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Virginia Braun: Influence Statistics

Orgasm is a "goal" of much sexual activity, and a source of potentially intense pleasure and fulfillment, yet can be fraught with difficulty or distress. Relatively little social science research has explored people's experiences around, and their meanings related to, orgasm, and indeed other sexual pleasures, especially with young adults. This study aimed to provide a rich exploration of the meanings associated with orgasm and sexual pleasure during sex with a partner, to understand the ...

Little is known about the health views of gay men. In this article we report on how gay men explained health and the ways they discussed how health for gay men can be improved. We conducted a thematic analysis of data collected from 45 gay men in 11 focus groups and identified that health was mainly explained in individual terms, as were the ways to improve health (personal health care services and health promotion). The second way health was explained drew on social and community ...

Recent shifts in the western cultural landscape mean that practices such as casual sex are contradictory terrains for women. Although permissive and liberal discourses construct women’s casual sex as acceptable, and even desirable, traditional discourses and a sexual double standard, do not. This article examines 15 young women’s negotiation of the sexual double standard in their talk of heterosexual casual sex. Interviews were analysed using thematic analysis, with borrowed insights ...

Until recently, sexual coercion among gay men has been regarded as virtually oxymoronic. Discourses of male sexuality as ever-present and driven, and discourses of masculinity that portray men as in control and invulnerable, converge to almost disavow the possibilities that sex could be unwanted by men, or that men could be vulnerable to being pressured into sex against their will. This article reports on interviews with 19 gay and bisexual men about their experiences of forced, coerced, ...

Female genital cosmetic surgery procedures have gained popularity in the West in recent years. Marketing by surgeons promotes the surgeries, but professional organizations have started to question the promotion and practice of these procedures. Despite some surgeon claims of drastic transformations of psychological, emotional, and sexual life associated with the surgery, little reliable evidence of such effects exists. This article achieves two objectives. First, reviewing the published ...

Research and anecdotal evidence suggest women continue to remove body hair, and there is some evidence for cultural changes in men's hair removal practices. This paper reports on data collected using an online mix-methods survey from 584 New Zealanders between the ages of 18-35 (mean age 26, 48.9% male, 50.6% female). The data demonstrated that substantial proportions of both women and men in Aotearoa/New Zealand remove body hair from many sites. However, gendered differences remain, and ...

This paper analyses online texts concerning the supposed ‘rules’ and ‘etiquette’ of heterosexual casual sex, exploring how ‘ideal’ casual sex was constructed – as object and practice. We examine how casual sex was constituted by authors who positioned themselves as knowledgeable and/or expert in relation to casual sex and demonstrate the discourses that their accounts drew on in constructing archetypal casual sex. Our analysis is situated within feminist/critical theorising and debates ...

Research over the past decade on rape and sexual coercion among gay and bisexual men has shown that significant numbers of men report some form of unwanted or coerced sexual experience. Most studies have investigated the prevalence and impact of sexual assault, with little exploration of the nature and meanings of sexual coercion. This paper contributes to understandings of the latter, analysing the notion of 'risk' as it appeared in the talk of 23 key informants interviewed. These ...

Thematic analysis is a poorly demarcated, rarely acknowledged, yet widely used qualitative analytic method within psychology. In this paper, we argue that it offers an accessible and theoretically flexible approach to analysing qualitative data. We outline what thematic analysis is, locating it in relation to other qualitative analytic methods that search for themes or patterns, and in relation to different epistemological and ontological positions. We then provide clear guidelines to ...

Defining and describing health has traditionally been the role of medical experts. Although a rich literature has recently established the importance of lay accounts of health, one important gap relates to gay men's accounts of health. Data from 11 focus groups involving 45 gay men were thematically analyzed to investigate gay men's views of health. Two contrasting positions on a possible relationship between sexuality and health-there is no link or there is a definite link-were ...

Women’s and men’s bodies and sexuality can be understood as socially situated and socially produced. This means they are affected by, and developed in relation to, patterned sociocultural meanings and representations. We aim here to understand a recently emergent, and potentially gendered, body practice—pubic hair removal—by examining the meanings people ascribe to pubic hair and its removal. Extending the widespread hairless bodily norm for Anglo/Western women, pubic hair removal is an ...

Intercourse remains the definitive heterosexual act, implied by terms such as `having sex', `making love', or even just `doing it'. However, the particular bodily mechanics of intercourse mean it carries considerably higher risks (of disease and unwanted conception for example) than other forms of sex. Because of this, we suggest a need to question the taken-for-grantedness of intercourse in heterosex. Drawing on data from interviews with 15 women and 15 men, we examine discourses and ...

Background: More than 15 years ago, the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) identified men’s involvement with reproductive and contraceptive tasks as vital for improving women’s reproductive health worldwide. The uptake of vasectomy provides one measure of men’s involvement in reproductive and contraceptive actions, but uptake requires the negotiation of a complex set of social and psychological meanings related to masculinity, sexuality and contraceptive ...

The concept of data saturation, defined as ‘information redundancy’ or the point at which no new themes or codes ‘emerge’ from data, is widely referenced in thematic analysis (TA) research in sport and exercise, and beyond. Several researchers have sought to ‘operationalise’ data saturation and provide concrete guidance on how many interviews, or focus groups, are enough to achieve some degree of data saturation in TA research. Our disagreement with such attempts to ‘capture’ data ...

Discussions of heterosexual casual sex are often imbued with (gendered) assumptions regarding the motives for, and drawbacks of, such a practice. The pulls of casual sex are often depicted as sexual gratification and the drawbacks relayed in terms of physical risk, for example, sexually transmitted infections (STIs)/human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) transmission. Most of the research in this area has largely focused on undergraduate university students or "emerging adults" in North ...