Poorer teenagers begin having sex sooner: Study

New York  :  Can a person’s socio-economic background influence when he becomes sexually active? Yes, research reveals.
Researchers, psychologists and others in the medical field have known for years that genes play an important role in how soon teens begin to engage in sexual activity.
Genes determine when a teenager reaches puberty, and this is a strong factor for what is known as studying ‘At First Sex’ (AFS).
However, a recent study showed that in low-income families experiencing stress, environmental factors will be an even stronger determinant as to when they begin having sex.
A comparison of adolescents from low-income families and more affluent families showed a remarkable difference between the two.
Adolescents from more socio-economic advantaged families were much more influenced by genes when it came to AFS.
Teenagers from low socio-economic status and ethnic-minority families were more influenced by their environment, said the study done at University of Texas in Austin.

Girls’ suffer bad romance more than boys

Caught in a bad romantic relationship? Do not give a damn if things go wrong especially if you are a girl. Else, you may suffer mentally a lot when romances unfold differently than you imagined.
According to research, for adolescent girls, such a situation would lead to negative implications for their mental health.

“I found that girls’ risk of severe depression, thoughts of suicide and suicide attempt increase the more their relationships diverge from what they imagined,” said Brian Soller, an assistant professor of sociology and a senior fellow at University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in the US.
“Conversely, I found no evidence that bad romantic relationship contributes to poor mental health among boys,” Soller added.
To understand this, Soller measured relationship inauthenticity in 5,300 high school students, examining the mental health consequences of mismatches between adolescents’ ideal and actual relationships.
In the initial interview, researchers provided adolescents with a number of cards describing events that often occur within relationships, including everything from hand holding and kissing to sex.
Roughly a year later, the respondents repeated the exercise.
During both interviews, researchers asked participants about their mental health.
As for why relationship inauthenticity increased the risk of mental health problems for girls, but not for boys, Soller said, “Romantic relationships are particularly important components of girls’ identities and are, therefore, strongly related to how they feel about themselves – good or bad.”
As a result, relationships that diverge from what girls envision for themselves are especially damaging to their emotional well-being.
On the other hand, Soller said relationships are not as important to boys’ identities.
“Boys may be more likely to build their identities around sports or other extracurricular activities so this could be why they are not affected by relationship inauthenticity,” he noted.
Helping girls build their identities around things other than romantic relationships may mitigate the effects of relationship inauthenticity on their mental health, the researchers noted in a paper published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior

Believe it! These females have penises

It may sound obnoxiously bizarre but these females have penis-like organs that leave males gasping for more. They even mate for an impressive 40-70 hours!
In a first such case, researchers have discovered cave insects in Brazil with rather novel sex lives.
The insects belonging to the genus Neotrogla are the first example of an animal with sex-reversed genitals.
“Although sex-role reversal has been identified in several different animals, Neotrogla is the only example in which the intromittent organ is also reversed,” said Kazunori Yoshizawa from Hokkaido University in Japan.
During copulation, female insects insert an elaborate, penis-like organ into males’ much-reduced, vagina-like opening.
The researchers speculate that the insects’ sex organs and sex-role reversal may have been driven over evolutionary time by the resource-poor cave environment in which the bugs live.
“Males of the genus provide females with nutritious seminal gifts in addition to sperm, making it advantageous for females to mate at a higher rate,” Yoshizawa added.
To learn more, the researchers observed the mating behaviour to find that the penis-like structure, termed the gynosome, is inserted into males and used to receive generous capsules of nourishment and sperm.
Once inside a male, the membranous part of the female gynosome inflates and numerous spines internally anchor the two insects together.
Neotrogla offers new opportunities to test ideas about sexual selection, conflict between the sexes, and the evolution of novelty, the researchers noted.
The study was published in the journal Current Biology.