A n article in the US magazine the Atlantic this week described one man's childhood horror of boys' open changing rooms and naked school swimming lessons. It felt like an injustice, he said, compared with the privacy that the girls were afforded — and this sense of injustice was only compounded in later life by public medical examinations in the army and extensive training on preserving a patient's modesty in medical school, which mysteriously left out the needs of men. The message was clear throughout his life, says the author: women get toilet and changing cubicles, gowns at the doctors' surgery and separate examination rooms. Men get told: man up, pants down. It is a serious issue, and one that shouldn't be swept under the carpet with the vague protest that women have to "put up with more". The dreaded charade of undressing in front of your peers of the same sex is something most of us will have encountered at some point, whether in school or that one time you pledged to do "a year of rigorous exercise" and then went to the gym for a single minute workout.

Meredith Chivers is a creator of bonobo pornography. The bonobo film was part of a series of related experiments she has carried out over the past several years. She showed the short movie to men and women, straight and gay. To the same subjects, she also showed clips of heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a chiseled man walking naked on a beach and a well-toned woman doing calisthenics in the nude. While the subjects watched on a computer screen, Chivers, who favors high boots and fashionable rectangular glasses, measured their arousal in two ways, objectively and subjectively.

To conduct the study , Johnstonbaugh, a sociology doctoral student, had more than 1, college students from seven universities fill out an online survey asking them about their rationale for sexting. But the odds were four times higher for women than men to say that they sent a nude in order to prevent the recipient from losing interest or to prevent the person from looking at images of others. I sent one. Women were twice as likely as men to say they sent a sexy pic to boost their confidence. So sometimes, sending nudes is a way to assert sexual agency.