Who Can You Trust?

I've always been wary of sex experts. Someone who was psychologically inclined might wonder whether growing up with a sex therapist father and librarian mother could have influenced my cautious approach to being "told" things about sex. And they might be right. But nonetheless, I think, given the number of lies we're told about sex, I have good reason to be skeptical.

Over the years I've tried to figure out a formula that would help me decide what sex information I could trust. One element of the equation has to do with where the information is coming from. I mean, can I trust Dr. Phil the same way I trust Dr. Kinsey? And is Jane magazine as good as the Journal of Sex Research when it comes to printing accurate information?

And whenever I think I might have found some clarity, things get fuzzy again. Take for example two recent collaborations between mainstream media and science in the area of sex information.

The first collaboration is one I read about on Petra Boynton's blog:

about the pilot scheme between the British Psychological Society and Top Sante magazine where the BPS had helped the magazine create a free 28 page supplement called ‘Happy New You’. The supplement was supposed to reflect collaboration between the media and the BPS and contain contributions from the ‘best experts’. The BPS were keen to show how they were going to shape editorial and liase with the media.

Petra goes on to describe the result, and the very critical response from the women's section of the British Psychological Society, which accused the society of reinforcing stereotypes about female sexuality and straying from evidence-based information.

I also came across another media/science collaboration (also UK based) involving the BBC and North American and British researchers which was built around an internet survey and a television documentary program called Secrets of the Sexes. The data was apparently collected in collaboration with academic researchers and several papers were published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior based on analysis of the BBC data.

The homepage about the survey offers the following introductory text:

Homosexual people are more likely to be left handed (or ambidextrous) than heterosexuals, according to scientists studying data from the BBC's Sex ID, one of the largest psychology experiments ever conducted.

This is one of a series of findings from the web survey of sexuality and mental processes, which had over 450,000 participants. Other findings include:

• Women with high sex drives are more likely to be attracted to both sexes but men with high sex drives are more likely to be interested in one sex or the other.
• When asked what traits they look for in a mate, men and women agreed on the top nine traits. However, men ranked good looks and facial attractiveness higher whereas women placed greater emphasis on honesty, kindness and dependability.
• People's ability to create a mental picture of the world around them (known as spatial processing) is affected by their sexual orientation.

I haven't been able to read the papers that are published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior (yet) but I suspect that the actual scientific research will be presented with far more qualifications and many cautions about limitations of the research than the BBC website offers.

All of which makes me skeptical about the general enterprise of scientists working with the media. After all, the media relies on catching the interest of its audience quickly and holding it for as long as possible (or until the next commercial break). Scientific inquiry is a long, often meandering, process with many starts and stops, and few splashy "eureka" moments. Bringing the two together should mean offering us not only more information but a broader context for understanding the information we're getting. In reality it seems more like both sides compromising and no one winning (except maybe the editors who have filled another issue, or launched another micro-site, which offers advertising real estate).

Read more - BBC.com: Sex ID

Read more - Petra Boynton: Are we helped or harmed when psychologists and the media team up?

Related - About Sexual Science