Is my vibrator ruining my relationship? Not long ago, I informed my boyfriend that I had ordered a Hitachi Magic Wand to keep at his place in New Jersey.
(Yes, Amazon sells them, and as of this writing, it’s their bestselling toy). I thought he’d be excited, perhaps — or, at worst, simply amused. Instead, I could practically hear the disdain over Gmail. “Do you even need me to come home anymore?” He asked. As a sex writer, I have a lot of toys, and this wasn’t the first time I’d bought the so-called Cadillac of vibrators, an extremely powerful plug-in electrical massager that’s been my go-to sex toy for over a decade. “It’s just a vibrator,” I told him. “It’s not that I think you’re going to leave me for your Hitachi,” he told me, “but there’s a caveman part of me that thinks, I should be able to satisfy you.
Uh-oh. I believed that toys were accoutrements of a good sex life, not a replacement for one. And my boyfriend certainly was. It surprised me. But I began to wonder if I should have mentioned it in the first place. Think more about sex! The problem isn’t that we’re thinking too much about sex, it’s that we’re thinking about it in all the wrong ways.
That’s the argument of philosopher Alain de Botton in his latest digestible treatise, “How to Think More About Sex,” which attempts to set us straight without neutering us. It’s a bite-sized book that applies a philosophical lens to our modern sexual reality — from infidelity to impotence, intimacy to Internet porn (and those are just the i’s). But it’s no Human Sexuality textbook: De Botton, author of the bestseller “How Proust Can Change Your Life,” is more concerned with big ideas than hard evidence. For example, he writes, “The more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’ the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.” This seems intuitively true and wise, doesn’t it? And why is it so “constitutionally problematic”? No. When will we see a herpes cure? As a feature of CNNhealth.com, our team of expert doctors will answer readers' questions.
Here's a question for Dr. Gupta. From Lloyd Bartley, Bowling Green, Kentucky “How close are scientists to developing a cure for herpes, figuratively speaking will we be seeing a break through in 10, 20, or even 30 years?” Answer: Well, Lloyd, there is good news and bad news on the herpes front. After receiving your question we reached out to a leading herpes expert, Bryan Cullen, the director at the Center for Virology at Duke University. Nearly one in five people over age 12 in the U.S. is affected by herpes. Despite funding challenges, Cullen and his team are inching closer to a cure.
While we wait for a cure, there are drugs out there that can at least suppress herpes. And of course the best way to avoid spreading herpes is to abstain from sex, but if you are sexually active, engage in safe-sex practices such as using condoms. Cullen Lab - FAQ. September 1, 2014 Update on HSV Research We have recently extended our efforts to cure HSV infections by developing DNA editing enzymes as potential HSV treatments.
I refer to these as “smart bombs” that can cleave the HSV-1 genome, and destroy the latent virus, if delivered to latently infected neurons using viral vectors. The only viral vectors that really make sense at this point are based on adeno-associated virus (AAV), which has been successfully used in gene therapy trials in humans. The big advantage of AAV is that you can get very high levels of virus—up to 10 billion infectious units per milliliter—and the Bloom lab has clearly shown, using an AAV that expresses green fluorescent protein (gfp), that he can infect essentially every single neuron in the trigeminal ganglia where HSV-1 establishes latency. So, my long-term collaborator David Bloom and I have taken two approaches. So, some progress has been made but we haven't quite achieved full success.