Ah. Now I understand the title of London-based professor Rona Moss-Morris’s presentation to the recent Innovations in Health Psychology conference in Clyde: “Sex please: Even for the British”. There was no Benny Hill music, or Sid James-style leering. Instead, a presentation on a programme of work to address the sex-related challenges of multiple sclerosis, punctuated with some really moving material from participants.
But let me take a step back. I’m assuming sex is good for us, but is that the case? There’s surprisingly little research on the topic, which is kind of indicated in the title of a 2012 review article, “Is good sex good for you?”
Authors Lisa Diamond and David Huebner open by quoting an American surgeon general from a decade before, who made the claim that sexual health is “inextricably” linked with both mental and physical health. Yet we don’t know very much about the nature of that connection.
So, let’s put this question to rest. Yes, sex, and particularly sex in the context of an intimate relationship, is good for our health. Not only does frequency of orgasm predict lower mortality (as in more orgasms per week at baseline means you’re less likely to die of any cause in the following 10 years) but that relationship shows what’s called a dose-response relationship – it’s a straight and climbing line.
One caveat is that this comes from a study that looked only at men. And Welshmen, at that. But there’s also now evidence that there are similar, though weaker, effects for sexual activity and wellbeing among women. Some studies suggest sexual enjoyment may be relatively more important for women than simple frequency of sex.
But before you tear off your clothes and hit the bedroom for a dose of wellbeing, although there may be a linear dose-response relationship between orgasm and health in men, the same doesn’t apply to frequency for everyone. Sex once a week seems to be the sweet spot for couples. There’s now quite compelling evidence that couples who canoodle less than once a week are less healthy (and happy) than couples who hit the once-a-week target, but going at it like rabbits to exceed that weekly dose doesn’t mean you’re any healthier.
Multiple sclerosis is a chronic disease in which the immune system attacks your nervous system, damaging the myelin sheath around nerve fibres. You can think of this a little like rats (or in my household, a rabbit called Wilfred) nibbling at the insulation around the cable that carries the signal from your aerial to your TV. When that happens, your picture gets grainy, but when it’s your nerves, this means numbness, muscle weakness and vision problems, among other symptoms.
Obviously, things like loss of sensation can interfere with some of the basic nuts and bolts of sex, but that’s not all that MS sufferers say gets in the way. Moss-Morris, based at King’s College London, notes that some medications for MS bring secondary challenges.
There are also “tertiary” challenges related to how you think about yourself, the anxiety of worrying about how you’re going to “perform” and the loss of spontaneity if you’re using medications to help with sex. And there’s the psychological impact of all of this on your intimate relationship.
That’s where psychology might come in. I’m going to have to follow up with Moss-Morris as this work develops, but she has a sense of the shape it’s going to take. A chunk of it is going to be around education – what kinds of aids and accommodations facilitate sex and feeling good about sex? But also an emphasis on developing communication with one’s partner, which – just like psychological researchers’ apparent reticence in conducting research on sex – isn’t something we’re necessarily good at.
