Do Gay Men’s Sexual Fantasies Differ From Heterosexuals?

 Human sexuality is incredibly complex, so we’re always fascinated into any insights into what makes us all tick. One interesting area of study is the exploration of the differences between gay men and straight men when it comes to sex.

Apart from the obvious – gay men generally have sex with men, straight men generally have sex with women – there are a number of areas where our experiences diverge but also some where we are all on the same page.

In this article, we’re going to focus on the subject of sexual fantasies.

Based on the reading that we’ve done, it seems that research suggests that gay men have more erotic fantasies than straight men. We are letting our imagination fuel our desire both when we’re masturbating by ourselves and also when we’re having sex with other people. We get turned on by sexual fantasies.

Let’s take a look at some of the specific sexual fantasies that gay men are really into.

Gay men fantasise about having more than one sexual partner

Researchers have found that fantasies about having sex with multiple partners is something is more common for gay men than it is for straight men. Men that identify as bisexual also lean heavily into the multiple partner fantasy.

One fantasy that both gay men and straight men respond to is cheating on your partner – being unfaithful. A particularly popular aspect of this fantasy is cuckolding – when you know that your partner is having sex with someone else and the humiliation of that is a turn-on for you.

Gay men tend to more into fantasies abut group sex, and also voyeurism.

Having unprotected sex with multiple partners used to be a popular fantasy for gay men, but now – with the advancements in the treatment and prevention of HIV – that is likely to be less significant now that bareback sex is the norm and not a fetish.

Fetish fun plays a prominent role in the sexual fantasies of gay men

Researchers have found that fetish and BDSM is a strong driver of the sexual fantasies of gay men – much more so than for straight men.

Again, the visual aspect of fetish-play is important for gay men – leather, uniforms, and wrestling singlets all deliver a strong sexual response to gay men.

Gay men are also very into the equipment and toys that are associated with fetish play and BDSM. But more vanilla sex-toys are also appealing to gay men – dildos, prostate massagers, and masturbation aids are all readily embraced by gay men.

Gay men may just be better at sex than straight men

Researchers have suggested that gay men are likely to be more comfortable about talking about sex and fantasies than straight men and that this results in higher levels of sexual satisfaction. If straight men aren’t as open to exploring different aspects of sexual pleasure then they are more likely to feel sexually frustrated.

Gay men also have a long history of exploring the use of drugs to help reduce sexual inhibition. From the relatively harmless such as poppers, through to MDMA, and the range of more harmful drugs associated with chemsex.

The power dynamics of sexual encounters can also be an important factor. While gay men frequently explore power dynamics within a sexual encounter – Top versus Bottom, Dom versus Sub – the boundaries of these dynamics are generally clearly understood and contained within fantasy. Straight men are more likely to associate sex with control which is more likely to spill over into abusive and dysfunctional behaviour. -Means Happy 

Fingering Advice For Men, From Lesbians

This article is in honour of all the cis male hands that have disappointed me.

By Gina Tonic

As a bisexual woman, I’ve always found that the best fingering comes from queer encounters rather than a ham-fisted hetero session. I’ve found myself at times looking to the heavens, praying for a finger blasting bible that will right all wrongs and stop my flaps from being scratched up like an activity post for cats.

My mother always told me "if you want something done right, do it yourself". I don’t think she meant getting off – even though I am really good at it – but in this case, I took the tip to mean "make a graphic guide to fingering that she will refuse to read, but be proud that it was published anyway", so I reached out to a few lesbians to get some certifiably solid advice on how to finger someone.

The overwhelming consensus was that, just as every sperm is sacred, every vagina – or asshole (let’s not forget the back entrance) – is different. So what works for one person might be uncomfortable or painful for another. As with all great shags, communication and consent are the best way to please your partner. That said, there are a few practical steps everyone can take towards ensuring a successful fingering.

The first, and possibly most vital, tip is: preparation. Don’t worry, you don’t have to do any finger lunges or anything like that, just employ a bit of common sense, i.e. TRIM YOUR FUCKING NAILS!! Who among us has not experienced a lanced labia caused, mainly, by the kind of man that wears sandals all year round and records covers of The Prodigy on an acoustic guitar that has a rope of yarn for a strap. But Miranda, 26, promises this is not a male-exclusive problem. “I have been scratched up by some long-nailed femmes,” she tells me. “Nothing kills the vibe more than you Edward Scissorhands-ing my pussy.”

As a long-nailed femme who has been nailed by her fair share of femmes myself, I would also suggest investing in some latex gloves. As well as being a great protective barrier for fingering and fisting, using gloves in the bedroom means you don’t have to give up getting acrylics.

One of the worst feelings in the whole world is inserting or removing a dry tampon. The same can be said of getting fingered. If the passage is not wet, avoid putting anything in – but a drought at the watering hole doesn’t necessarily mean that your partner isn’t having fun. If you’re sure that they are, and you’re sure they want your digits inside of them, reach for the lube before sliding a finger in.

On that note, the second big tip is to catch yourself on to the many varieties of lube available and make sure you pick the best product for your play. Different lubes have different bases and suit different needs. While a silicone lube might be better for your ass, they should not be used with most sex toys (as they will break down the fantastic plastic of your Rampant Rabbit). If you’re playing exclusively with a pussy, a water-based lubricant is perfect for maintaining pH balance and treating vaginal dryness.

It’s also crucial to note that penetration is not solely what fingering should be about. Charlotte, 27, goes as far as to suggest that “fingering should not be the same as penetration”, and that the only time she did get fingered by a cis man he made the mistake of “going about it like that's what he'd be doing with his dick if I'd have let him.” Less delicately, Miranda described her experience of a male technique as being basically a “finger stabbing.”

For a lot of cis women – including myself – a simple finger blasting isn’t enough to get off on. Only around 25 percent of penetrative vaginal sex leads to orgasm, so to give your girl a wide-on I’d thoroughly recommend reaching for the clit (GENTLY). That said, it’s also been argued that a vaginal orgasm is the same as a clitoral one, so perfecting your pinky punch under the hood as well as in the love tunnel comes at an equal importance. Luckily, our lesbians have all angles covered.

Alex – my literal ex-girlfriend – honed in on some specific advice for slipping a finger in. “You always want to aim for the g spot (that little peach pit bit a couple of inches back and up from the entrance of the vagina) or, if you’re trying to replicate being fucked with something larger than fingers,” she advises, “press downwards while you’re moving in and out.”

However, as anyone who watched series two of Sex Education will know, a formula for fingering won’t always work in your favour. When Otis tells Ruthie, the resident lesbian on Sex Education, about his clockwork method for fingering, she laughs at him. Alex, one of the resident lesbians for this article, agreed: “The worst mistake you can make is going in with a set routine and thinking that’ll get me off. As fake deep and cringey as it sounds, you’ve really gotta listen to the person’s body and work out what they respond positively to.”

Amelie, 22, gives similar advice. “Don’t take one sign and run with it. Just because I moaned once does not mean you should repeat that action aggressively till I cum,” they say. “Fingering is all in the variation! And that twisty/flicky/jabby movement you did that one time was definitely fun, but it only stays fun when sprinkled in with your other moves.”

Going with the motion of the ocean has repeatedly been brought up as a key skill for fingering here, but having a few tricks up your sleeve can be the difference between fondling a flap aimlessly and making them squirt up the wall. For a guy that’s used to wanking himself off, Alex advises that you “think of the clit as a mini penis, and interact with it like that.”

“While you only really see the top bit, don’t stop there,” he continues. “Mix rubbing or stroking the clit with rolling it gently in between the tips of your fingers. That way you’re stimulating more surface area. You can kind of jerk it off by grabbing and massaging the labia surrounding it.”

Armed with a veritable bounty of fingering knowledge, it feels apt to end this piece on a romantic note. Amelie advised me that, out of all their sexual experiences, the best time they passed second base wasn’t down to the techniques but the atmosphere it happened in.

“My best experience with fingering funnily didn’t involve a whole lot of fingering,” they explain. “She laid me down, and pushed her fingers inside of me slowly, which was hot obviously – but the rest was mainly the teasing that surrounded it, the eye contact, the whispering in my ear. It made it so much hotter and made me feel even more excited when I finally did get to feel her there. Sometimes, the best thing about fingering is everything but.” -Vic

Vaginal vs. Clitoral Orgasm

Scientists have known that women have different types of orgasms, but what makes them different? Are some orgasms better than others?
by Seeker

 In a world riven by conflict and division, surely there is at least one thing we can all agree on: Orgasms are good. But female orgasms actually come in two varieties. Is one better than the other? Amy Shira-Teitel has the details in today's DNews special report.

Both men and women experience orgasms, of course, but scientifically speaking, female orgasms are divided into two types. First, let's define some terms: Female external genitalia - the part you can see - is technically called the vulva. The vagina is actually the internal canal housed by the vulva. And the clitoris is the small, extremely sensitive organ above the vaginal opening. The clitoris was "discovered" by male scientists back in the 16th century, although it's safe to say women were aware of it earlier.

Here's the critical part: The clitoris is the external tip of an entire system of internal nerves and muscles called the clitorourethrovaginal complex, or CUV, that surrounds the vagina and the urethra. Since there are external and internal portions of the CUV, there are two types of orgasms women can experience: clitoral and vaginal.

Most women reach orgasm faster via clitoral stimulation, and with good reason: It has more nerve endings than any other human body part, male or female. But internal vaginal stimulation can also trigger orgasm - in the end, it's the same bundle of nerves and muscles.

Whether vaginal or clitoral, male or female, all orgasms have the same general effect on the human body and brain. Rhythmic contractions relax aroused muscles and the brain issues forth a flood of feel-good hormones like oxytocin, dopamine and prolactin. These chemicals have direct and measurable health benefits. With orgasms, everybody wins. –Seeker

How Much Time Do Couples Spend When They Have Sex?

by Brendan Zietsch

If you’re a non-scientist, you might have once asked yourself, propped against the bedhead after disappointingly quick intercourse, how long does sex “normally” last?

A scientist, though, would phrase the same question in an almost comically obscure way: What is the mean intravaginal ejaculation latency time?

I know there’s a lot more to sex than putting the penis into the vagina and ejaculating, but the rest is not always easy to define (kissing? Rubbing? Grinding?). To keep things simple and specific, we’ll just focus on the time to ejaculation.

Measuring an average time to ejaculation is not a straightforward matter. What about just asking people how long they take, you say? Well, there are two main problems with this. One is that people are likely to be biased upwards in their time estimates, because it’s socially desirable to say you go long into the night.

The other problem is that people don’t necessarily know how long they go for. Sex isn’t something people normally do while monitoring the bedside clock, and unassisted time estimation may be difficult during a transportative session of love-making.

What does the research say?

The best study we have estimating the average time to ejaculation in the general population involved 500 couples from around the world timing themselves having sex over a four-week period—using a stopwatch.

That is as practically awkward as it sounds: participants pressed “start” at penile penetration and “stop” at ejaculation. You may note this could affect the mood somewhat, and might perhaps not exactly reflect the natural flow of things. But—science is rarely perfect, and this is the best we’ve got.

So what did the researchers find? The most striking result is that there was a huge amount of variation. The average time for each couple (that is, averaged across all the times they had sex) ranged from 33 seconds to 44 minutes. That’s an 80-fold difference.

So it’s clear there’s no one “normal” amount of time to have sex. The average (median, technically) across all couples, though, was 5.4 minutes. This means that if you line up the 500 couples from shortest sex to longest sex, the middle couple goes for an average of 5.4 minutes each time they do it.

There were some interesting secondary results, too. For example, condom use didn’t seem to affect the time, and neither did men’s being circumcised or not, which challenges some conventional wisdom regarding penile sensitivity and its relationship to staying power in the sack.

It didn’t much matter which country the couples came from either—unless they came from Turkey, in which case their sex tended to be significantly shorter (3.7 minutes) than couples from other countries (Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States). Another surprising finding was that the older the couple, the shorter the sex, contrary to the prevailing wisdom (probably peddled by older men).

Why do we have sex for so long?

As an evolutionary researcher, all this talk of how long sex lasts make me wonder: Why does it last any time at all? All sex really needs to achieve, it seems, is to put sperm into the vagina. Why all the thrusting and bumping? Instead of sliding the penis in and out many hundreds of times per sexual session, why not just put it in once, ejaculate, and then go have a lemonade and get on with the rest of the day?

Before you say, Because it’s fun to go in and out!, remember evolution doesn’t care about fun per se—it generally only “designs” things to be enjoyable if they helped our ancestors pass on their genes to future generations. For example, even though we like eating food, we don’t chew each mouthful of it for five minutes just to make the enjoyment last longer. That would be inefficient, and so we’ve evolved to find it gross.

Why we last so long is a pretty complicated question with no clear answer, but a clue may be in the way the penis is shaped. In 2003, researchers showed—using artificial vaginas, artificial penises, and artificial sperm (corn syrup)—that the ridge around the head of the penis actually scoops out pre-existing syrup from the vagina.

What this suggests is that men’s repeated thrusting might function to displace other men’s semen before ejaculating, ensuring their own swimmers have a better chance of reaching the egg first. Incidentally, this could explain why it becomes painful for a man to continue thrusting after ejaculating, since that would risk scooping out his own semen as well.

So what to do with this information? My advice would be to try not to think about it during the throes of passion. –Alternet

4 Very Good Reasons Prostitution Shouldn't Be a Crime

A national discussion about the criminalization of nonviolent crime is taking place. Let's make sure we talk about sex work too.

On July 16, 2015, Pres. Obama visited the El Reno Federal Correctional Institution in El Reno, OK, the first sitting president to visit a federal penitentiary. Reflecting on his visit, the president acknowledged, “When they describe their youth, these are young people who made mistakes that aren’t that different from the mistakes I made, and the mistakes that a lot of you guys made.” He added, “The difference is that they did not have the kind of support structures, the second chances, the resources that would allow them to survive those mistakes.”

The visit followed President Obama’s commutation of the sentences of 46 nonviolent drug offenders and a speech at the NAACP convention calling for changes in sentencing laws for nonviolent offenders.

The president’s actions come at a time when many are drawing attention to the failure of the nation’s criminal justice system. There’s a growing movement of both liberals and conservatives, including legislators, civil-rights activists and even the Koch brothers, calling for a reformation of arrest practices (e.g., stop-and-frisk), bail requirements and sentencing guidelines. Liberals point to its inherent unfairness, racism, while conservatives acknowledge its high-costs and high rates of recidivism as signs of failure. Many want fundamental change in the system.   

In the same spirit of rethinking the criminalization of nonviolent offenders, it’s time to rethink the nation’s prostitution laws. According to the most recent FBI data, only 44,090 people were arrested in 2011 for “prostitution and commercialized vice,” a 50 percent drop in arrests from the 2004 total of 87,872. Why the decline? The FBI offers no answer; perhaps law enforcement no longer considers commercial sex a serious crime? And why is commercial sex a criminal offense in all but a handful of counties in Nevada, but estimated to be a multibillion-dollar enterprise?

There are four principle reasons to decriminalize prostitution.

1. Protect sex workers. 

The real victims of commercial sex industry are the women, girls and some young men who are forced (or “choose”) to work in the sex trade. These people most often live in poverty, have suffered physical and/or sexual abuse, lack affordable housing, have limited education, have few job opportunities, have few childcare options and are often non-documented immigrants. 

The decriminalization of prostitution can help bring sex workers — the real victims of this “victimless” crime— out of the social shadows so they could secure labor rights, unemployment benefits, health care and life insurance. More important, sex workers will be more able to secure police protection to deal with threatening or violent situations.  

2. Reduce sex trafficking and street prostitution.

Federal officials insist that sex trafficking has reached epidemic proportion, with between 100,000 and 300,000 people annually at risk. The Department of Homeland Security reports the average age for a girl sex worker at between 12-14 years and 11-13 years for boys. 

The decriminalization of prostitution can help contain sex trafficking. While the U.S. officially remains frozen in 19th-century moralist purity, other first-world countries are adopted a variety of decriminalization strategies that have cut trafficking. They could be models for the U.S.

3. Reduce rape and STDs among sex workers.

Results from a recent report by the National Bureau of Economic Research “suggest that decriminalization could have potentially large social benefits for the population at large — not just sex market participants.” NBER researchers examined a loophole in a Rhode Island law that made street solicitation illegal but decriminalized commercial sex that took place indoors. 

The study found that decriminalization of prostitution contributed to “a large decrease in rapes” and “a large reduction in gonorrhea incidence … for women and men.”  It also found that “decriminalization decreased prostitute arrests, increased indoor prostitution advertising and expanded the size of the indoor prostitution market itself.”

4. Cut government expenditures and increase tax revenues.

The three-strikes and other throw-away-the-keys efforts of the 1970s-‘80s that swelled the nation’s prison population are over. There appears to be no reliable data on the total annual costs expended by all government entities — federal, state and local — for the arrest, prosecution and imprisonment of those busted for prostitution. With regard to confinement, prisoner per diem expenditures are estimated to vary from $175 in New York City to $57 in Dallas; Texas is estimated to pay $6.5 million per year to keep prositutes behind bars. 

The decriminalization of regulated commercial sex could be a new revenue source for hungry state and local governments. Prostitution is legal in a handful of Nevada counties, but state Republicans repeatedly thwart legislative efforts to extend “sin” taxes – e.g., alcohol, tobacco, gambling, slot machine and lotteries – to prostitution.

Christian moralists rail against the immorality of prostitution, especially the sex trafficking of young women. Their condemnations may be well intentioned, but they all too often blame the victim for her moral failure. They decry the consequences of commercial sex, but not the causes. 

Moralists refuse to acknowledge that one must sell oneself in the marketplace to survive. If nothing else, the decriminalization of commercial sex could expose the hypocrisy inherent in the efforts to suppress – as oppose to regulate – consensual and age-appropriate commercial sexual engagements. The decriminalization of commercial sex work could become the next battleground in the effort to revise the criminal justice system. –AlterNet

6 Fascinating Things About Sex Around The World

Who has the most sex? The least? What country is the most satisfied? Do artists get it on more than non-artists? Find out below.
 
While Europeans may think American sex norms are wack, how do other countries compare when it comes to sexual frequency, satisfaction, orgasms, and other sexpectations? Who’s getting the most bang for their bucking? Read on to learn some surprising ins and outs of of the ol’ in and out, and then some.

1. Which country has the most sex?

Despite the United States’ tendency to proclaim “we’re number one!” about, well, everything, when it comes to sexual frequency across the globe, it turns out we don’t come first, or even in the top 20. According to Durex’s Sexual Wellbeing Survey and Face of Global Sex report, which surveyed 26,000 people across 26 countries, age 16 and up, the countries that have the most sex per week are Greece (87 percent had sex at least once a week), Brazil (82 percent), Russia (80), China (78), and Italy (76). The U.S. falls at number 25 on this list, with a paltry rate of 52 percent per week of sex.

2. Before you pack your bags for China…

Though the Chinese purportedly have quite a lot of sex, they also, paradoxically, have the fewest orgasms. Seventy-six percent of Chinese people said they were not able to achieve an orgasm every time they had p-in-v intercourse. On the other end of the rainb-O, Italy, Spain, and Mexico all tied for first place, achieving orgasms 66 percent of the time. The global average was an orgasm rate of 48 percent of the time, and also the rate at which France came (Oui!). And, sadly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, globally, men orgasmed twice as frequently as women.

3. Who has the most satisfying sex?

Forget quantity, what about quality? According to Durex again, the most sexually satisfied country is Nigeria, with a satisfaction rate of 67 percent, followed by Mexico (63), India (61), Poland (54), and Greece (51). Sexual satisfaction was defined as being stress-free, little to no sexual dysfunction, frequency of foreplay and sex, and orgasmic potential. The U.S. ranks slightly higher in this arena, coming in tenth place on the list, with a satisfaction rate of 48 percent, tying with Canada.

Who’s having the least satisfying sex? That would be Japan, which is the only country in the survey that reported a higher percentage of dissatisfaction with their sex lives than satisfaction. It turns out that a proliferation of tentacle porn and used underwear vending machines do not lead to more fulfilling sex. Who knew?

4. Who has the most children?

Stand aside, creepy Duggar family, because the world record for baby-makin’ goes to an 18th-century Russian woman, who gave birth to 69 children in her lifetime (67 of whom survived infancy), and who, it should be said, doesn’t even have a name! She’s known simply as Mrs. Vassilyeva, after her husband Feodor Vassilyev. This exhausted and unsung hero of a woman had 27 pregnancies, which included 16 sets of twins, 7 triplets, and 4 quadruplets.

On the male side, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the title goes to a Moroccan emperor with the highly erotic name of Ismail the Bloodthirsty. Also from the 18th century, which we should probably just go ahead and refer to as The Great Sexcession, Mr. Bloodthirsty is said to have fathered more than 1,000 children, meaning he would have had to father about 15 children a year for 60 years. There’s some dispute over the statistical probability of that many offspring, however, given that Ismail had the tendency to kill his daughters (except when they were from one of his four wives), and the lack of reliable paternity tests back then, among other factors. But arecent paper by Elisabeth Oberzaucher and Karl Grammer showed that it was theoretically possible for one man to sire that many children, using a number of computer simulations and taking into account a range of human fertility estimates.

5. What’s the randiest religion?

According to a study published in the American Sociological Review, Jews are “significantly more likely than Muslims and most other groups to report premarital sex,” according to researcher Amy Adamczyk. The study looked at premarital and extramarital sexual behavior of Muslims in 30 countries and compared the data to that of other major world religions, including Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism. The finding of Jews to be more likely to engage in premarital sex is “consistent with some U.S.-based studies that have compared the sex-related attitudes and behaviors of Jews and Christians, finding that Jews tend to be less conservative,” Adamczyk says. On the flip side, Muslim women were the least likely to report having premarital sex, and also, both Muslim men and women report the least amount of extramarital affairs.

6. Do creative types have more sex than non-creatives?

Do they ever! According to this 2005 study in the academic journal The Proceedings of the Royal Society, professional artists and poets get it on with two or three times as many partners as non-artists. The study found that creatives averaged between four and ten partners, while the insurance adjusters and data analysts of the world typically had three. Researchers also found that the number of sex partners rose with how creative the person in question was, which perhaps explains why so many of us have had sex with very bad poets and interpretative dance macrame sculptors. –Alternet

Japan’s Desperate Housewives Opting For Adulterous Online Dating

It turns out Japanese married couples like sex as much as anyone, but not so much with each other.

In the last year headlines about how celibacy is trending in Japan have gained attention around the world: “No sex please, we’re Japanese,” reports the BBC. But, wait a minute. This is a country where an estimated two trillion yen ($19.3 billion) are spent each year on the legal sex industry. And now it looks like the land of the rising sun is also the land of rising adultery. Ashley Madison—the international web site for married people who want to fool around—is taking Japan by storm.

“Life is short. Have an affair,” the site advises its clients, and when it launched in Japan on June 24 of last year it signed up over 120, 000 members in just ten days. As of March 27 of this year, that membership had grown to 1,074,075 people.

Out of all the markets Ashley Madison has penetrated, Japan was the fastest to reach one million members. If the numbers continue to grow at the current pace, by the end of the year one per cent of the entire Japanese population will have joined. Those numbers do not immediately negate Japan’s sexless marriage problem, but they do suggest that there are over a million people trying to get some action, and the problem may not be so much that married couples don’t want to have sex as that they don’t want to have sex with each other.

The ratio of women to men on the site is about two to one, which shows that many of Japan’s desperate housewives are determined to be desperate no more.

“There’s no doubt in an intelligent Japanese woman’s mind that her husband, who probably isn’t making love to her all that often, is somehow partaking in sexual encounters somewhere out there,” said Noel Biderman, the founder and CEO of Ashley Madison. “And to her, in what is becoming a more equitable society, that seems like BS,” he told The Daily Beast. “She doesn’t want a life of celibacy—that’s not how she’s engineered either.”

In a survey to be released on April 2, which targeted 75,000 users around the world (3, 500 in Japan), there are some interesting statistics.

First of all, Japanese women lead the world in their rush to have affairs, and, yes, 55 percent of Japanese women have an affair because they’re not having enough sex with their husband. This matches the results of a national survey of 14,000 people by condom-maker Sagami, which found that 55 percent of married couples considered their relationship sexless. By comparison, the women surveyed in other parts of the world cited lack of sex as the reason for an affair only 40 percent of the time.

It seems that Japanese people also don’t feel much guilt about their affairs: 8 percent of women and 19 percent of men throughout the world said in the survey that they felt bad about their adultery. (Remember, the people surveyed have already signed up for a fling.) But in Japan, hey, the guilt quotient is only 8 percent for men and for women just 2 percent, or about a quarter of the world average.

And not only are people in Japan not guilty about their affairs, they’re also proud of them.

“In America lots of women use Ashley Madison, but I don’t think they tell their friends about it. I think they’re telling their friends about it here. I think there’s some ‘virality’ going on. Not only are they unashamed, they are, in a sense, proud,” said Biderman.

Japanese people, who typically follow Shinto and Buddhist religions, don’t have as strong a sense of guilt over sex as people in the West, who follow Judeo-Christian traditions, with their strong concept of sin.

The Kojiki, one of the classics of the Shinto religion, contains a remarkably bawdy interlude: The sun goddess is lured out of her cave another goddess performs an impromptu striptease before the other assembled deities and concludes by masturbating on stage. The hoots and hollers and all the commotion bring the sun goddess out from the darkness, probably because she’s missing out on the fun. Even Buddhist priests have sung the praises of both legitimate and illicit intercourse.

In other words, Japanese people aren’t as concerned about being sent to hell for having sex with someone else’s husband or wife.

In the survey, 84 percent of Japanese women and 61 percent of Japanese men answered that having a fling has a good effect on their marriage.

“When people jump into an affair, they alleviate a lot of psychological stress on themselves, because they were pretty unhappy and lonely before, and now they have some attention being paid to them,” said Biderman (who is known as “the King of Infidelity”). “They’re less agitated about their children and their partner. I even get anecdotal e-mails from women, in particular, who say that.”

Ashley Madison had figured that frustrated Japanese women would be a lucrative market. There are plenty of hostess clubs, “soaplands,” and other services for men who are seeking something else outside of their marriage. Not so for their wives. But in some respects targeting women has proved difficult. The company has not been able to get a single female-focused TV channel to agree to run any of its ads. “Japan is a very enlightened sexual culture but refuses to acknowledge it,” said Biderman.

Paradoxically, the experience of online arranged adultery may have gained wider acceptance because of the long tradition of family- arranged marriages known as o-miai. In practice these are arranged dates between a man and a woman who share common goals, looking to settle down, marry and have children. The Ashley Madison paradigm also depends to a great extent on shared goals: both partners are looking to not get married, not upend their family life, and not settle down. They want to stir things up in the bedroom, not the courts.

So Ashley Madison expects continued high growth in the Japanese market. Currently, the country is ranked fifth in overall members, behind Brazil and the United States, but Biderman thinks Japan will move up the ranks.

Notwithstanding the carefully guarded anonymity of Ashley Madison’s users, the trend is likely to be very well documented. Japan leads the world in selfie porn: 84 percent of women and 89 percent of men love to take footage of themselves in the act. That’s far ahead of everyone else: in the rest of the world only 52 percent of women and 60 percent of men take photographs of themselves having sex.

So, now maybe we know why Japanese tourists love carrying around their cameras so much. But here’s another curiosity: while fellatio, frottage, and just about every conceivable sexual service besides actual vaginal penetration can be purchased legally in Japan, pornography is still censored. The scenes of penetration are obscured with masking or blurring. This may account for Japanese fascination of taking taboo “non-edited” porn on their own initiative. “Oh, that’s what it looks like,” may be the reaction for many home directors.

So, while it’s hard to deny statistics showing Japan has a low sexual frequency rate, the focus on sex within marriage may be misleading. According to the Sagami survey cited previously, in cases where the married man or woman was having an affair, the number of sexual encounters per month more than doubled. –Daily Beast