“Women,” the British writer Anthony Burgess once said, “thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets”. That’s not entirely true, of course. I’m a fashion-challenged male myself—and one of those rather rare gay ones to boot—but most men aren’t quite as indifferent about their appearance as Burgess would have us believe. Not today’s men, anyway. As Reuters correspondent Ellen Wulfhorst points out, the latest in menswear has a long history of playing second fiddle to female vogue, but those in the know now see it as a potential sleeping giant, with the wide valley in sales figures between what the two sexes are willing to spend on cosmetics and stylish clothes increasingly narrowing.

Still, if major industry events like New York Fashion Week are any reflection of human psychology, it’s women who seem especially eager to invest their hard-earned dollars in feathering themselves up with designer labels, spending over $100 billion a year to do so. From handbags worth more than a new Hyundai, to stiletto heels that would set you back more than treating a large family to a feast, to sunglasses that…. well, you get the idea. It’s a decidedly feminine affair, this conspicuous consumption of high-priced fashion goods. And from a scientific perspective, that’s a bit of a puzzle. Here’s why.

The average heterosexual man simply doesn’t care what, or who, women are wearing. Study after study has found that men see a frugally attired woman as being just as sexually attractive as one whose outfit screams fashionista diva. Place her in a fancy pair of Jimmy Choo shoes or no-name heels from Walmart; male arousal just isn’t influenced by such vanity items.

It’s a very different story for women’s perception of male attractiveness, however. Women’s feelings about a man’s desirability are swayed by cues to his wealth. Put the same guy—even the same image of that guy, just photo-shopped accordingly—in an Armani suit, or a Mercedes, or (as Cardiff Metropolitan University psychologist Michael Dunn found in a notable experiment) a luxury apartment, and women’s subjective evaluations of that man’s attractiveness are significantly higher than if they see him in a pair of boxers, a Toyota Corolla, or a cheap flat. Evolutionary psychologists explain this sex difference through “parental investment theory”: since the physiological risks associated with casual sex were so much higher for women than men in the ancestral past, women evolved to be choosier overall about their reproductive partners, preferring those males who signalled that they had the resources to help raise any shared offspring.

So if women aren’t spending big bucks on fashion and other luxury goods to score a man, why are they doing it? Saying it’s “for themselves” or “because it’s fun” is fine, but from a deeper, evolutionary, non-conscious perspective, it means nothing. It turns out that the real reason women flaunt their handbags and couture has to do with the other women around them. The latest Balenciaga bag may send a message that a lady has great taste, but it’s also telling other women around her that she probably has a man who bought it for her (so back off!) or it’s marking her as a formidable contender on the competitive scene of single ladies. At least, that’s what the data from two insightful psychological studies tell us.

The first comes from researchers Vladas Griskevicius and Yajin Wang at the University of Minnesota. When asked their impressions of a woman drenched in extravagant garb and dangling with currency incarnate, female participants perceived her as being in a more serious, committed relationship than those less sumptuously attired. This effect pans out regardless of who really paid for those luxury items; other women’s default assumption, for better or worse, is that she must have a male partner who lavishes her with such objects. Griskevicius and Wang also found that when women feel threatened and jealous in the romantic realm—like when some vixen flirts with their husbands—they’re more likely to splurge on designer brands. This broadcasts loud and clear that their partner is taken. In other words, it’s what other women think that matters most in this game of “intrasexual competition”.

The second study, cheekily titled “The Rival Wears Prada”, was led by Lisa Hudders of Ghent University, Belgium. Hudders and her team fine-tuned the previous study, investigating the specific types of luxury goods that women use to prevent their men from getting poached. To do this, they recruited about 200 Flemish women to participate in a controlled experiment. Half of the sample (those randomly assigned to the “non-competitive” condition) saw a photo of a pretty landscape and were told to imagine walking through that place while enjoying the scenery. The second group (those in the “competitive” condition) saw a photo of an attractive woman and were told to imagine being at an event where this other woman began flirting with a guy whom they were interested in themselves: an “attractive, smart, funny, intelligent man with an engaging personality”.

After picturing one of these scenes, the participants were asked to read one of three different product descriptions: an advertisement for a mass-produced non-luxury product such as a cheap ballpoint pen; one for a pricey non-appearance-altering luxury item such as the latest smartphone model, or; for an attractiveness-enhancing luxury object, such as a one-of-a-kind designer dress. The women were then simply asked how much they personally wanted that object.

The results confirmed Hudders’s suspicions. Women who’d been primed with the competitive dating scene and who then read about the designer dress desired that item significantly more than did women in the other conditions (even women who read about that same designer dress but who didn’t imagine the other flirtatious woman beforehand). From this, the authors concluded that sexual competition between females spurs them on to purchase luxury goods, but only items that are capable of accentuating their physical beauty in the eyes of desirable men—things like figure-enhancing dresses, expensive face creams, Botox injections—not just expensive things like smartphones.

If this message of “don’t even try to compete with me, darling” is what women hope to communicate to rivals by glamming it up, it seems to work. After all, in a follow-up experiment, Hudders showed that women perceive other women who spend an exorbitant amount of money on luxury products as more attractive, more ambitious, sexier, and of higher status than their peers. Because men value these traits in a partner, women decked out in luxury gear are viewed by their peers as formidable romantic rivals, making them less likely to be challenged.

These data are rich pickings for anyone savvy enough to realize that predictable algorithms of evolved human psychology underlie consumers’ shopping decisions. So listen up, marketing gurus in the fashion business: advertising campaigns that play off women’s “intrasexual competition” (read, female rivalry and jealousy) push all the right buttons in female cognition. With all the theatrics regularly trotted out for New York Fashion Week, a catfight on the catwalk could go a long way.

*A much earlier version of this piece was originally published at Playboy.com.

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Masturbation. What is it good for? For human males, at least, the most compelling argument—put forward by British evolutionary biologists Robin Baker and Mark Bellis in 1993—is that it expels old, rapidly deteriorating sperm cells in favour of fresh, healthier ones.

It’s classic sperm competition theory, a concept Baker unpacked a few years later in his book Sperm Wars. Fresher sperm, the evidence suggests, are simply better swimmers than their arthritic, geriatric counterparts, and therefore better able to reach a secure position in the reproductive tract. Once those vigorous flagellating gametes land there, it’s a win-win-win, adaptively speaking. For men in monogamous relationships, more recently produced spermatozoa are more fertile than those that have grown stale. For men having sex with women who recently had sex with another male—or multiple males—it’s sending in one’s best talent to square off with the competition. Finally, younger sperm live longer in the female tract, so any enhanced fertility and competitiveness advantages will also last longer. Not to be gross (oh, who am I kidding, I love being gross), but in one clever study, the contents of women’s “flowback,” which is just what it sounds like, were analysed after intercourse with their partners. The longer it had been since he’d last ejaculated, the more sperm in her flowback, showing that women’s bodies favourably retain fresh sperm.

Anyway, back to masturbation. And now that I’ve finished that, back to the article. (The French, by the way, have a rich vocabulary for the act; my personal favourite is “marrying the wrist widow.”) So, considering that the shelf-life of spermatozoa is five to seven days, and given that human males produce a whopping eighty-five million sperm cells per day, per testicle, that’s a lot of low-grade elderly sperm to be toting around. Masturbation therefore becomes a sort of adaptive flushing—out with the old, in with the new. Quality over quantity.

The numbers line up, too. In the original Baker and Bellis article, male university students reported masturbating to ejaculation about once every three days, a frequency that has never really wavered, even in the porn-saturated present. It’s worth remembering also that we’ve always had virtual porn theatres in our heads. One of my favourite early sex researchers, the Austrian psychologist Wilhelm Stekel, described masturbation fantasies as a kind of trance or altered state of consciousness, “a sort of intoxication or ecstasy, during which the current moment disappears, and the forbidden fantasy alone reigns supreme.”

Much like how AI is now encroaching (dangerously, I believe) on human creativity and critical thinking, porn has likely atrophied our erotic imaginations. This is definitely true for males, whose sexual arousal, compared to that of females, is so strongly linked to visual cues. I’m sure there are data on this somewhere, but I would not be surprised if the majority of the modern male population masturbates only to porn.

Spilling seed through masturbation, however, is as old as time. Or at least, human time. Non-human primate hands are just as capable as our own in this arena, but surprisingly, evidence of “deliberate” masturbation to ejaculation in monkeys and apes in the wild is scarce, at best. Over an observation period totalling more than 8,500 hours, one primatologist who was following a troop of colobus monkeys observed only five incidents of males masturbating to the point of ejaculation. And even then, it wasn’t that the monkeys were pleasuring themselves alone in the treetops. These rare incidents occurred only when nearby sexually receptive females were exhibiting loud courtship displays and copulations with other males.

At the risk of being overly speculative, I’d wager that so much masturbation in our species co-evolved with an advanced cognitive capacity to mentally represent (i.e., picture) scenarios divorced from our immediate surroundings. This could be true for both sexes. But among our male ancestors, especially, this unique ability to simulate intercourse mentally would have helped—not solve the problem, clearly, but helped—alleviate sexual conflict among in-group members, fostering social coalitions that were central to our species’ mysteriously rapid rise and proliferation across the planet. Sure, you might fancy Urg’s hot wife Ugga, but if you act on those libidinous impulses, you can forget about Urg helping you build that shelter tomorrow, or any other day. However, having sex with Ugga in your head, well, that’s two birds with one stone. Think of the “spank bank” as underappreciated driver of our species’ success.

Porn has arguably rendered the spank bank obsolete. What that means, only time will tell. It is interesting, though, how a growing number of young males, especially, see masturbation as a “scourge of the human race … destructive of that perhaps most important thing in the world, the potency of good heredity … causing offspring with persistent infantilism or overripeness.” Actually, my mistake, those were the words of G. Stanley Hall in 1904, the father of adolescent psychology, who had a major thorn in his side when it came to teenage masturbators.

Hall’s views on fapping were merciful compared to those of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, who, back in the 1880s, recommended that serial—sorry—offenders be circumcised without an anaesthetic, because the pain and soreness would further discourage the act. For parents who hesitated to lop off their child’s foreskin, he suggested stretching it as tightly as possible over the glans and suturing it shut with a needle and wire. He apparently thought this was more humane than the alternative. Not only did such boys go blind, insane, or have deformed or mentally impaired offspring, Kellogg explained in his wildly popular Plain Facts for Old and Young, “such a victim [of masturbation] literally dies by his own hand.”

It’s not quite that strident, but questionable messaging appears in different packaging these days, with names like NoFap and No Nut November (followed by the more carnally festive Destroy Dick December). They are a response to problematic porn use—and there is no doubt that is a real problem for many males—but often involve restrictions against masturbation entirely. There are limitless online testimonials, podcast pseudoscience, and bro-culture anecdotes, but the salubrious virtues of “holding back” have yielded little in the way of actual clinical evidence, and in fact plenty of counterevidence. One recent study published earlier this year in the journal Psychology & Sexuality featured a content analysis of the top 100 posts to a “semen retention” Reddit subforum. The authors define semen retention as “the act of preventing or avoiding ejaculation by refraining from any sexual activity altogether, ceasing sexual activity upon reaching the point of ejaculation, or achieving orgasm without ejaculation” (I still have no idea how that last one works in someone with a functioning prostate, by the way). The r/Semenretention subreddit is a community of likeminded no-cummers dedicated to this practice.”

The researchers—a Canadian team led by sexual health professor Caroline Pukall from Queen’s University—identified recurring themes in these subreddit posts. A common topic was the conceptualization of semen as a sort of mystical or vital life force, one whose depletion diminishes masculinity, keeps men weak and subordinated, drains their moral fibre and resolve, and has cascading negative effects on everything from career performance, to health, to relationships. In fact, the investigators suggest that such growing anxieties in Western males about the loss of semen closely resemble what has, until now, been treated as a psychiatric South-Asian “culture-bound syndrome” known as Dhãt syndrome. That disorder manifests in young males from rural backgrounds in India and Pakistan with limited education, who become anxious and hypochondriacal about losing Dhãtus (considered a spiritually powerful bodily fluid in the Vedic tradition of Hinduism, concentrated in semen).

Actually, there’s stronger evidence that semen retention affects the wellbeing of women who are inseminated than men whose bodies reabsorb it. Only about 3 percent of the average human ejaculate consists of sperm cells. The rest is seminal plasma. Semen is highly chemically complex, containing over 50 different functional compounds like hormones, neurotransmitters, and endorphins. Most surprisingly, it acts as a natural cocktail of anti-anxiety and mood-boosting chemicals—when you give it to others.

Perhaps the real threat to our species isn’t the loss of a mystical life force but forgetting that having sex with Ugga in your head was probably what helped us conquer the globe in the first place.

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There was once a modern art installation inspired by my book Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? Something about a plunger and a head in a toilet. You had to be there.

But this recent article on The Incredible Afterlives of Dr. Stevenson over at the Daily Grail may be my very first illustrated review. Some visual highlights below, but be sure to read the full article to see the book’s entire 472-page journey spelled out in pictures.

And while I’m at it, a few other reviews have recently popped up as well, including this very thoughtful one at The Skeptic…

…and this interesting opinion piece at Chronicle of Higher Education.

That last one ended with a prickly — and what I felt was quite cruel — barb about Ian “wasting his life.” That certainly doesn’t reflect my views. It reminds me of one of Ian’s very quotable quotes that didn’t make it into the book, but still stuck with me.

The book was also just given an extensive review at the Times Literary Supplement. “Bering … is strict with his subject throughout … [the cases] are also made entertaining in a junky, televisual way. Bering is an excellent medium … Colourfully depicted … Stevenson is portrayed as scrupulously mathematical … fanatical about data; yet he was also consumed by his pursuit of the unprovable.” I’m told ‘junky’ is being used favourably here, more like ‘bingeable’ than a trash heap. I hope that’s true!

The book was, as Richard Wiseman aptly put it in The Psychologist, a genuine labour of love. You don’t have to believe in the afterlife to appreciate Ian’s remarkably colourful life story and his still-unacknowledged role in the history of science. And you don’t have to be a credulous consumer of pseudoscience and woo-woo tales, either. It is a middle ground. All Ian ever asked for was for us to appreciate the surprising complexity of the issues, to evaluate the evidence he spent decades meticulously gathering, and to have an empirically informed opinion on the “survival question.”

Belief is irrelevant; it’s the evidence that matters. And it’s okay to grapple with the inconclusive evidence that Ian left us with. I spent three years writing the book, and I’m still not a believer. But I am more openminded. Nobody wants their brains falling out. But an open mind, Ian liked to remind people, is not an empty mind.

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Hate to break it to you, but you may not be as in control of your own emotions, thoughts, and even behaviors as you’d like to believe. I’m referring not so much to that airy philosophical notion of ‘free will’—although this has implications for such discussions—but rather the biological concreteness of chemosignals. These are chemical compounds emitted by human bodies that not only transmit social information, but also subtly manipulate our brains and get us to do nature’s bidding. It’s not a subject without controversy, but for current purposes, think of them as undetectable little puppet masters reaching up through your nostrils to finger your vulnerable cortex, convincingly altering your perception of reality and prompting you to act in ways that promote your genetic replication.

One of the more extensively studied chemosignals is called androstadienone, or “AND” for short. Although this androgen derivative is produced by men and women—present, for instance, in the underarm and groin sweat of both sexes—its concentration is higher in men.

It is also most abundant in semen, and for this reason is thought to play an adaptive role in social contexts specific to sex and reproduction.

Many studies have indeed already found that women’s exposure to AND under controlled conditions—the double-blinded type where participants take whiffs from test tubes, not knowing which is the real stuff and which is the control—elicits perceptual distortions, emotional shifts, attentional biases, and arousal responses that favor reproduction. Smelling the AND compound appears to make women hornier in general. They also judge the faces of male strangers to be more attractive (or at least, less repugnant), especially those faces with more masculine features. AND boosts women’s mood and makes them better at perceiving (even overperceiving) men’s—but not women’s—happy and relaxed faces. According to a group of Chinese investigators led by psychologist Yue Wu of Southwest University, these effects of AND may serve to “facilitate [women’s] interactions with the opposite sex.”

Now, before any of you ladies go bottling up men’s groin sweat—or worse—for use as an aphrodisiac, be aware that AND may not be all sunshine and rainbows in the dating world. In fact, a new study by Wu and colleagues published in Archives of Sexual Behavior has found compelling evidence that AND enhances women’s innate tendency for “intrasexual competition.” Basically, those exposed to this odorless chemosignal suddenly get cattier.

It’s all very Darwinian. Whereas men tend to compete with one another for mating access to the opposite sex through physical prowess and overt fighting, women’s preferred methods of aggression are more “indirect” and, arguably, Machiavellian. Damaging the reputations of other females through negative gossip is one such tactic; previous studies have demonstrated that women are most likely to deploy this strategy when they perceive other women as being romantic threats. Think Regina George, queen bee of Mean Girls’ “The Plastics,” and her ruthless takedown of other girls through vicious rumors and gossip to defend her territory—including her ex-boyfriend, whom she still considers hers. Such indirect aggression has functional utility, evolutionarily speaking. When men are asked to rate images of female strangers whom they’ve just read nasty gossip about, they judge them as being less attractive.

In fact, it’s not just actively spreading mean-spirited information about perceived female interlopers. Some theorists have speculated that women may also be more likely to withhold positive information about their rivals. Sure, Julie has been around the block, as they say, and is rumored to have chlamydia, but she’s also a Fulbright Scholar and once heroically saved a baby from a burning building. Only, someone like Regina George isn’t likely to mention those more flattering details about Julie, even if she knows them to be true.

Now back to those sneaky little chemosignals: does being exposed to AND enhance women’s innate tendencies for intrasexual competition? It might, figured Wu and colleagues, and there’s only one way to find out. Well, probably many ways, methodologically speaking. But the study design they settled on went like this.

First, a group of 52 young Chinese women aged between 18 and 25 agreed to serve as guinea pigs and were tested individually. On two consecutive days, each woman was instructed to inhale from one of two vials (earlier pretests established that the odors were impossible to discern from one another). One vial contained AND, and the other was a placebo. The order of presentation was randomized, and the research assistants administering the task (all females too), as well as the participants themselves, had no idea what the true purpose of the study was. Instead, they were told it was about “exploring the effects of a common compound present within a clove on first impressions and social interactions.”

There were strict vetting rules: no wearing perfume or makeup in the lab, no smoking or drinking the day of the experiment, no current use of hormonal contraceptives. Also, to standardize the procedure, all participants were tested during the fertile phase of their menstrual cycles. This is when, theoretically, the young women would be most receptive to male suitors and therefore the most vigilant toward the threat of romantic rivals interfering with their mating prospects.

After duly sniffing—again, either the vial containing AND or the placebo—participants sat down at a computer screen and read the following scenario:

You are at a college community activity when you meet a handsome man (A). You participated in the last community activity and have spoken to him several times. You find out that this handsome guy is single, just like you, and you seem to have a lot of chemistry. He spends some time talking to you; you two seem to be hitting it off. However, you later notice that he also talked to another woman (B), a new member of the community. They seem to enjoy each other’s company. Unfortunately, you know that B is also single, and you are not sure whether A is more interested in you or her.

I don’t know if naming the other woman “B” was a Freudian slip, but it does set the stage. The investigators showed the participants a random photo of one of ten young Chinese models and told them to imagine that the woman in the photo was B herself. They were asked about their first impression of her. How flirtatious was B? How friendly? How trustworthy? Next, they were given nine pieces of information about this B: three negative items (“She sleeps around a lot,” “She cheated on her last boyfriend,” “She has an STD [sexually transmitted disease]”); four positive items (“Her IQ classifies her as a genius,” “She donates to charity,” “She speaks four languages,” “She has traveled all over the world”); and two neutral items (“She loves watching TV shows,” “She has a lot of courses this semester”). For each item—juicy, impressive, or bland—participants were asked how likely they were to share that information, again while looking at a photo of one of the ten models said to be B.

“It was hypothesized,” the authors explain, “that in the context of intrasexual competition, women’s likelihood of spreading negative information about romantic rivals would increase, whereas their likelihood of spreading positive information would decrease when they were exposed to AND compared to a placebo. We also hypothesized that AND would bias women to perceive romantic rivals as more flirtatious, which signals a [reproductive] threat.”

So, is that what they found?

Yes and no. After smelling the androstadienone, the participants indeed perceived B to be more flirtatious, and they were also more likely to say that they intended to share the negative gossip about her. Exposure to the chemosignal, however, had no effect on their self-reported intent to share B’s good qualities. In fact, irrespective of what they’d just sniffed, women were more likely to say that they would share the neutral and positive items than the negative ones. That may sound encouragingly like “women supporting women,” but Wu and coauthors urge caution. They speculate that even that is part and parcel of female intrasexual competition. Women who only have bad things to say about other women, they point out, aren’t trusted or seen as desirable partners either, and so they must cushion their barbs with idle chatter and praise. The negative gossip is more potent anyway. “Although negative gossip is an effective strategy,” summarize the researchers, “the cost . . . may constrain its usage. The positive gossip may function as a mask for women’s indirect aggression (e.g., masking the [significant] increase of negative gossip under AND exposure).”

Oh, the games we play. Or the ones that play us. Nature, it seems, prefers her puppets to smile while they scheme.

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I tell my students that research ideas can come from anywhere, not just scientific literature. My own “simulation constraint hypothesis,” which contends that afterlife beliefs are cognitively grounded in our basic inability to imagine the absence of consciousness, itself came from a fictional story. This passage from Sartre’s short story “The Wall” (1939), about a resistance fighter in the Spanish Civil War in a jail cell contemplating his execution by firing squad in the morning, helped to inspire an entire line of studies, continuing to this day, on the psychology of afterlife beliefs:

Something’s the matter. I see my corpse; that’s not hard but I’m the one who sees it, with my eyes. I’ve got to think… think that I won’t see anything anymore and the world will go on for the others. We aren’t made to think that.

By the way, I couldn’t squeeze it into the SMH piece, but I still consider The Changeling (1980) to be the most quietly terrifying movie ever made. For those who’ve seen that ominous classic, featuring George C. Scott as a grieving widower in a Victorian mansion being haunted by the spirit of a murdered child, you’ll appreciate the irony in this. While watching it spellbound in our den, with everyone in my family accounted for, the piano played in the next room. It was the cat walking on the keys—something (and this is odd in itself) she’d never done before or would ever do again.

There are some things that a man wants to get done as quickly as possible. Replacing a flat tire. Cleaning the gutters. A colonoscopy.

Having sex is not typically on that list.

A bit of theory first. From an evolutionary perspective, “premature” ejaculation may be something of a misnomer. After all, as long as it doesn’t happen beforehand—or within hand—ejaculating inside of a vagina in 30 seconds or 30 minutes can be equally effective for a male’s reproductive success. In fact, being endowed with such a trigger-happy sperm-shooter (otherwise known as a penis) may, according to some scholars, even have conferred advantages under certain ancestral conditions, such as in the case of surreptitious mating in environments where other males jealously guarded females. One theorist dubbed this the “survival of the fastest” hypothesis and claimed that “the ancestry of Homo sapiens became overpopulated with rapid ejaculators.”

Still, being a one-minute man—or not even—isn’t exactly something to pin on your Tinder profile. Depending on how it’s being measured (a stopwatch at one’s bedside is the gold standard, apparently), up to a quarter of all males can last no longer than 60 seconds after vaginal penetration. That, in fact, is the clinical cutoff for being diagnosed with PE. Consider that the average woman takes considerably longer than that to reach orgasm through penile-vaginal sex, if she does so at all. This mismatch in orgasm latencies between the sexes, as well as the fact that modern contraceptive inventions have made sex no longer just a bestial reproductive act but a recreational activity as well, can be a source of serious frustration, and even distress, for both parties. We’ve all seen those sad scenes of a horny young couple throwing off their clothes and jumping into the sack, only for the disappointed woman to instantly pat her embarrassed, apologetic partner on his back, telling him “there, there, it’s okay.”

If only he had popped in some Wrigley’s, she might have gotten her happy ending, too.

I know that sounds like a rather strange non sequitur. What in the world does chewing gum have to do with ejaculating? More than any of us ever realized, it turns out. Well, most of us. Recently, a team of Turkish urologists led by Hüseyin Koçakgöl from Erzurum Regional Training and Research Hospital saw a possible connection. As urologists who routinely treat patients who struggle with PE, the researchers knew that existing treatments—anesthetic-coated condoms, topical creams and sprays to reduce penile sensitivity, pelvic-floor muscle exercises, counseling, behavioral therapies, even pharmacological interventions such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)—are often less than ideal. It might help the man in the coital equation, but having those numbing agents also affecting the woman’s genitals through prolonged friction is not doing her any favors. SSRIs such as dapoxetine, a drug sometimes prescribed for on-demand use by those with PE, have their own downsides in the form of adverse side effects. Sure, they might stall your sticky euphorias, but they might also prevent them from happening altogether (anorgasmia) or flatten your libido. Then, of course, there are more practical concerns, such as the cost of expensive treatments and the stigma attached to PE, preventing medical help.

From a clinical perspective, one serious challenge, Koçakgöl and his coauthors point out, is that the exact “pathophysiology” underlying PE remains a mystery. Whether the condition is primarily physical (e.g., penile hypersensitivity, neurological misfires), mental (anxiety, overstimulation, lack of experience), or some circuitous epigenetic combination that we may never entirely disentangle, a cure for PE remains elusive. Yet, factoring in the known variables, Koçakgöl and his colleagues came up with an ingeniously simple possible fix. In a study published earlier this year in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, the authors explain that since mastication (i.e., chewing like a cow) is already known to reduce anxiety, increase attention, and stimulate brain regions responsible for serotonin release, “chewing gum therapy” may have surprising benefits for this particular form of intimacy challenge.

Having a good idea is one thing; empirical evidence is quite another. So how did they go about this? Essentially, they instructed a group of PE sufferers to get busy chewing “commercially available, sugar-free, and unflavored inert” gum about twenty minutes before sexual intercourse, similar to how men with ED might pop a Viagra an hour in advance. Only, in this case, participants were told to keep chewing the gum throughout the partnered sexual activity. Here, in their own words, was Koçakgöl and his colleagues’ hypothesis:

Rhythmic mastication not only exerts anxiolytic and attention-enhancing effects, but also activates serotonergic systems in the brainstem (e.g., the raphe nuclei), thereby increasing serotonin levels and activating the descending inhibitory serotonergic pathway . . . Based on these multidimensional physiological effects, we hypothesized that gum chewing applied before and during sexual activity would enhance inhibitory control over the spinal ejaculation generator (SEG), thereby increasing the ejaculatory threshold and prolonging IELT (intravaginal ejaculatory latency time).

See, maybe it’s not so crazy after all. To qualify for the study, men had to meet certain screening requirements. For example, they needed to be under 65 and certified “LPEs” (lifelong premature ejaculators)—from their earliest visit to the vaginal world, they’d been Johnny-come-quicklies. Those men who’d acquired the condition over the years, or those with a medical condition, such as a urinary tract infection, that secondarily affected their seminal business, were excluded. Also, no use of SSRIs or other psychiatric meds. No chronic diseases. No erectile dysfunction.

And, of course, no current dental problems.

I’m beginning to think this was an inside joke among the ad execs at Wrigley’s.

The final sample consisted of 33 men. Their average age was 39 years and, more importantly, their average ejaculation time after penetrating a vagina was just 41 seconds. Not the same vagina, I should probably clarify. That was another screening requirement. To be eligible for the study, men needed to have a female partner with whom they had sex regularly. One has to wonder if watching their husbands and boyfriends snapping bubbles like a 1980s Valley Girl delayed their orgasms as well, but in any event, this simple gum-chewing therapy seemed to work just fine for the men. None reported reduced arousal, trouble getting it up, or decreased sexual satisfaction. “The rhythmic and comfortable nature of chewing,” the researchers state, “is unlikely to impose physical strain or interfere with sexual performance.”

A month into this gum-chewing therapy, the group’s average IELT was 130 seconds. Three months later, it was 147 seconds. Sure, that’s still not exactly a marathon love fest, but it’s a significant improvement, placing them comfortably outside the diagnostic PE criteria. In fact, their timing gains were comparable—if not even more impressive—than a comparison group of men who’d been randomly assigned to a standard frontline treatment for PE, a clinical intervention involving biofeedback-guided pelvic floor muscle training sessions.

Although the authors acknowledge the study’s limitations (it’s only as an afterthought that they mention the women’s unknown sexual satisfaction with “continuous gum chewing during sex”), these findings of the humble chewing gum’s semen-retaining qualities are impressive. Compared to the alternatives—numbing ointments, counseling, drugs, behavioral therapy, pelvic floor exercises, and all the rest—picking up a pack of chewing gum along with your next condom purchase sounds pretty good. Can the answer to this problem of the ages be this simple? Get out there and experiment, you citizen scientists. For 41 seconds versus 147, I’m guessing most men are willing to look a little ridiculous with a wad of Bubblicious in their cheek.

This article was originally published in French at my Le Point column 28.06.2026

Back in the aughts, women’s sex toy parties were all the rage. I could only picture in my head small giggling gatherings of blushing ladies in the suburbs. While the attendees fawned over a coffee-table spread of the latest vibrators, lubes, and feather ticklers, some tipsy, bespectacled mom would be holding a plastic anatomical model of the female reproductive system in one hand and a mimosa in the other, urging the more uptight women to liberate their inner goddesses. Often likened to the previous generation’s Tupperware parties, these were harmlessly naughty, “sex-positive” gossip venues for normal middle-class housewives.

It’s curious, is it not, that such an innocuous thing somehow becomes grotesquely darker when applied to male sexuality. Just imagine a group of men huddled over their neighbor’s pool table, bonding over this season’s fleshlights, cock rings, and anal vibrators while sharing tips about their foreskins and mind-blowing ejaculations.

Unless I missed it, men’s sex toy parties never had their cultural moment. But even at trade shows, company reps say that products for men (such as penile masturbators, or “strokers”) are often required to be kept out of sight, whereas vibrators or other products for women are prominently displayed. Men’s use of sexual technology—or sextech—is seen as being less acceptable, or at least is more stigmatized, than women’s use of such erotic products.

That’s a head-scratcher, point out the psychologist Madison Williams and her colleagues in a recent study in The Journal of Sex Research. After all, in most other areas—sex before marriage, relationship age disparities, number of sex partners, having orgies or threesomes—it’s women who are stigmatized or judged more harshly. Yet in the case of sextech, men’s use of such products seems clearly to inspire more visceral aversion than does women’s. Why?

Williams and her team had a hunch. They suspected that the emotion of disgust is probably driving this creepiness differential. It’s not that people aren’t grossed out at all by women using dildos, vibrators, or other feminine whatnots. In fact, previous research indicated that, regardless of the user’s sex, people tend to view those who use sextech as low-grade social lepers—and this ostracism increases as the product becomes more “human-like,” such as hyper-realistic sex dolls and robots. (That earlier study wasn’t flawless, however. One of the items in the survey was “Would other people in your community avoid a person using a(n) [insert technology here].” Like, using it right now? Of course. Who’d want to disturb them?)

Indulging in sextech, suggest Williams and her co-investigators, hits the unholy trifecta of disgust—pathogen disgust, moral disgust, and sexual disgust—right on the D-spot. “Sextech use has the potential to elicit all three domains, positioning it as a particularly salient area for study,” write the authors. “For instance, concerns about the cleanliness of sextech may evoke pathogen disgust, the perception that its use violates social norms may elicit moral disgust, and its inherently sexual nature may trigger sexual disgust.” And when you throw into this mix detached, lifelike silicone body parts with monstrous perturbations—do yourself a favor and do not, I repeat, do not, Google “foot fleshlights”—that can take it to a new level.

In any event, Williams and her co-investigators went deeper than ever before into these meaty issues. A sample of 371 adults—men and women between the ages of 18 and 81—were given scenarios depicting sextech use and, for each one, they were asked “how disgusting” (1=not at all disgusting to 7=extremely disgusting) they found it to be. There were six scenarios:

· A man using a sex toy (e.g., fleshlight)

· A woman using a sex toy (e.g., vibrator)

· A man conversing with an erotic chatbot

· A woman conversing with an erotic chatbot

· A man having sex with a robot

· A woman having sex with a robot

The results were telling, and mostly unambiguous. First, across the board, male users of sextech were judged more harshly (i.e., seen as being more disgusting) than were female users of sextech. “This is the first study to empirically demonstrate that people perceive men who use sextech more negatively than they do women,” summarize the authors, “highlighting a striking double standard.” This was true regardless of the type of sextech being, er, deployed and was especially pronounced in women’s disgust ratings of men’s sextech use. Female participants saw men who used such devices to be grosser than women who did so.

However, the more “humanlike” the sextech—in terms of appearance, movement, behavior, artificial intelligence, and so on—the more these sex differences dissipated. The use of humanlike sextech (especially sex robots) was seen as being more disgusting—for men and women—than more traditional sex toys.

Considering the large swaths of people who are apparently using such objects either for masturbation or during partnered sex—roughly half of the Western human population, according to self-reports—these findings of an anti-male, sexual double standard are unsettling, say the authors. After all, they note, a “prejudice that penalizes men more strongly for using sextech—especially sex toys—than it does women … is unfortunate in light of the many [established benefits], including presenting new avenues for sexual experience among those with disabilities, enhancing sexual well-being, improving intimacy between partners, addressing sexual dysfunction, and providing heightened arousal and pleasure.” While women are often lauded for embracing their erotic nature through such toys, men are shamed.

Also, given that the sex industry is always at the vanguard of technological advancement, it would be foolish to think that this ostensibly disgusting issue of humanlike sex—with robots, avatars, or whatever else our species’ libidinous imaginations are likely to conjure—will be going away anytime soon. “In spite of mainstream moral panic or concerns that technology may interrupt or replace human intimacy,” Williams and her coauthors point out, “little research has examined the actual implications of sextech use, especially in its more advanced forms.” With the extraordinary pace of technological development, we had better hold onto our virtual knickers. Even in our wettest dreams, I’m guessing we haven’t seen anything yet.

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I suppose both are better than being wedged between strangers—usually at least one of them snoring away like a stertorous boar on tranquilizers—but having to choose between the aisle seat and the window seat on a long-haul flight from New Zealand is like being asked whether you’d prefer to have your left incisor removed, or the toenail of your pinkie toe. Both are unpleasant propositions. Choose the window seat, and at least a few times during the journey, you’ll be forced to rudely awaken one of those peacefully slumbering boars in order to use the toilet. Choose the aisle seat, and prepare to have your own heady dreams disrupted repeatedly by the impatient bowels and bladders of your seatmates.

And so it was for me the other day on a thirteen-hour excursion to Los Angeles, with a kind but apparently bursting couple communicating their frequent lavatory needs through the man’s brusque tap tap tap on my shoulder. I didn’t need to see his apologetic smile to discern his intent; I simply knew—before I even shook off the fog of an altitudinous sleep—exactly what his index finger on my shoulder meant. Now, if he had caressed my knee, that would have held a different meaning altogether. But I’ll save that for another column.

It may seem obvious, but in fact it’s mysterious: Where and how, exactly, have we human beings learned the many covert, unspoken meanings of such “social touches”? The term is just what it sounds like. Like that middle-aged pisseur tapping my shoulder to signal his need to void the endless Diet Cokes he’d imbibed during the flight, social touch can be everything from a mother absently raking her child’s hair as he watches television, to the gentle squeeze hidden in a handshake, to pinching someone’s derriere. Be prepared for the consequences of that last one. “Social touch can be defined as intentional physical contact between two individuals that can give rise to changes in the disposition and subjective state of one or both individuals and can ultimately influence their behavior,” explain the psychologist Juulia Suvilehto and her colleagues in an article published in Nature Reviews Psychology.

Although the importance of interpersonal touch in human lives has been the subject of research for many years and from many interdisciplinary angles—from its role in attachment, to child development, to healthy brain development, and hormone production, to name a few—it is only recently that investigators have asked whether there may be an innate lexicon of social touch. In other words, do those being touched simply know what the toucher is trying to convey to them through tapping, stroking, tugging, rubbing, squeezing, slapping, picking, poking, patting, and all the other expressions from the handsy human repertoire? Or, alternatively, is our ability to extrapolate meaning from such manual messages due to social learning, perhaps even being unique to the idiosyncratic dynamics of particular relationships?

Such questions were at the center of some intriguing experiments conducted by a team of investigators led by sensory neuroscientist Sarah McIntyre of Linköping University in Sweden. In an initial study, pairs of adult participants who had a preexisting relationship—married couples, parents and grown children, friends, neighbors, and so on—were asked to guess what the other was trying to tell them through touch alone. “We required only that participants were sufficiently acquainted to be comfortable touching each other,” clarified the authors. One member of the dyad (the receiver) was situated behind a curtain, with just their arm extended onto the other side. Meanwhile, the other party (the sender) was shown one of six randomized words (attention, love, happiness, sadness, calming, gratitude) and instructed to communicate that message to the receiver by touching their arm. Just touch them in whatever way comes most naturally to you, they were told. Also, silence, please: you must be completely quiet—no verbal emissions such as giggles or sighs allowed during the sessions.

Each word came with instructions. For gratitude, for instance, senders were told: “Your partner has just helped you solve a problem. Try to communicate GRATITUDE through touch.” For love: “Think of all the wonderful qualities that your partner has and how they enrich your life. Try to express LOVE through touch.” The receiver’s job was to choose from the six words whichever sentiment they felt a given touch was meant to convey. They were also given an “other” option if they thought the intended message wasn’t among the choices.

Rather astonishingly, receivers were “well above chance rate” when it came to interpreting what the sender was trying to communicate. When the roles were swapped, with the senders now acting as receivers, the latter’s performance increased further still. (A second study replicated these findings, this time while the receiver was lying in an MRI scanner.)

These initial findings were intriguing, reasoned the authors, but still, because they’d occurred within the context of a close relationship, it remained unclear if they reflected a genuine universal grammar of touch that could be understood even between strangers.

A video camera had been closely trained on the receivers’ extended arms during all of the sessions, enabling the researchers to try to decode an exact language of social touch, and even to quantify those touch features using 3D hand tracking. For each cued word, they studied the precise locality at which the touch occurred (e.g., hand, wrist, lower forearm, upper forearm), the intensity of the touch (e.g., light, moderate, strong), and the touch type (e.g., stroking, lifting, pulling, and so on). “We found that successful strategies for touch communication in a close relationship shared common features across senders,” wrote the authors:

If a research assistant can be trained on this exact language of touch, wondered McIntyre and her colleagues, could they use such scripted tactile gestures to “talk” clearly to complete strangers via touch? After all, those earlier studies involved people in close relationships. Perhaps their previous experience in being touchy-feely with each other, or general familiarity with one another’s presence, explained how they passed that message test.

Not only were these skilled touch communicators able to successfully convey the intended messages to total strangers using the same arm-only technique as before, but the receivers’ scores were even better than they were when the two people knew each other.

Together, these findings are suggestive of an intuitive language of social touch. It remains to be seen, the authors are careful to point out, whether such a language is truly ubiquitous. Would indigenous peoples from Papua New Guinea or East Africa have performed the same as the Swedish participants in this study, or are such haptics somehow being shaped culturally? Nevertheless, the findings are a fascinating display of our species’ preternatural sense of social touch, one that is, arguably, even more advanced than spoken language.

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This article was originally published in French at my Le Point column 15.06.2026

Years ago, psychologists Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler showed that when people are told that free will is an illusion, they’re more likely to lie, cheat, and steal. For example, after reading a passage from Francis Crick’s The Astonishing Hypothesis, in which the eminent author described “you” as “nothing but a pack of neurons” suffering the erroneous belief that you have any actual control over your decisions, participants were more likely to cheat on a math test than were those who read a different passage.

Another study—this one by social psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues—found that people exposed to similar deterministic statements (e.g., “Like everything else in the universe, all human actions follow from prior events and ultimately can be understood in terms of the movement of molecules.”) acted more aggressively and selfishly compared to those who saw statements endorsing free will (e.g., “I demonstrate my free will every day when I make decisions.”) or neutral statements (e.g., “Oceans cover 71 percent of the earth’s surface.”).

Both sets of researchers came to a startling conclusion. “If exposure to deterministic messages increases the likelihood of unethical actions,” wrote Vohs and Schooler, “then identifying approaches for insulating the public against this danger becomes imperative.” Insulating the public against this danger is the key phrase here, as it connotes that, sorry, you people can’t handle the hard scientific truth. Baumeister and his coauthors, meanwhile, put it in slightly different terms, but they land similarly. “Some philosophical analyses may conclude that a fatalistic determinism is compatible with highly ethical behavior,” they wrote, “but the present results suggest that many laypersons do not yet appreciate that possibility.”

As someone who writes often—some say gratuitously—about unpalatable aspects of human nature, and who endeavors to explain such things in reductionistic, evolutionary terms, this gave me pause. In fact, when I first covered those free-will-as-illusion studies back in 2010 at Scientific American, I alluded to their unsettling implications for our judgments of human sexuality, in particular. I offered the following hypothetical example:

A middle-aged man hires a prostitute, knowingly exposing his wife to a sexually transmitted infection and exploiting a young drug addict for his own pleasure. Should we hold him accountable? Most people, I’d wager, wouldn’t hesitate to say yes.

But what if you thought about it in the following slightly different, scientific terms? The man’s decision to have sex with this woman was in accordance with his physiology at that time, which had arisen as a consequence of his unique developmental experiences, which occurred within a particular cultural environment in interaction with a particular genotype, which he inherited from his particular parents, who inherited genetic variants of similar traits from their own particular parents, ad infinitum. Even his ability to inhibit or “override” these forces, or to understand his own behavior, is itself the product of these forces! What’s more, this man’s brain acted without first consulting his self-consciousness; rather, his neurocognitive system enacted evolved behavioral algorithms that responded, either normally or in error, in ways that had favored genetic success in the ancestral past.

Given the combination of these deterministic factors, could the man have responded any other way? Attributing personal responsibility to this sap becomes merely a social convention that reflects only a naive understanding of the causes of his behaviors. Like us judging him, this man’s self merely plays the role of spectator in his body’s sexual affairs. There is only the embodiment of a man who is helpless to act in any way that is contrary to his particular nature, which is a derivative of a more general nature. The self is only a deluded creature that thinks it is participating in a moral game when in fact it is just an emotionally invested audience member.

In other words, how can we fault this “pack of neurons” for acting as his nature dictates, even if our own nature would have steered us otherwise? What’s more, shouldn’t we be more sympathetic to our own moral shortcomings? After all, we can’t help who we are either.

Right?

Of course, that was all just a thought exercise. I don’t believe—even if there were no such thing as free will in any strictly materialistic, recondite sense—that people shouldn’t be held accountable for their actions. But there is also the very real possibility that such causal biological explanations have the power to shift perspectives about blame and autonomy in significant ways when it comes to sex. And now, sixteen years later, a new study by the British psychologists Sofia Persson and Thomas Hostler, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, has apparently found just that. The investigators asked, essentially, whether exposure to an evolutionary psychology explanation of male sexual aggression makes people more sympathetic to rapists and less sympathetic to their female victims.

This longstanding fear, about the social dangers inherent to evolutionary psychology, particularly when it comes to “normalizing” misogyny and so-called rape culture due to its central message of immutable sex differences, has been around for decades. (Many see the 2000 publication of the book A Natural History of Rape by biologist Randy Thornhill and anthropologist Craig Palmer as a lightning-rod moment in these heated debates.) But Persson and Hostler’s study is, as far as I’m aware, among the first experiments to interrogate what has otherwise been just a feminist talking point. It’s hard not to detect the authors’ own intellectual aversion to evolutionary psychology, but what I do find commendable is their teasing apart the scientific veracity of evolutionary psychology from its psychological effects on audiences. This is a critical distinction: not if it is true, but if it is dangerous. And they’re also very much aware of the counterarguments that stress exactly the opposite, writing:

Although evolutionary psychologists argue that findings can be used to prevent sexual violence (for example, by identifying those at risk of being victims), critics argue that evolutionary psychology’s negative consequences for gender equality outweigh any potential value from findings in this area (i.e., regardless of whether the results can be considered scientifically valid or not), and that the significance of evolutionary psychology does not lie in whether the theories themselves are correct, but rather in its contribution to a wider meta-narrative on female-male differences, as reflected in attitudes of laypeople more generally.

The study design itself was rather involved, as the British say, but here are the highlights. Persson and Hostler first showed all of their participants (over 600 people) a set of factual, data-driven infographics. The graphs used UK crime statistics to visually depict how men are far more likely to be perpetrators, and women more likely to be victims, of sexual violence.

After seeing this obvious disparity, participants were randomly assigned to watch one of three short videos (~7 min), basically edited clips from YouTube. Two of the videos were titled “Why is this behavior mostly done by men towards women?” and featured either a social explanation or an evolutionary explanation. A third group of participants—the controls—viewed an unrelated video about the benefits of being outdoors in nature. (The full original videos from YouTube are below, but click here to watch the trimmed versions actually shown to participants in the study.)

For the social explanation condition, the researchers used a TED Talk by Jackson Katz, who argues that violence against women is primarily a men’s issue: male leaders need to be willing to stand up against sexism and to challenge socially ingrained gender norms. It’s a toxic, permissive male culture that is to blame. Biological factors? What are those? Male sexual aggression, he surmises, is a learned social response.

By contrast, the video used for the evolutionary explanation condition featured evolutionary psychologist David Buss, who espouses the view that sexual violence against women can only be understood through the lens of biology. Namely, men’s and women’s evolved mating strategies are often in conflict, with men seeking quantity and women more selective about their reproductive partners. Like Katz skipping over biology entirely, Buss glosses over the role of social influences.

Finally, the control video—about the healing properties of nature on the brain—was by cognitive neuroscientist David Strayer. There was no talk of sexual aggression in that one.

The experimentalist in me must pause to quibble over the obvious confound of having different people giving different messages (ideally, the speaker would be held constant and only the message changes), but the authors note that they were all white, middle-aged men. Hmm. Anyway, participants were then asked to read the following description of a sexual assault:

The researchers explain that they wanted to portray an event that met the legal definition of rape (unconscious people cannot give their consent), yet also contained features known to make such incidents seem ambiguous to outsiders (she’d previously shown interest, there was a lack of physical restraint, both had consumed alcohol). Participants were asked, in a series of Likert-type questions, how much Nick was at fault, and how much Joanne herself was to blame. Thus, there were two separate scores: perpetrator culpability and victim culpability.

There were no differences across the three video groups when it came to people’s views of Nick’s culpability. However, the participants who’d just watched Buss speaking about evolutionary psychology judged Joanne to be significantly more responsible for her rape than did those who’d watched Katz speaking about the social causes of male sexual aggression. (Further analyses revealed that the effect was mediated by belief in gender essentialism; basically, seeing the evolutionary explanation video increased people’s beliefs in innate and immutable sex differences, and this in turn drove people to see Joanne as more accountable.)

Similar to those free-will-as-illusion studies turning people into all-around assholes, Persson and Hostler’s study is certainly uncomfortable. I, for one, don’t want anyone using my articles or books to justify something truly heinous. Still, should we shy away from describing and explaining some harsh scientific reality because the underlying message leads laypeople to minimize or normalize serious moral transgressions? “Based on our data,” they write, “we can conclude that by describing the causes of male aggression as anchored in evolution, evolutionary psychology may prescribe an increased tendency to hold victims of rape more culpable, at least when compared to social explanations for male aggression.”

Well, maybe. But now what? I read recently that parents who believe in reincarnation are more accepting of their gender-nonconforming children, which is helpful for these families. But that doesn’t make reincarnation true. And as we’ve seen, telling people that they have free will makes people behave better. But that doesn’t make free will real, either. I’m not saying that social explanations for rape are in the same category as those examples, but the point is, should we really favor communicating one scientific theory over another, even if it does have more positive social effects?

To borrow the authors’ prescription metaphor, science communication, in my opinion, is simply medicine for ignorance. That makes it humane, ipso facto. There may be occasional side effects of this communication, or even outright abuse. But through responsible practice, it can also be done with great clinical utility.

You can listen to the full interview here.

And here is the short writeup from the RNZ website.

For a more in-depth look at the surprisingly complex psychology underlying the human legacy drive, this New Ideas in Psychology article (based on my former student Brett Waggoner’s PhD on the topic) offers a comprehensive summary of the issues.

Otago Daily Times, November 9, 2019

Deep sense of loss not helped by rainbow bridges

For years, Gulliver and Uma, our rambunctious, bright-eyed border terriers, were the centre of our universe.

Their point of origin was County Down in Northern Ireland, where, the locals claim, Saint Patrick is buried (or at least part of him, possibly an ankle bone or an ossified elbow). At the time, we’d just moved from “the States” to Belfast, where I was teaching at the local university. I managed to convince my less enthusiastic partner, Juan, that “Lisbane Lad” and “Cloughey Lass,” Gulliver and Uma’s official registered kennel club names, were just what we needed.

I’d never had terriers before, only retrievers and spaniels of mottled ilk. All were lovely.

But soon I became a breed loyalist, won over by the border’s uncanny human-like nature and its up-for-anything sense of adventure. My memory of the past 12 years, hazy in parts but with blistering preciseness in others, is brimming over with fragments of our exploits.

In my mind’s eye, I see cheeky little Gulliver bouncing along the dingy footpaths of Belfast, peeling chewing gum from the pavement stealthily as he goes; Uma romping through the tall weeds at my father’s farm in Ohio as the horses sigh their discontent; a middle-aged Gulliver seated imperially, windblown, on a big rock, absorbing the salty sea air; the two of them in perfect unison on a trail in the winter woods in upstate New York, frozen white snow melded to their brown muzzles; Uma rolling in the warm sand of a desolate New Zealand beach.

And tennis balls. To say that they “liked” chasing tennis balls would be like saying that a vampire “likes” blood or that an addict “likes” heroin. They needed tennis balls. Uma, especially, was an eager advocate of the furry yellow hunt.

True to Gulliver’s name, their journeys took them to three continents. They were victims, and content ones, of my wayward academic career. Together with our cat, Tommy, the five of us were a real family unit. If you know the subject of my last book [A Very Human Ending], it’s not a stretch to say that they saved my life. (At my lowest, Juan would sometimes warn me — I think sardonically but one can never be sure with him — that I’d better not, because the animals would end up in a shelter. And I couldn’t have that.)

When Gulliver died in surgery last February from a gallbladder mucocele, a pernicious and fast-acting disease that turns bile into agglutinated muck and wreaks havoc — and one that, sadly, the breed is genetically predisposed to developing — we were devastated. So was Uma. In fact, looking back, I don’t think she ever really got over losing Gulliver.

She became forlorn and slower in her gait. It aged her.

We welcomed a new border terrier puppy into the home, an inquisitive, playful fellow named Hanno, hoping that he would lift Uma’s spirits. They had their moments, but mostly, “grandma Uma,” as we started calling her, just wanted to be left alone.

Uma died two Sundays ago. Like Gulliver, she had a gallbladder mucocele. I knew the symptoms this time: sudden loss of appetite, vomiting, and an overall flat affect. After confirming the worst with my local vet, I drove Uma to the nearest specialist to perform the surgery.

Listless on a cushion in the passenger side foot well, as a drip IV with pain relief dangled from the closed window, Uma, no longer bright-eyed, stared up at me. I cried the entire five-hour drive from Dunedin to Rangiora, telling her between sobs how much I loved her and still needed her.

Unlike Gulliver, she survived the operation. “It went beautifully,” the surgeon told me. I allowed myself, briefly, the joy of statistically informed hope. But things went downhill overnight, and Uma suffered a fatal blood clot the next morning. “She fought hard,” the vet told me.

As one does these days, I shared my grief on Facebook, including on some border terrier aficionado pages. I don’t know what I was expecting. Perhaps I was hoping, implicitly, that the world would finally take notice of this little old dog, grey and lumpy with lipomas, quarrelsome towards other dogs but endlessly doe-eyed for me and Juan, who for a dozen years had slept every night on the pillow between our heads. “Uma has died!” I wanted to claw with my heart into those insipid online posts. “She was the secret of life. How is the world not unraveling at its very seams?”

In return, I received the predictable condolences for my loss. Most, echoing my despair from their own tragic pet losses, helped to ease the pain, as only such commiserations can.

But then there were the many emblazoned with tacky rainbow bridges, of throwaway comments about Uma now “running free,” of promises that I’d see her again one day. One woman assured me that God was ushering Uma into Heaven now, with Jesus in the guise of another dog offering a paw to greet her.

I appreciate the spirit in which these sentiments are made, and I have no malice for anyone with pure intentions, saccharine or not. Still, they ring hollow, and to an extent they even degrade the complexity of Uma’s existence.

Frankly, they just don’t help, and I wish that people wouldn’t foist such simple-minded memes on us nonbelievers when all we want, really, is for others to briefly recognise that a great burning light, bright and variegated as love itself, has gone out in our lives.

Uma was not a one-dimensional cartoon character, now frolicking in a meadow on the other side of a rainbow.

And God? On an old Judge Judy episode, there was a case in which two women were claiming ownership of a beloved dog. Judge Judy asked the bailiff to take the dog and release it into the courtroom, adjudicating ownership on the basis of which of the women the dog trotted off to.

Let’s just say that if it came down to me and God, and you set Uma free to see who she’d choose, you’d be a fool to put money on the latter. That’s how much she loved me. And that’s why the death of a dog hurts so much: their love for you is a mortal one, yet it’s so powerful that it eclipses anything divine.

I’m haunted by the memory of the last time I saw Uma. Despite her obvious discomfort, she locked eyes with me as I left the room for the vet to prepare her for surgery. Her gaze lingers. The next time I saw her, she was swaddled in a blanket, deceased. My sweet Cloughey Lass. I kissed her small head as I’d done a million times before. Inside of it, an entire cosmos had just disappeared with one cruel stroke.

I suffer no illusions that Gulliver and Uma are anything other than gone now. They are extinct in their individuality, just as I will be one day, and you too. In fact, I think that when it comes to dogs, their sacredness is their fleetingness. So be terribly kind to them, because despite our most irrational beliefs, our earthly relationships with our dogs is the closest that both of us animals will probably ever get to heaven.

Source: https://www.odt.co.nz/opinion/deep-sense-loss-not-helped-rainbow-bridges

Paraphilias change with the times—and with the materials at hand. One of the reasons that completely new forms of sexual deviancy continue to emerge, while others vanish, is the fact that, as society changes, so too do the cultural factors upon which sexual imprinting occurs. In 1975, the scholars Alex Scobie and Tony Taylor argued that a once relatively common type of paraphilia known as agalmatophilia (from the Greek agalma, statue) had by then become so obscure as to be nonexistent in the modern world. By contrast, frequent references to some men’s exclusive sexual interest in stone statues can be found throughout antiquity, especially in the records of Ancient Rome and Greece. “The early civilizations provided an abundance of sculptured human figures with which people could identify,” explain the authors:

[and these] were representational in appearance, coloring and size. The statues were placed on street level rather than high up on pedestals. Hence the statues were life-size, life-like and so conveniently accessible as to enable the populace to form personal relationships with them.

These relationships, according to the work of ancient scholars and playwrights, sometimes included erotic infatuations. Pliny the Elder wrote of a man who fell in love with a statue of the goddess Aphrodite, “hiding by night embraced it [so] that a stain betrays his lustful act.” Meanwhile, Athenaeus, a Greek writer who gained prominence in the late 2nd century A.D. during the Roman reign of Marcus Aurelius, offers an especially vivid account about a certain Cleisophus of Selymbria:

... who fell in love with the statue in Parian marble at Samos, locked himself up in the temple, thinking he should be able to have intercourse with it; and since he found that impossible on account of the frigidity and resistance of the stone, he then and there desisted from that desire, and placing before him a small piece of flesh he satisfied his desire with that.

It’s slightly unnerving how there’s no mention of what this “small piece of flesh” consisted of or from whence it came (let’s hope it was simply a euphemism for Cleisphus’s own hand), but you get the idea, which is that agalmatophilia was not uncommon during those times. Intriguingly, Scobie and Taylor uncovered no mention of women attempting intercourse with a statue, with only one such sarcastic reference appearing in a book of jokes. Although a smattering of literary allusions to agalmatophilia can be found in less ancient works, the condition has become more or less unheard of today, and in fact I could find no case studies of this paraphilia in the formal sexology literature dating back to the late 19th century.

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“Tentatively,” the authors conclude, “it could be argued that over a few thousand years mankind has dropped at least one pathological condition, agalmatophilia, from its repertoire of pathologies.” “But it could be,” they go on to say, “that it might merely have changed its form because the burgeoning plastics industry has rendered obsolete the pathological focus on stone statues per se.”

They’re right. The agalmatophiles’ descendents are those today whose desires are reserved for artificial females (or males) in the form of realistic life-size dolls (pediophilia, from the Greek pedio, doll; not to be confused with pedophilia). There should also be little doubt that a virtual explosion in the ranks of the robotophiles is right around the corner. In other words, we may have lost agalmatophilia from the colorful roster of paraphilias, but advances in technology mean that we’ve since gained everything from latex fetishism to mechanophilic arousal by automobiles to the electrophile’s sexual dependence on electric currents.

It’s not just ever-accelerating technology that probably broadens the paraphilic range, though. Unexpected changes to prevailing social conditions may also modify, distort or alter the human form in ways that similarly introduce new possibilities for sexual imprinting during development. In times of war, for example, the likelihood of coming across amputees—particularly male amputees—would be drastically higher than during times of peace. The spike in amputee war heroes is postulated to have led to the overrepresentation of Baby Boomers among the last generation’s apotemnophiles.

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You can listen here: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/latenightlive/jesse-bering-ian-stevenson/106755746

This article was originally published in French at Le Point on 02.05.2026

Once, while in one of those bleary-eyed, zombified states that comes from flying halfway across the planet to attend some long-forgotten academic conference in middle America, I found myself stumbling out of the plane and into the nearest airport restroom. Perhaps there was a subliminal part of my brain that registered something was off—the unusually clean facilities, the pleasant floral notes, the utter absence of urinals—but honestly, it wasn’t until I zipped myself up and exited the stall to find myself face-to-face with a woman, of all things, that I realized the gravity of my faux pas.

This was long before the trans bathroom debates poured gasoline on this issue, but I still wanted desperately to explain I was merely an absentminded gay professor with no sexually deviant intent whatsoever. I figured that would have been even more awkward, so I just apologized profusely for the confusion and beat a hasty retreat.

Anyway, it was that woman’s facial expression that I remember to this day: a mélange of bewilderment, irritation, scorn, and maybe even a bit of fear. (I must say, however, that I also recall being a little surprised by the perfectly unbothered reactions of the other ladies primping themselves at the mirror.)

What do facial expressions reveal about our tacit expectations of adherence to gender norms? Potentially, a lot, according to the psychologist Karen Man Wa Kwan and her colleagues in a study published last year in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. Whereas one might say that they are perfectly okay with a man wearing a dress, or a woman going headfirst into frontline infantry combat, or, I don’t know, some idiot ambling into a ladies’ bathroom at a crowded airport, those verbal “socially desirable” responses may mask deeper emotions at odds with one’s expressed liberal views.

Here is how the authors put it:

People’s appraisals of stigmatized characteristics are governed by two psychological systems—a reflective, controlled system and a reflexive system. For verbal reports, the reflective system is dominant and may produce socially desirable responses. When nonverbal measures are used to gauge participants’ implicit, non-deliberated responses, the reflexive system may be dominant and better reflect the underlying attitude . . . both explicit and implicit measures are predictive of judgments and behaviors.

In other words, a proper implicit measure allows clever researchers to hear the quiet part out loud.

To tease apart surface-level attitudes toward gender-nonconformity from a more visceral emotional response, Kwan and her team conducted the first-ever study on young children’s facial reactions to violations of gender norms. Why kids? Well, for several reasons, explain the authors. First, it’s to help gender-nonconforming children. They experience higher rates of ostracism and bullying, leading to poorer mental health outcomes. This is especially true for boys with traditionally feminine traits. By carefully discerning the affective components behind their discrimination, clinicians are in a better position to create interventions that help gender-conforming kids accept their gender-nonconforming peers. If you don’t know what specific raw emotions are behind such unfriendly attitudes, you can’t begin to address them.

Also, have you ever met a kindergartner with a poker face? Compared with adults, kids aren’t that great at hiding their true feelings. “There is a more limited possibility for children to manipulate or control their facial expressions,” the authors note. Thus, by studying their facial reactions to another child violating gender norms, the scientists could get a relatively unadulterated look at how kids really feel about “girlish boys” and “boyish girls.”

By the age of three, most children have a firm understanding of their own gender identity. Gender identity is also a social identity. And interestingly, the more gender-conforming a child is—who they’re friends with, how they like to play, how they prefer to dress, and so on—the more negative their view of other children who stray from gender norms. This, reason the authors, may constitute a sort of outgroup bias against the latter, especially if such unacceptance is bolstered by intolerant parents and peers. “It is [also] possible,” they write, “that the violation of gender norms threatens children’s own gender identity, which contributes to less positive appraisals of gender-nonconforming peers.”

Prior studies focused only on children’s reflective systems, relying entirely on verbal responses to questions regarding gender-nonconforming peers. For instance, children in such studies would be presented with, say, stories of a boy who plays with dolls, or a girl who prefers to dress like her dad rather than her mom, and are then asked how much they would want to be that child’s friend, or whether the child was doing something wrong by acting that way, and so on. But nowadays, in woke-ish societies where rigid gender stereotypes are seen as backward or ignorant, even young children may learn that the “appropriate” (i.e., socially desirable) response to such questions is to embrace or even celebrate gender diversity.

Is that how children actually feel about the issue, however?

The researchers came up with a straightforward way to address this more reflexive question. Over 600 children aged between four and nine years—boys and girls—sat down in front of a computer screen to watch a slide show. Half of the participants were Canadian, and the other half from Hong Kong. With a video camera trained on their faces, each kid saw four illustrated vignettes in a random order. The vignettes featured a hypothetical child (gender-conforming boy; gender-nonconforming boy; gender-conforming girl; gender-nonconforming girl) along with an audio description made by a female narrator speaking in a neutral tone.

Each vignette included five illustrations . . . the first illustration lasted for 15 s and introduced the target’s name and grade (same grade as the participant). Then, another four illustrations with accompanying audio were presented for 15 s each (1 min total), with the four images presenting the target’s gendered preference for toys (car vs. Barbie), activities (tackle football vs. toy kitchen), clothing and hairstyle (dressing like dad vs. mom), and gender of playmates (boys vs. girls), respectively.

Using an advanced software program called FaceReader, the researchers could then subsequently analyze the facial expressions—and micro-expressions—of each child as they viewed the target character going about their gendered business. Frame-by-frame, the program provides accurate estimates of the presence and intensity of the six basic human emotions: anger, disgust, happiness, sadness, fear, and surprise. After each vignette, participants were also asked the standard verbal set of questions:

· “Would you like being friends with [this child]?”

· “Do you think other children would like being friends with [this child]?”

· “Do you think [this child] is happy?”

· “Would you like to do what [this child] did in the story?”

· “Was what [this child] was doing in the story right?”

This general approach enabled Kwan and her colleagues to measure the relationship, if any, between children’s reflexive (facial expressions) and reflective reactions (verbal responses) to other kids’ expressions of gender-nonconformity.

What do you think they found?

Curiously, for the facial expression measure, only one emotion was statistically significant. It wasn’t surprise, disgust, anger, happiness, or sadness. Just fear. Moreover, it was only on seeing the gender-nonconforming boy—not the gender-nonconforming girl—that children’s faces showed this heightened scared look. The more fear a child showed on their face while viewing the gender-nonconforming boy, the less happy they judged him to be. No other meaningful links were found. “Perhaps feeling somewhat scared informed children’s perception of the emotional state of the target,” the authors speculate.

What these findings don’t tell us, of course, is where children’s apparent fear toward gender-nonconforming boys comes from. The authors suspect that it is a culturally learned or imitated emotional response, with society’s harsh disapproval of effeminate males (femmephobia) generating an ambient disliking of such figures that children are absorbing, even if just implicitly. But why, then, is it fear—and not other negative emotions, such as anger, disgust, or sadness—in their facial expressions? And if it’s just a general outgroup bias, then why aren’t gender-nonconforming girls evoking that same look of fear?

From an evolutionary perspective, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were an innate component to all this, given that effeminate males are disproportionately more of a threat than masculine females to the reproductive interests of both sexes. (See my writeups about the sneaky f*cker hypothesis and transphobia.) I doubt any of this would have put a smile on the face of that woman in the airport restroom, and I don’t blame her. But whether it’s “nature or nurture” (that old false dichotomy) at play, identifying fear as the key emotion underlying children’s intolerance, particularly of boys who stray innocently from gender norms, does have clinical importance. Since fearful people are more likely to make sweeping categorical judgments against whole groups, early opportunities to calibrate children’s emotions through positive early experiences with gender-nonconforming boys might ease a lot of future suffering.

This article was originally published in French at Le Point on 19.04.2026

It’s not the most civil of thoughts—and certainly very rude when spoken aloud—but I suspect we all make the same mental observation upon noticing, well, let’s call it an “aesthetic imbalance” in a couple. Essentially, this is the equivalent of asking oneself how did he get her? It can go in the opposite direction, too, but there seem far fewer hot studs on the arms of homely women than stunningly beautiful women on those of average-looking men.

Popular culture present and past abounds with such visual shockers, from the severely inbred Habsburg King Charles II of Spain with the jaw-dropping (sorry) Marie Louise of Orléans, to that beanpole crooner with a pompadour, Lyle Lovett, tying the knot with Julia Roberts at her Pretty Woman peak, to—dare I say it—the cartoonish gulf between Donald and Melania. Obviously, looks aren’t everything, and with these types of “mate value discrepancies,” as evolutionary psychologists refer to them, the other party typically compensates by, say, having more money than God or by dripping with talent.

What is mate value? It’s the overall assessment of a person’s desirability as a romantic or sexual partner. To some extent this is subjective (“beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” and so on), and perception may not always match reality (we all know delusional people who overestimate how much of a catch they really are, as well as those with low self-esteem who sadly sell themselves short). But there are also objective markers of attractiveness, resources, intelligence, desirable personality attributes, and so on. And when there’s an imbalance in the relationship—that is, mate value discrepancy (or “MVD”)—the risk of straying increases.

I hesitate to use the term “high-value female,” as such language just feels coarse, but when the woman has the upper hand in this way, she may be tempted to leave in search of a man who is more “in her league.” Even if she stays, surreptitious hookups with other men who exhibit higher-quality genes pose a big evolutionary problem, in the form of unknowingly raising another man’s offspring. Anyway, such reasons are why most people seek—even prefer—romantic partners with a similar mate value to themselves, avoiding rejection and fostering commitment in potential long-term relationships.

But MVD is still a real thing, and it’s not fixed: it can creep into a relationship at any point, even if it didn’t exist at the start. If your spouse goes on Ozempic and starts toning up at the gym, makes senior partner at the law firm, or gets some dramatic cosmetic surgery, you may suddenly feel a need to reset the balance. Or try to. The question therefore becomes, what countermeasures can you, the disadvantaged party in this MVD scenario, adopt to retain the affections—and more importantly, the sexual fidelity—of your partner?

Well, if you’re a man, you can start going down more on your wife or girlfriend. I know that sounds like some dumb life hack you might read on a “looksmaxxing” forum in a post written by a twenty-year-old virgin explaining how to keep your “Stacy” while you’re still “ascending” from “normie” to full “Chad” mode—I suddenly feel like a grandpa trying to speak TikTok—but there may actually be something to this cunnilingus trick.

In a recent study published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, Polish psychologist Natalia Frankowska and her colleagues examined whether men who judge themselves as having a lower mate value than their partners perform more oral sex than those without such an MVD. If so, then much like buying jewelry or showering her with compliments, frequent oral sex may also be designed for female mate retention. If you’ve ever heard that quip “he must be good in the sack” in accounting for such mismatched relationships, you can see how such intimate negotiations are baked into our everyday understanding of how MVD works.

Previous research, the authors note, had already shown that men who are more worried about their female partners cheating on them also spend more time performing oral sex on them. As I’ve written previously, some scholars assert—and not without salacious controversy—that this is literally done to detect the presence of other men’s semen, kind of like a dog sniffing a fire hydrant. Frankowska and her colleagues’ approach isn’t at odds with that interpretation, per se, but their logic was more, er, palatable. “We predicted that the greater the mate value discrepancy in favor of the female partner,” the authors write, “the higher the man’s motivation to sexually satisfy her, which would, in turn, translate into a higher frequency of performing oral sex.” Women who first receive the cunnilingus treatment, after all, are more likely to orgasm at intercourse. Unsurprisingly, frequency of this sex act is associated with higher female ratings of perceived relationship quality.

To test their hypothesis that cunnilingus is used mostly as compensatory pleasure-giving by men with lower mate value than their partners, the authors surveyed 540 men, all of whom were presently in a committed relationship with a woman for at least the past three months. The average age was 29, and most had been in a relationship for three or more years.

The first thing assessed was MVD—or at least, perceived MVD. Here’s what these men read:

Many people pay attention to specific traits when choosing a potential romantic partner. Some commonly desired traits include: being socially engaging, age, physical attractiveness, having a sense of humor, being kind and understanding, having high financial/professional status, high intelligence, good health, and whether or not one likes children. Those who possess these traits to a high degree are highly sought after by the opposite sex and are said to have a high mate value. With this in mind, we would like you to try to assess both your own mate value and separately the mate value of your romantic partner.

The participants then answered a series of blunt questions, such as: “Overall, how would members of the opposite sex rate your level of desirability as a partner?” and “Overall, how good of a catch is your partner?” and so on. By subtracting the mate value of the participant from that of his partner, a mate value discrepancy could be calculated. And in comparing these MVD values with each man’s self-reported frequency of giving oral sex to his wife or girlfriend in the couple’s ten most recent sexual encounters, the researchers’ key hypothesis was supported: the greater the perceived MVD, the more cunnilingus was being served.

Importantly, however, these participants were also the most into sexually satisfying their partners. That is to say, MVD wasn’t directly “causing” these men to perform oral sex, but indirectly affecting their motivation to please their female partners, which translated into [cunnilingus] frequency. They weren’t exactly turning their noses up at the act either. For most, it was the opposite of a task. “The higher discrepancy between a man’s mate value in favor of a woman,” explained Frankowska and her coauthors, “the more likely he was to enjoy performing cunnilingus.” Still, for men who said that they really disliked performing oral sex—perhaps due to individual differences in disgust sensitivity or pathogen avoidance—no amount of mate discrepancy could bring them to indulge in the act.

As a correlational study based on perceived rather than veridical MVD, not to mention self-reported sexual behaviors that may or may not reflect people’s actual bedroom habits, we can only put so much stock into these findings. From an evolutionary perspective, they also can’t tell us whether such stealthy clitoral tongue tactics work for these men as an adaptive mate-retention strategy. Are their wives and girlfriends less likely to leave them?

Still, the data are certainly—my sincere apologies—something to munch on.

This article was originally published in French at Le Point on 13.04.2026

When it comes to sex and regret, there’s regret over not doing it when one could have (passive sexual regret), and doing it when one shouldn’t have (active sexual regret).

Which form is more common—and more tragic—is debatable. Existentially speaking, a solid case could certainly be made for the former. I have a sneaking suspicion that few on their deathbeds wish that dazzling night of debauchery with a beautiful stranger half a century ago never happened, whereas a life filled with such missed opportunities and carnal what-ifs—out of shame or fear or religious guilt or whatever else—before passing into oblivion seems a genuine human tragedy.

That being said, in the messy real world of STDs, sexual assaults, drunken one-night stands, broken hearts, divorces, unplanned pregnancies and abortions, stalkings and obsessions, gossip and rumors, ruined friendships, and a million-and-one other unlikely but possible negative outcomes of genital liaisons, it’s also easy to underestimate the potential emotional costs of casual sex. In a recent study in Archives of Sexual Behavior, psychologists Christina Sagioglou and (if I may, the perfectly named) Maximillian Dick from the University of Innsbruck in Austria investigated people’s regret in the wake of a one-night stand. That is to say, active sexual regret.

It’s important to define a “one-night stand” clearly, stress the authors, as it’s just one of several types of casual sexual relationships and experiences—or CSREs, as it’s known in the business. There are also “booty calls” and “friends-with-benefits,” for example, both of which imply a degree of regular occurrence with the same person. One-night-stands, by contrast, mean just that: a single sexual encounter in which, after the deed is done, you probably will never see the person again, bar that awkward moment in the grocery store five years later. (By the way, it’s called a one-night “stand” rather than a one-night “lay” due not to the hasty literalness of lust catching us on our feet, but because it stems from the historical use of the word stand, which was like a mobile stall set up temporarily in the market, often for a single night only. There’s a terrible meat market pun in here somewhere.)

Nowadays, there are plenty of apps built for lascivious purpose, with countless other horny souls near you being just a swipe or two away, if you so desire. The phrase “one-night stand” in that respect feels almost old-fashioned or quaint. But even before hooksups were at our proverbial fingertips, such casual, one-off encounters have been a part of human sexuality. And in their sticky aftermath, say Sagioglou and Dick, may come the dreaded “post-ONS regret,” basically having negative feelings about someone done rather than someone not done.

Previous research, they explain, made two things very clear. First, most one-night stands don’t lead to regret, but are instead viewed either neutrally (pretty much instantly forgettable) or positively. Second, there’s a gender gap: women are more likely to regret having a one-night stand than are men. The authors therefore sought to carefully dissect that hornet’s nest of factors that give rise to post-ONS regret, while also trying to figure out why women are so much more susceptible to having those negative second thoughts than are men. As for the gender gap, it could be, they reasoned, an evolutionary artifact, or alternatively it could be the toxic residue of the patriarchy, or maybe some combination of both.

Let’s put a pin in that for now, and first have a look at how Sagioglou and Dick went about measuring post-ONS regret. As psychological scientists, they developed a survey instrument that asked people to reflect, specifically, on their most recent one-night stand. (Those who hadn’t had any such experience weren’t included in the study.) This served to standardize the responses; participants weren’t simply thinking about their worst-ever or best-ever ONS experience, which would skew results, but just the latest one. The final sample consisted of 1,044 participants (649 females and 395 males) representing a diverse forty nationalities. There was quite a range in sexual experiences, as you’d expect—from a single ONS to 561 such casual sexual encounters. But the median number was three. Most (78% of the sample) were single at the time of the one-night stand, and the average age of the sample was 25.

Each person was asked to think about their most recent one-night stand, with the survey deliberately posing the types of intimate and uncomfortable questions usually reserved for conversations with your therapist... or maybe ChatGPT. Was this a same-sex encounter? Did you use protection? Were you single at the time? Cheating on your partner? Did you feel pressured, or was it your idea? Did you give or receive oral? How about anal? Did you climax? To what extent was it disgusting or unhygienic? How drunk were you, exactly? And so on. I’m paraphrasing here, but not by much. The researchers’ intent with these rather personal survey items was to get at the nitty-gritty details in a way that allowed them to pinpoint—with surgical statistical precision—what is most likely to lead to post-ONS regret.

A few clear contenders emerged. Among these were decision heteronomy (the less ownership people felt over their decision to have casual sex, the more regret); moral concern (the more intrinsically “wrong” they felt it to be, for whatever reason, the more regret); reputational concern (the more worrying about what others would think, the more regret); alcohol intoxication (the more sloshed at the time, the more regret). In addition to these predictable factors of sexual dynamics, some people are also just more regret-prone. The personality dimension of emotional stability significantly predicted regret (the more emotionally volatile, the more post-ONS regret). Age mattered too (younger respondents had more regret). Interestingly—and somewhat contrary to my deathbed hypothesis above—the more time that had elapsed since the one-night stand, the more regret people had about it. Whether this modest trend is due to the fading of positive memories of physical pleasure over time, or people just getting crankier and more conservative as they age, the authors couldn’t say.

One of the biggest predictors was simply sexual satisfaction. For both sexes—in straight and in gay pairings—those who got off during the casual encounter had less regret about the episode than did those who didn’t. But this buffering effect was especially pronounced for women who had hookups with men, “with orgasm achievement playing the critical role.”

In fact, heterosexual sex is apparently a risk factor for post-ONS regret—but only if you’re a woman. Men who had one-night stands with women, women who had one-night stands with women, and men who had one-night stands with men, all had significantly lower regret than the women who had sex with men. “This pattern suggests that the elevated regret commonly observed among women following [one-night stands] may be driven primarily by dynamics specific to mixed-sex encounters rather than representing an inherent sex difference in psychological response to casual sex,” write the authors. Although they interpret this as evidence against evolutionary psychology explanations for sex differences in post-ONS regret, I don’t see it this way. Human brains could have certainly evolved to distinguish between different types of sex partners and the adaptive implications thereof. Not to be crass, but a penis inserted in her vagina obviously has more genetic ramifications for a woman than another woman’s vulva pressed against her own. It’s that old parental investment theory again: today’s birth control measures mean the playing field has leveled, but for most of human history, women had far more at stake in having casual sex than did men. Well, straight sex, anyway. In other words, not all CSREs are equal, and as far as I’m aware, evolutionary psychologists have never argued any such thing.

Still, as Sagioglou and Dick point out, and as their findings also suggest, any evolved dispositions for post-ONS regret are likely to be meaningfully shaped by sociocultural forces anyway. Even in the modern progressive West, heteronormative scripts—particularly those that prioritize male sexual pleasure and tacitly favor patriarchal control—may indeed be seeping in. Again, women who had one-night stands with men expressed the highest regret overall (and remember, even that was pretty modest). But statistically, the primary reason for this male-female gap in post-ONS regret was that only in that particular erotic combination was one side more likely than the other to get their rocks off. And you can guess which one.

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This article was originally published in French at Le Point on 05.04.2026

In his 1932 book The Moral Judgement of the Child, the famous Swiss developmentalist Jean Piaget wrote about how a colleague of his, a mysterious-sounding “Mlle Rambert,” administered a series of stories to a large group of schoolchildren. Here’s an example:

Once there were two children who were stealing apples in an orchard. A policeman comes along and the two children run away. One of them is caught. The other one, going home by a roundabout way, crosses a river on a rotten bridge and falls into the water. Now what do you think? If he had not stolen the apples and had crossed the river on that rotten bridge all the same, would he also have fallen into the water?

Kids under the age of eight said definitely not, explaining that the bridge had collapsed only because the boy had stolen the apples. Older children saw what Rambert was getting at. They answered in terms of “mechanical chance.” The worn planks would have given way, they said, no matter who was on the bridge. Piaget didn’t entirely trust these rational answers, however. Rather, he believed that instinctual superstitious thinking is often “justified by a cloak of words” in science-savvy children and adults. One of the reasons Piaget suspected this was that some of the older children told Rambert that of course it was simply coincidence that the boy had fallen into the river after stealing the apples; they couldn’t help themselves from adding, however, that all the same, it was punishment for what he had done.

Since Piaget’s day, researchers have found compelling evidence that human beings operate with an innate sense of immanent justice. Basically, this is the idea that good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people. This intuition can be overridden by our more rational, scientific understanding of the world. Life isn’t fair. But it isn’t unfair, either. It just is. But like those older kids in Piaget’s example, that doesn’t mean we’ve grown out of this cognitive bias of immanent justice thinking entirely. I once read about a guy who murdered an elderly woman and, in a desperate bid to escape the police, jumped into a Florida canal, where he was promptly consumed by a giant alligator. It works the other way around too. Back in 2008, not long after being released from prison for raping a thirteen-year-old girl, a sex offender hit the jackpot in his state’s fifty-seven-million-dollar lotto. If you’re logically minded, chances are you would say that these things just happen. But I bet you’d nevertheless feel that the murderer got what he deserved in that canal, and that something came undone in the fabric of the cosmos when a level-three sex offender won the big lottery.

When this powerful psychological tendency for immanent justice is co-opted by religion—as it is in Dharmic traditions such as Hinduism and Buddhism—it becomes fully expressed as a belief in karma. It’s rather shadowy, and you can tell me why this description is naive and wrong in the comments below, but the central logic appears to be that people get what they deserve not because other human beings intervene to exert justice, but because the universe itself is a great moral leveler, and our social deeds are, somehow, always being calibrated.

According to cognitive scientist Cindel White of York University, who is quickly emerging as one of the world’s foremost authorities on the psychology of karma, this makes it distinct from belief in God. After all, God is usually a personified agent who, much like Santa Claus, knows when you’ve been good or bad and doles out the gifts accordingly. You can always ask for forgiveness, just as you would with another person, and you might get your presents in the end regardless. By contrast, karma is a faceless, cosmic comeuppance that doesn’t involve any human-like mind, but instead treats good fortune almost as a limited natural resource; it’s always in a state of flux based on individual human actions but moving toward a lawful equilibrium of fairness. There’s no personal god to thank or appeal to for mercy.

In a new article in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, White summarizes how belief in karma has real-world effects, both for the believer’s own mental well-being, and for how they treat others. It turns out it’s a double-edged sword. Let’s look at the positives first.

The Good.

When good things happen to us, karma implies that we must have earned it. Somehow. Maybe in a previous life?

In one series of studies, people were asked to reflect on their own happy life experiences. Compared to positive events believed to be caused by God—which induced feelings of indebtedness, submission, and gratitude to that external agent—people thinking in terms of karma made more internal attributions, taking personal credit for their own good fortune. The karmic believers felt pride and feelings of entitlement. “Belief in karma can predict greater well-being by reassuring people that they deserve the blessings in their life,” White writes. They must be good if they’re reaping life’s rewards. What more evidence do they need?

Karmic beliefs also lead to a more positive outlook about the future. The person can act now to ensure good outcomes later, White explains, giving them a sense of control over their own fate. This “forward-looking karmic optimism,” as she calls it, has even been experimentally demonstrated under laboratory conditions. In one study, participants who were asked to think about a desirable but uncertain future outcome that was now out of their hands (i.e., receiving a job offer, getting positive medical results back, etc.) donated more time and money to a totally unrelated cause, essentially investing in their karmic merit to influence the outcome.

Also, with karma, people are motivated to be nicer and more generous to each other. In behavioral economics studies, for example, asking participants to think about karma before playing the dictator game causes them to make less selfish money decisions. (It’s all ultimately for selfish reasons, like Christians giving tithing to stay in God’s good books. But still prosocial at a behavioral level.) Relatedly, thinking about karma tends to make people less vindictive. After all, if “what comes around goes around,” believers can outsource punishment and retribution—a high-risk and all-consuming response—to mindless, automatic karmic forces. Experiments have found that reminding people of karma causes them to be less likely to exact revenge on those who have wronged them. Whether that’s good or bad is debatable, but overall, karma beliefs can make for a more cooperative and tolerant society.

Reincarnation is of course often tied up with karma, with karmic credit scores spanning across multiple lives. Intriguingly, there’s evidence that belief in karma is associated with more long-term, sustainable patterns of consumption, including environmentally friendly attitudes and behaviors. If you believe that man-made damage to the earth today is going to eventually have direct consequences for you—not in this life, but maybe in the next—then things like climate change, deforestation, biodiversity loss, and so on—feel more tangible than a hypothetical future generation facing problems that you’ll never personally experience.

The Bad (and the Downright Ugly).

For every positive, prosocial attribute it may offer, belief in karma also has a darker side. For example, that tendency to believe that our good fortune must reflect our good selves also means that our misfortunes must be about something rotten we’ve done—or maybe just thought. Whereas there is salubrious pride in happy events, there is deleterious shame and self-blame in tragic ones. One vivid example of this is that belief in karma predicted greater depression and post-traumatic stress disorder in survivors of the 2004 Sri Lankan tsunami.

In general, however, there’s a self-serving bias: believers are more likely to think about good karma when it comes to themselves, and more likely to think about bad karma when it comes to others. And that, not surprisingly, leads to more victim-blaming. Like that bridge collapsing under Piaget’s little apple thief in the Swiss orchard nearly a century ago, one study showed that today’s karma believers explain that a person’s random bad luck (e.g., losing their phone in a café) must be about something bad that they’ve done. “Applying karmic thinking to understand the misfortunes of others can provide a satisfying way to maintain the belief that the world is just,” White writes. Not only that, but belief in karma is also associated with more disparaging attitudes toward victims, even the withholding of help. And while believers may be less motivated to punish those who wrong them, this detachment can mean transgressors are seen as irredeemably bad people beyond social redemption.

Stepping further back, there are also ugly political implications of moralistic karma and reincarnation, including a shoulder-shrugging tolerance—even support—for obvious social inequities. In many parts of India, being born into a lower caste still means that you’ll never enjoy the same socioeconomic opportunities or privileges as those born into a higher one. Individuals with stronger karmic beliefs are also more likely to endorse right-wing authoritarianism and to have a more pronounced social dominance orientation.

Karma’s not really a bitch. She’s not even real. But as empirical evidence continues to mount, there are very real effects of such beliefs on people’s prosocial—and antisocial—attitudes and behaviors.

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Life After Life by Raymond Moody popularized “near-death experiences” (NDEs) and launched a booming cottage industry that still can’t keep up with customer demand. Although there’s a much more re­strained academic component (and even a respected peer-reviewed Journal of Near-Death Studies dating back to 1982), the genre is now mainly ecstatic accounts of people claiming they’ve died and come back to life, and with amazing travel tales to tell. Ian Stevenson’s early thinking about “out-of-body experiences” (or “OBEs”) presaged what has since become a predominantly American—and largely religious—business of celestial confabulations.

An OBE doesn’t necessarily entail a near-death experience (NDE) since other dissociated states are known to induce similar feelings of leaving one’s body. But Ian was certainly aware of the old Society for Psychical Research cor­respondences in this vein. For instance, there were letters from the late nineteenth century between William James and an experienced mountaineer who believed he’d frozen to death in the Swiss Alps. Prior to being revived by fellow hikers, the adventurer remembered a piercing pain before crumpling lifeless into the snow-covered granite. Suddenly, he told James, he was transformed into “a ball of air in the air, a captive balloon still attached to earth by a kind of elastic string. . . . How strange! I see better than ever, and I am dead. Looking down, I was astounded to recognize my own envelope.”

Ian was also very familiar with so-called “Peak in Darien” cases. The phrase derives from the 1816 poem “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” by John Keats. That work of literature recounts an expedition by a team of Spaniards who, upon climbing a peak in Darien (in what is now Panama), expect to see a vast continent spread out before them, but instead are met by another ocean. Keats’s poem has nothing to do with parapsychology, or even death, but the idea of getting an unexpected sight “on the other side” pro­vided a useful metaphor for the Anglo-Irish writer Frances Power Cobbe. NDEs weren’t really in fashion then, but her 1882 book The Peak in Darien was a spiritual “octave of essays” featuring people’s close brushes with death. Sometimes, these included encounters with the spirits of those the percipient didn’t expect to see, since they had no idea that these people had died, too. Ian believed these Peak in Darien cases were import­ant, as they mitigated against an apparent expectancy bias in which the dying person’s hopes about reuniting with loved ones known to have died could be furnishing dreamlike content.

In the 1970s, Moody and other researchers began interviewing people who claimed to have died and come back to life. Not every experience was the same, nor did everyone report all the classic features of an NDE, but there were some notable recurring aspects. These included a great sense of serenity; the feeling of having left one’s body and sometimes an accompanying autoscopic vision (see­ing one’s “envelope” from an external point of view); a distorted perception of time (with “personal time” unfurling infinitely slower than “solar time”); enhanced perception of light (often described as moving through a tunnel); overwhelmingly vivid, sensory-rich memories that give the impression of a panoramic life review; and, perhaps most intriguingly of all, super-cognitive function. This last feature is characterized, according to many people who say they’ve had an NDE, as suddenly gaining unusual clarity and speed of thought, as well as an astounding acuteness of perception. “Realer than real,” as one said.

Ian thought that self-reports of enhanced cognitive function in NDEs were impressively on brand with the late 19^th-century psychical researcher Frederic W. H. Myers’s notion of a wild postmortem consciousness let loose from the prison of its brain. “What most persons describe,” Ian explained, “is remembering themselves as having enjoyed unusual mental clarity at the time of nearly dying. Seldom, if ever, they tell us, have they felt more alive than they did during the near-death experience.” The sum of these experiences might, he added, “provide further evidence that, at a time when the person’s physiological condition might lead us to expect that mental functioning would be diminishing or even ab­sent, it is instead speeding up and becoming more vivid. This . . . suggests that the relationship between mental and physical func­tioning may not be as straightforward as many scientists have long assumed.”

* * *

Nonetheless, this distinct sense of having a “superior emancipated intelligence,” as the British writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton provoca­tively called it, wasn’t terribly convincing to Ian that the patients’ souls had momentarily departed. He found such first-person accounts intriguing, potentially even fundamental to addressing the survival question, but he made no secret of his distaste for the tabloid trend precipitated by Moody and others’ mainstream works. This wasn’t because he didn’t believe those who reported an NDE, or that these people had indeed had a life-altering experi­ence. It was just that, with few exceptions, they rested entirely on the person’s subjective accounts. After all, a person’s impressions of having enhanced cognitive function didn’t mean that they had enhanced cognitive function.

Moreover, the concept of an NDE was (and remains) poorly un­derstood. In later work, Ian and his coauthors reviewed the medi­cal records of forty patients who reported an NDE and found that most were nowhere near death when they claimed to have left their bodies. Only eighteen, in fact, were at risk of dying on the operat­ing table or without urgent medical intervention. Still, most thought they’d slipped away. Ian blamed the media’s saturation of NDE stories for rampant “fear-death experiences.” He and his co-investigators argued, “We may have here, an example of contaminating effects from the wide­spread publicity given to these experiences, especially in the US. Because people near death have been reported to have unusual ex­periences, someone who has a similar experience may falsely con­clude that he or she must have been near death.”

From a psychological perspective, our anticipation of death un­der conditions of extreme duress, combined with cultural and re­ligious beliefs and a soaring human imagination (and in medical settings, a brain often pickled in analgesics), may engender simi­larly vivid OBE imagery. If you’ve ever pictured your own funeral, you get the idea.

There’s still that subset of cases involving patients whose med­ical records show that they really were close to death. Even these, however, can’t provide the standard of evidence for survival that serious parapsychological scientists have come to expect. NDEs may have profound and lasting effects on those who have them. Yet these extremely powerful, private blasts of consciousness can also be explained by normal mechanisms. The standard wet-blanket hypotheses include delu­sions induced by altered blood gases, temporal lobe malfunctions, a flailing limbic system, and neurotoxic metabolic reactions. The common denominator is that NDEs are engrossing, and often eu­phoric, hallucinations of death-rattled brains.

“The consensus of many people who study the evidence for life after death has been that NDEs may have something to contrib­ute to the study of altered states of consciousness,” Ian explained in a 1998 article in the Journal of Scientific Exploration coauthored by his close colleagues Emily Williams Kelly and Bruce Greyson, “but not to the problem of survival. . . . [O]ut-of-body experienc­ers, including near-death experiencers, are in fact still alive at the time of their experience and have not existed independently of their bodies. Even those persons who may have been pronounced dead by medical personnel were physically intact enough to have been revivable. Consciousness may therefore seem to be detached from the physical body but may still remain dependent on it for its con­tinued existence.”

Ian also believed, however, that one extraordinarily rare feature of NDEs—so rare that you can probably count the number of solid cases on a hand with a missing digit—could be of central impor­tance to the survival question. This was evidence of “veridical para­normal perception,” which Ian described as “those rare instances in which the patient demonstrates knowledge of events, objects, and people of which he could not have become aware through the nor­mal sensory channels while he was ostensibly unconscious. Such a patient, after recovering consciousness, narrates events that took place beyond the range of his sight and hearing while his body was lying inert and seemingly dead or nearly so.”

* * *

There are two textbook NDE cases that are so frequently invoked as proof of the afterlife that they’ve become more like urban legends, the vicissitudes all but vanishing in the retellings. Whether we like it or not, the materialistic devil is often in the details.

The first is the case of the wing-flapping surgeon. A fifty-three-year-old truck driver who’d undergone emergency heart surgery said he drifted out of his body and looked down to see one of the surgeons making comical gestures, moving his elbows as though flapping his wings. On hearing this, one of the other surgeons knew immediately what the patient was referring to. Dr. Takata, the lead cardiac surgeon, had the habit of flattening his palms against his chest and pointing out surgical implements to the nurses using his elbows, because after scrubbing in, he didn’t want his un­gloved hands touching anything until the surgery began. Ian and his coauthors learned from the medical records that before being knocked out with general anesthesia prior to the main operation, the patient was first given a local anesthetic so that an intra-aortic balloon could be inserted. “It occurred to us,” the researchers wrote, “that [the patient] might have seen Dr. Takata ‘flapping’ his elbows when the balloon was being inserted but before he was given general anesthesia and lost consciousness, and that he later confused the order of events.” So they asked the patient for further details about what else he’d observed when he saw the doctor flapping his arms. “[The patient] said he saw Dr. Takata standing alone over his opened chest, which was being held open by metal clamps, and he also saw two other surgeons working on his legs.” This latter observation, recalled the patient, had confused him, as he didn’t understand why they were working on his legs when he was there for heart surgery. (They were busy stripping a vein out of his lower limb to create a bypass graft for his heart.) Ian and his associates concluded that “these results seem clearly to confirm that [the pa­tient’s] observations of Dr. Takata flapping his arms occurred under general anesthesia and, at least to observers, unconscious.”

As parapsychological scientists often express themselves, the language is careful (”seem clearly to confirm” is not the same as “clearly confirm”). To me, though, the case doesn’t seem so clear at all. As part of Dr. Takata’s presurgical routine, the gesture would have been more likely to occur in that earlier stage when the patient was still awake, as he was being prepped for surgery. It’s possible that the already gloved surgeon also made his flapping gestures midway through the operation when the chest cavity was open, but the point is, nobody could rule out that the patient didn’t see it while conscious. The rest of the presumed paranormal knowledge isn’t specific enough to rule out re-created imaginings of the scene. He may have been confused by what they were doing down there but given the critical role of his legs in the procedure, it “seems probable” some fuss and attention would have also been spent on that part of his body during the still-conscious period preceding the surgery.

The second famous example of an empirically supported NDE is the case of the blood-drained brain. First investigated by the car­diologist Michael Sabom, this storied case transpired in Phoenix in August 1991. Thirty-five-year-old Pam Reynolds underwent a rad­ical surgical procedure to remove a dangerous giant basilar artery aneurysm from her brain stem, that stalk-like portion connecting the spinal cord and the brain. It wasn’t an operation for the faint of heart, or any heart for that matter. It involved a complete induced cardiac arrest, deep hypothermia, and barbiturate cerebral protec­tion (a drug-induced coma to lower intracranial pressure). At the time the aneurysm was removed, the patient’s core body tempera­ture was sixty degrees Fahrenheit, her heart was stopped, and an EEG showed no activity in her brain, which is not surprising, given that her head was drained of blood. Moreover, Reynolds’s eyes were taped shut and her ears blocked by small, molded speakers that monitored the auditory nerve center of her brain stem. So, suffice it to say that the woman was out of it. By all technical criteria, she was “clinically dead” during those few hours.

Once she was medically resurrected and eventually came to, Reynolds recalled that she’d been “the most aware I think I have ever been in my life” during the operation. Several of those hall­mark features of NDEs were present in her account. She felt “a loss of time,” she said, and heard a buzzing sound before leaving her body; for a while, she watched as though she were perched atop the surgeon’s shoulder as he worked on her exposed brain. Things were “brighter and more focused and clearer than normal vision.” She saw a bright light, entered a tunnel-like vortex, and was surrounded by dead loved ones and strangers telling her that she needed to go back. Her loving (but apparently frustrated) dead uncle had to liter­ally shove her back into her body on the gurney because she didn’t want to return, a sensation she said felt like plunging into an ice bath. (What exactly he was “shoving” is an interesting question.) She was still unconscious, but by then the assistants were cleaning up and playing the song “Hotel California” by the Eagles, which, she joked later, seemed a bit insensitive given that whole “you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave” line.

In addition to naming the song, what elevated the case beyond that of just another evocative but subjective NDE account was Reyn­olds describing an unusual bone saw used by the neurosurgeon, and some remarks by the female cardiac surgeon:

The saw thing . . . looked like an electric toothbrush and it had a dent in it, a groove at the top where the saw appeared to go into the han­dle, but it didn’t. . . . And the saw had interchangeable blades, too, but these blades were in what looked like a socket wrench case. . . . I heard the saw crank up. . . . [A woman] said something about my veins and arteries being very small.

Critics, as well as those who argue that Reynolds’s NDE was genuinely paranormal, have been dissecting the case since Sabom published the account in his 1998 book Light and Death. As with the wing-flapping surgeon case, there’s a rather blurred anesthetic timeline. Those key parts about the distinctive bone saw and the cardiac surgeon’s comments about her tricky vasculature occurred while Reynolds was under general anesthesia and her aneurysm was still being assessed. This was hours before the hypothermic car­diac arrest, the draining of blood from her head, and the flatten­ing of her brain waves. And by the time she heard those orderlies grooving to “Hotel California,” all that deadness was behind her: she was still unconscious, but a defibrillator had shocked her heart back into action, warm blood had been reinfused into her circula­tory system, and her brain activity was back online.

As Ian and Greyson noted in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), “This kind of experience is not necessarily evi­dence of extrasensory perception; patients who are anesthetized or otherwise ostensibly unconscious sometimes can assimilate, and afterwards remember, conversations held in their presence.” That’s a little frightening and perhaps a word of warning for loose-lipped surgeons. But what’s important is that Reynolds’s auditory and brain stem response was still active at the time the neurosurgeon began cutting into her skull and when the female cardiac surgeon was speaking about her veins. The technician who inserted her ear­buds countered that the tape and gauze covered the patient’s ear openings, making hearing all but impossible. Aside from his opin­ion, though, we can’t be entirely sure that this aural setup made for totally soundproof conditions that day. As for the bone saw, Reyn­olds got at least one detail wrong. Sabom noted this in his report:

Pam’s description of the bone saw having a “groove at the top where the saw appeared to go into the handle” was a bit puzzling. . . . [T]he end of the bone saw has an overhanging edge that [viewed sideways] looks somewhat like a groove. However, it was not located “where the saw appeared to go into the handle” but at the other end. Why had this apparent discrepancy arisen in Pam’s description? Of course, the first explanation is that she did not “see” the saw at all, but was describ­ing it from her own best guess of what it would look and sound like.

Given that liminal field of numbed cognition, Reynolds may not have needed to guess what it sounded like at all. As she was still un­der general anesthesia, some subconscious part of her might have actually heard the saw and felt it reverberate in her bones. When you add that it was three years after her surgery that Sabom first in­terviewed Reynolds—time enough for her to learn more about the harrowing procedure and for some innocent buttoning up of gaps in the narrative—you can see why Ian and others who’ve bothered to look closely at even the best cases find the NDE evidence for sur­vival “far from compelling.”

* * *

Not everyone who comes near death has a near-death experience. In fact, most don’t. We only know what patients are willing to share—and the fear of not being believed or being ridiculed is a real deterrent—but estimates suggest that only around 10 percent of those who survive a cardiac arrest report having left their bod­ies. That’s not an insignificant number, but it does beg the ques­tion of why it’s seemingly just currents out (and on again) for the remaining 90 percent. Once, after fainting at the doctor’s office, I felt as though I had traveled light-years and bathed in beautiful symphonies in a few lost seconds, which, I must say, felt encouraging for my own afterlife pros­pects. On the less encouraging side, in my more irresponsible years, I once went into a severe diabetic shock after some misadventures with alcohol and lay unconscious in a hotel room in Atlanta for thirty minutes. That half hour, by contrast to my OBE at the doc­tor’s office, felt like a split second: lights off, lights on. One moment I was dizzy, standing at the desk counting quarters to buy a can of sugary Coke from the vending machine, and the next thing I know, I’m flat on my back with two paramedics administering a glucose drip. (Luckily, my friend had come out of the shower and found me unresponsive.)

None of this is to say that Ian viewed NDEs as without potential parapsychological value. Some, such as the case of Pam Reynolds or a few Peak in Darien accounts, weren’t so easily dismissed as hallucinations. “It is not helpful to declare that all near-death ex­periences provide evidence of our survival after death,” he wrote, “but neither is it helpful to categorize them all as merely ‘toxic psy­chosis.’ I can feel dogmatic about only one conclusion in this con­troversy: that we still have a great deal to learn.”

In the 1980s, he and Satwant Pasricha interviewed Indian sub­jects who claimed to have had NDEs. In doing so, they were among the first to study cross-cultural similarities—and differences—in reported experiences. The details for any given case were just as spectacular and intense as those in America, but there were some telling differences, too. The typical NDE case in India involved the subject being escorted by “messengers” to another realm. There they’d meet with an administrative official who, after consulting with books or papers, would discover a slight clerical mistake. The faux pas was usually some sort of identity mix-up; a person of the same name but a different caste, or someone living in a different but nearby village, was meant to have died, but the messengers got the wrong person. After the big whoops gets revealed, the subject is brought back by the messengers to the world of the living, whereby they’re “pushed down” into their body and revived.

This common NDE script among the Indian subjects, Ian and Pasricha realized, aligned with the religious and cultural beliefs of those they interviewed.

Yamraj, the king of the dead, is a well-known figure of Hindu mythol­ogy. So are his messengers, called Yamdoots, and “the man with the book,” Chitragupta. Chitragupta’s book is conceived as containing a record of a person’s deeds during the life just ended; judgments from the record determine the assignment of the deceased to heaven or hell until the time of his or her next incarnation. It can be safely as­sumed that all Indians are familiar with these beings, just as we can assume that nearly everyone in the West has some familiarity with Je­sus Christ, the Virgin Mary, and at least a few of the prominent Chris­tian saints, such as St. Francis of Assisi.

In other words, as with popular accounts of dying and getting a glimpse of heaven, God, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, angels, gates, clouds, tunnels, life reviews, reuniting with dead loved ones, be­ing told it’s not your time yet, and other basic ingredients of a very American type of near-death experience, there appears to be a dis­tinctively Indian version of NDEs as well. The parapsychologists, however, admonished skeptics not to read too much into this find­ing. These kinds of differences, they wrote,

may lead [materialists] . . . as confirming the view that the contents of NDEs are nothing but expressions of culture-bound beliefs. We should remember, however, that if we survive death and live in an after-death realm, we should expect to find variations in that world, just as we find them in the different parts of the familiar world of the living. A traveler to Delhi encounters dark-skinned immigration officials, who in many respects behave differently from the lighter-skinned immigration officials another traveler may meet when arriv­ing in London or New York.

* * *

Ian and Pasricha only meant it as an analogy, but their reference to ethnic variation in melanin content, when applied to presum­ably discarnate personalities in the afterlife, raises another knotty question: What is it like to be “in the body” of someone who claims to have “left the body”? For those who’ve had an OBE or NDE, the experience is usually recounted as though the person has retained basic proprioceptive states in sync with a bog-standard human mor­phology. No matter how otherworldly the scene, the person having an NDE perceives things from the vantage point of a bipedal pri­mate with a body plan fashioned over eons of evolutionary time. In Eben Alexander’s book Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife, the author described flying on the back of a giant butterfly alongside a beautiful woman with “high cheekbones” and “deep blue eyes” during his own shockingly vivid NDE. Presumably, he was seated in an upright jockey position.

Ian examined this phenomenology of NDEs, or the what-it-feels-like sense of being embodied as a disembodied spirit, in an early study with Bruce Greyson published in the American Journal of Psy­chiatry. Looking at seventy-eight cases of NDEs, they found that the “nonphysical body” was commonly described as being much lighter in weight than the physical body (74 percent) but usually the same size (68 percent) and the same age (84 percent). A con­siderable percentage of respondents (67 percent) described having some vital signs in their nonphysical body (breathing, a heartbeat, or even a pulse). And like that mountaineer saying he felt as though he were “a ball of air in the air” while attached to his corpse by a string, some (28 percent) said they’d felt “linked” somehow to their physical body. Another subset (28 percent) recalled that defects of their physical bodies (e.g., partial deafness, missing limbs) were absent in their nonphysical bodies. Many (71 percent) had unusual somatic experiences during the NDE, including a feeling of warmth. Unusual auditory phenomena, such as hearing music or voices, was also quite common (57 percent). A handful reported unusual smells (25 percent) and tastes (10 percent).

Self-reports, of course, reflect people’s subjective impressions only. There have been several empirical attempts to determine whether people’s souls actually leave their physical bodies during an NDE. In one ambitious, large-scale study led by critical care specialist (and part-time parapsychologist) Sam Parnia, hospitals across the United States, the UK, and Australia agreed to install shelves below the ceilings of rooms where people were likely to have cardiac arrests requiring CPR, including emergency departments, operating rooms, and acute medical wards. Each shelf contained a unique image only visible from above the shelf—a mix of animals, people, nationalistic and religious symbols, and major newspaper headlines. All told, there were nearly a thousand shelves installed across countries, so plenty of opportunity to test the veridical out-of-body hypothesis. “It was postulated,” explained Parnia and his coauthors in a 2014 write-up in the journal Resuscitation, “that should a large proportion of patients describe [visual awareness] combined with the perception of being able to observe events from a vantage point above, the shelves could be used to potentially test the validity of such claims (as the images were only visible if looking down from the ceiling).”

During a study period of four years, over two thousand “cardiac arrest events” occurred in these areas with shelves. Most of those patients didn’t have a near-death experience. They had a total death experience, and so they couldn’t report back. Among the survivors, 140 participated in follow-up interviews. Although 9 percent re­ported an NDE, including several who claimed to see their own bod­ies from above, whatever images were on the top of those shelves remain known only to Parnia and his fellow incarnate researchers.

Learn more about Ian Stevenson’s storied career and parapsychological investigations into reincarnation, apparitions, mediumship, poltergeists, and more in my new book The Incredible Afterlives of Dr. Stevenson, available now.