay man as her most trusted confidant. But according to a recent article in Evolutionary Psychology, every one should...
January 1, 2014 — Jesse Bering
A Baker's Dozen Old-Fashioned Anti-Erection Gadgets for Men (with Illustrations)
It should come as no surprise that an archival search of the U.S. Patent Office yields an embarrassment of riches regarding various contraptions for guarding against self-abuse (masturbation) and nocturnal seminal emissions (wet dreams) in human males...
December 30, 2013 — Jesse Bering
Darwins Morning After Pill: How Couples Who Want Children Can Increase Their Chances
If youre desperate for a child but have been having trouble in this area, semen may be the solution to your reproductive woes. That may sound like the most obvious sentence ever written in the history of the English language, but sometimes beneath the most ancient truisms lie remarkable secrets...
Ian Stevenson's Case for the Afterlife: Are We 'Skeptics' Really Just Cynics?
If you're anything like me, with eyes that roll over to the back of your head whenever you hear words like "reincarnation" or "parapsychology," if you suffer great paroxysms of despair for human intelligence whenever you catch a glimpse of that dandelion-colored cover of Heaven Is For Real or other such books, and become angry when [...]..
November 2, 2013 — Jesse Bering
The Lustful Human Animal: Cultural Differences in Sexual Harm and Consent
Most of us are convinced that we excel at being clearheaded, humane thinkers when it comes to sex. We appeal, and admirably so, to notions such as harm and consent.
October 6, 2013 — Jesse Bering
Of Cultures Destroyed by Western Sexual Exploitation and Violent Religious Prudery
In working on my latest book Perv, some of the saddest material I came across involved the stormy cross-cultural conflicts erupting between Western ideals of sex and those discovered among other "exotic" societies...
September 24, 2013 — Jesse Bering
Do Octopuses Feel Pain?
The recent headlining report of a 70-year-old man who inserted a fork into his urethra in a misplaced effort to obtain sexual gratification—and who, in the process, unleashed a collective wince heard 'round the world once the x-ray image of his sounding went viral online—shines a light on the lengths some people will go to [...]..
September 6, 2013 — Jesse Bering
I Don't Mean to be Forward, but Please Park on my Face?
For most of us, the prospect of getting injured in a car accident isn't particularly erotic. But of course, that's just most of us. When it comes to human sexuality, anything—and I really do mean anything—can become subjectively eroticized in a rogue mind...
Bite Those Nails, Baby: A "Quick" Tale of Fingernail Fetishism
Suum cuique pulchrum est—"to each his own is beautiful." For an otherwise normal, 23-year-old male patient described by the Wisconsin psychiatrist Austin McSweeny in 1972, the most arousing sexual fantasy was the image of an obese woman nibbling at her nails...
August 14, 2013 — Jesse Bering
The Opposite of "Protection": A Fetish for Used Condoms
Using condoms is a good thing. Using used condoms, well, not so much. In a 2009 article published in Sexually Transmitted Infections, the British medical author Vincent Tremayne explains the fetish for prophylatics...
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