Sex researchers shed light on unpopular sex acts

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From bondage to “breath play” and zoophilia, it’s not easy keeping up with society’s fast-developing sexual trends.

That’s why some of North America’s top sexologists are hunkered down with academics and therapists at a Fisherman’s Wharf hotel this weekend: to swap findings about everything from teens with underwear fetishes to transgender couples.

“These couples have problems that I didn’t know how to deal with,” said Olga Perez Stable Cox, president of the Western U.S. region of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. 

"You have to understand the culture, otherwise you’re an outsider, and you don’t get it.”

The theme for the society’s four-day conference is “Unstudied, Understudied And Underserved Sexual Communities.” Presentations range from autoerotic asphyxiation, or “breath play,” to zoophiles, or animal lovers, to more mainstream topics like sex motives of dating partners.

“Let me tell you, it was not easy finding these pictures,” Hunter College professor Jose E. Nanin told his audience in a seminar about “specialized” sexual behavior among gay men.

Nanin’s photos are more than an explicit how-to of exhibitionism and sadomasochism, he says; they are examples of safe alternatives to sexual intercourse that need to be de-stigmatized in order to fight diseases like HIV/AIDS.

Researchers say their greater goal is to help the medical community, the public and legislators figure out what behavior is merely out of the norm versus downright dangerous.

“As sex researchers, one of our concerns is distinguishing what can be harmful and what is not - so that instead of being based on myth, public policy can be informed,” said Charlene Muehlenhard, professor of psychology and women’s studies at The University of Kansas.

When authorities caught a Midwestern U.S. teenage boy stealing girls’ underwear, they immediately demonized his underwear fetish, Pennsylvania State University researcher Patricia Barthalow Kosch said. Many clinicians attribute the boy’s crime more to broken family relations. The crime was theft, not his sexual fantasies, conference attendees said.

Teen sexuality draws sensational headlines, but suffers from a lack of academic study, researchers said.

Kim Openshaw, a psychology professor at Utah State University in Logan, Utah, who studies teenage sex offenders, said the limited amount of research so far has found that girls make up only 5 to 10 percent of all underage sex offenders.

The numbers are underreported, Openshaw says, because many people are reluctant to acknowledge the problem.

Victims of girl sex offenders tend to be in the immediate family circle. Most perpetrators are victims of family abuse. By contrast, boy sex offenders tend to be more macho, violent and attack outside of their immediate family.

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