Sex is good for you. It doesn’t sound like a controversial assertion, but work
by Professor Stuart Brody, one of Britain’s leading “sexperts”, on the
physiological and psychological effects of sexual intercourse has sent the
radical left into a lather and has led him to fear political correctness is
in danger of stifling academic research in Britain.
Brody is the American-born professor of psychology at Paisley University. At
the heart of his thesis is the claim that one kind of sex — penile-vaginal
intercourse (PVI) or, in tabloid parlance, a good old-fashioned “bonk” — is
better than any other. According to Brody, no other form of sexual activity
conveys the same benefits. If he is correct, his work has profound
implications for the way sex education is taught in Britain and how sex
therapy is practised.
In a week in which gay rights were extended to prevent businesses
discriminating against homosexuals and in an era that has seen the removal
of social stigma from a wide range of sexual practices, the instruction to
lie back and think of Scotland is not a fashionable message. But Brody, who
could become Scotland’s answer to Dr Ruth — the suave New Yorker has been
approached by a television company with a view to making a series about his
work — believes his research has important health implications.
Brody’s findings show that sexual intercourse, but not other forms of sex, can
be an effective stress-buster. To keep the nation in the peak of rude
health, GPs, it seems, should be dispensing sexual advice along with the
cholesterol-lowering statins to patients with high blood pressure.
“One of my particular research interests is to look at physical and
psychological differences between different sexual behaviours,” says Brody
over coffee in Glasgow’s Merchant city. “Since the time of (Alfred) Kinsey
it has been asserted, but never supported by evidence, that all sexual
behaviour is equivalent. That has been more an assertion of ideology than
fact.
“I have been measuring with hard variables, such as blood pressure and hormone
levels, as well as softer variables, such as psychological reports, the
differences between major categories of sexual behaviour.”
In his most celebrated experiment, Brody asked 24 women and 22 men to keep sex
diaries for a fortnight. The volunteers then took a stress test that
involved public speaking and doing mental arithmetic out loud. Those who’d
had intercourse but none of the other kinds of sex were least stressed and
their blood pressure returned to normal faster than those in the other
groups.
The abstainers had the highest blood-pressure response to stress. The effects
were not attributable to other stress-related factors such as work, anxiety
or the quality of the relationship and the findings were equally valid for
men and women.
According to Brody, the health benefits of “bonking” can last up to a
fortnight. “They certainly last beyond the immediate warm physical and
emotional feeling,” he says. And the more heterosexual intercourse, the
greater the benefits. “There is no critical threshold, but the more days per
month you do it — and that is the issue rather than number of times — the
better it was. Zero was bad, 30 days out of 30 was great.”
Because of the difficulties of getting ethical approval in Britain for his
research, Brody often uses European subjects. In another study using German
health workers, heterosexual volunteers were assigned one of three
activities in the lab: watching videos; watching videos and masturbating; or
watching videos and having sex with their partners. While this was going on
their blood was measured for the hormone prolactin, which is associated with
satisfaction. The results were bad news for Woody Allen, who described
masturbation as “sex with someone I love”.
“What I found in that study was that the post-orgasmic surge of prolactin was
400% greater in the intercourse group than in the masturbation orgasm
group,” says Brody. “That has some implications for mental health.”
The findings, while highly controversial, are not unexpected, according to
Brody, who also works on transmission of the Aids virus and has published
more than 100 papers in a variety of journals. “I wasn’t surprised by my
findings at all,” he says. “There are many reasons why it should be so.
Evolution is not politically correct. It strongly rewards any behaviour
which has even a trivial association with an increasing likelihood of
passing on genes.”
Not surprisingly, his work has been condemned by radicals at both ends of the
political spectrum. “The anti-scientific right not only denies evolution but
would rather no sex research was done at all,” he says. “That is less of a
problem than the radical left, which wants sex research done, but only if
the results are politically acceptable to them. It’s not the gay lobby per
se that objects, but a subset of the radical left. I’ve met a lot of
homosexual men who have a great interest in truth, but there will always be
some people who put maintenance of their ideology above science. Ultimately
it’s counterproductive. Truth is no enemy of compassion.”
Sex and sexual preferences are far more subtle and emotional than even the
most objective research experiment can accommodate. How can Brody be sure
the positive results he has found are not due to some other factor, such as
a happy marriage? “I’ve looked at that,” he says. “The results were not
confounded by whether subjects were in a relationship, their age or a number
of other sociological predictors. As a scientist in the research study I can
say love doesn’t matter. As a man, I know love matters a great deal. Some
things are mechanistic, but in the softer studies I can look at the effects
of emotion.”
Brody, who is in a heterosexual relationship, finds it distasteful when the
American religious right twists his work for its own purposes — “having sex
the way God intended” — but he maintains that at the very least we should be
teaching that different sexual behaviours are not equivalent and that PVI is
the only sexual behaviour consistently associated with better psychological
and physiological function. He believes that among the scientific
establishment there is “a seemingly intentional avoidance” of looking at
differences.
“I’m in favour of people being made aware of the relative benefits and then
they live their lives as they choose,” he says. “Sex education and sex
therapy need to be rewritten. A lot of what they teach or practise is either
false, or at least doing a disservice to the clients. We could do it much
better. There are also practical applications for health care.”
Brody believes GPs should ask their patients about their sexual behaviour as
part of their general healthcare, but only if GPs are properly trained in
sexual medicine.
“There are countries where this happens,” says Brody. “In France, for example,
sex is an important part of life. Its absence is noteworthy. It can be a
sign of depression or one of the first signs of heart disease. When one
looks at the magnitude of difference in terms of blood-pressure activity
between the different sexual behaviour groups in my study, and knowing that
blood-pressure activity relative to stress is a good predictor of the
long-term development of hypertension as well as other cardiovascular
diseases, it becomes something people need to consider.”
Dispensing sex advice with the Solpadeine may be some way off. Brody
acknowledges the Scottish reluctance to be open about sexual matters. “It’s
not just reticence about sex, it’s reticence about any emotional expression
other than rage and that’s a big problem,” he says. He recently got ethics
committee approval to do an anonymous online survey in Scotland, which may
shed more light on Scottish attitudes to sex.
In the meantime he is concerned about the tacit censorship of academics whose
work does not fit the politically correct ideology of the left. “I am unable
to play the piano, but it doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate Vladimir
Horowitz,” he says. “I don’t say that he doesn’t exist and I don’t try to
break his fingers. We need to let the science speak for itself.”
What the science appears to be saying is: “Yes, yes, oooooh yes!”
