Masturbation, as a significant sexual activity within its own right, has garnered substantial interest as a research topic only within the past 10–20 years. In this in-depth analysis of masturbation in women, we examined relationships among frequencies of, reasons for, and activities during masturbation, and investigated how such parameters predict orgasmic pleasure, latency, and difficulty. Participants were 2215 women at least 18 years of age participating in a 42-item opt-in online survey that collected detailed information about women’s orgasmic response during masturbation and partnered sex. Higher frequency of masturbation was related to lower satisfaction with partner, greater importance of sex, and higher levels of general anxiety/depression. Frequency of, reasons for, and activities during masturbation predicted both orgasmic pleasure and orgasmic difficulty during masturbation. The pattern of results enabled the development of three typologies of women who differ systematically with respect to their masturbation and partnered sex behaviors.

Propagating Lyapunov functions to prove noise-induced stabilization

Introduction: Women's primary issue with the orgasmic phase is usually difficulty reaching orgasm. Aims: To identify predictors of orgasmic difficulty in women within the context of a partnered sexual experience; to assess the relation between orgasmic difficulty and self-reported levels of sexual desire or interest and arousal in women; and to assess the interrelations among three dimensions of orgasmic response during partnered sex: self-reported time to reach orgasm, general difficulty or ease of reaching orgasm, and level of distress or concern. Methods: Drawing from a community-based sample using the Internet, 866 women were queried on a 26-item survey regarding their difficulty reaching orgasm during partnered sex. Four hundred sixteen women who indicated difficulty also responded to items assessing arousal and desire difficulties, level of distress about their condition, and their estimated time to reach orgasm. Main Outcome Measures: Answers to a 26-item survey on surveyed women's difficulty reaching orgasm during partnered sex. Results: Age, arousal difficulty, and lubrication difficulty predicted difficulty reaching orgasm in the overall sample. In the subsample of women reporting difficulty, approximately half reported issues with arousal. Women with arousal problems reported greater difficulty reaching orgasm but did not differ from those without arousal problems on measurements of orgasm latency or levels of distress. Slightly more than half the women experiencing difficulty reaching orgasm were distressed by their condition; distressed women reported greater difficulty reaching orgasm and longer latencies to orgasm than non-distressed counterparts. They also reported lower satisfaction with their sexual relationship. Conclusion: This study indicates the importance of assessing multiple parameters when investigating orgasmic problems in women, including arousal issues, levels of distress, and latency to orgasm. Results also clarify that women with arousal problems do not differ substantially from those without arousal problems; in contrast, women distressed by their condition differ from non-distressed women along some critical dimensions. Although orgasmic problems decreased with age, the overall relation of this variable to distress, arousal, and latency to orgasm was essentially unchanged across age groups.

Sexual dysfunction sometimes negatively affects the individual, his or her partner, and the relationship. We investigated the relationship between the distress experienced by men and women with orgasmic phase difficulties and the perceived distress of their partner(s). We also identified predictors of perceived partner distress, and related self and partner distress to severity of the problem and relationship quality. Data were drawn from 374 men with premature ejaculation (PE) and 377 women with anorgasmia who responded to a survey regarding their sexual functioning, including their distress about their condition and the perceived distress of their partners. Results yielded an overall distress score consisting of combined self and perceived partners distress, with women showing a higher overall score and higher perceived partner distress than men. For men, significant predictors of perceived partner distress included self-distress, relationship quality, interest in sex, and arousal difficulty; for women, only the level of self-distress significantly predicted perceived partner distress. These findings indicate the burden of experiencing sexual difficulty, identify factors related to perceived partner distress, and demonstrate differences in self versus partner distress across men and women. Overall, such findings reiterate the strong need for the inclusion of the partner in any attempted remediation of a sexual problem.

Noise-induced stabilization is the phenomenon in which the addition of randomness to an unstable system of ordinary differential equations results in a stable system of stochastic differential equations. With stability defined as global stochastic boundedness, Hamiltonian systems can never be stabilized by the addition of noise that is constant in space. In this article, we investigate how to deterministically perturb a class of unstable Hamiltonian systems in such a way that the qualitative behavior is preserved, but that enables the systems to exhibit noise-induced stabilization.