Women have more sexual fantasies during fertile periods of the month, a new study finds.

The research is one of many studies finding differences in women's sexual interest across the menstrual cycle. For example, a 2007 study in the journal Hormones and Behavior found that around ovulation, when pregnancy is possible, women say they prefer macho, masculine guys. An April 2011 study even suggested that women who are in the more fertile phase of the month are more likely to see Georgia O'Keeffe's suggestive paintings as erotic.

The new study finds that sexual fantasies increase, and lead to more arousal in women, during fertile periods. Women also reported a higher proportion of men in their fantasies during fertile times of the month.

"When it mattered most, women were fantasizing more about men," said study author Samantha Dawson, a graduate researcher at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada.

Dawson and her colleagues focused on fantasies because such sexual daydreams aren't dependent on the availability of sex partners or other outside forces. That means fantasies may be more representative of sexual interest than how much real-life sex a woman has, Dawson told LiveScience. [ How to Spot a Fertile Woman ]

The researchers paid 27 single heterosexual women, mostly college students, to keep a daily online diary of their sexual fantasies for one month. None of the women were on hormonal birth control. By counting back from the last menstrual period, the researchers targeted a 10-day window in which each woman would likely ovulate.

During those 10 days, each woman took a do-it-yourself urine test to detect ovulation, much like the fertility tests available at drug stores. The tests were in neutral packaging, and women weren't told that they being tested for ovulation.

The women in the study reported, on average, 0.77 sexual fantasies a day — much higher than earlier work, which had suggested that men fantasize about once per day and women only once a week. Those earlier studies, however, asked participants to look back over time and recall their fantasies. A day-by-day approach is likely more accurate, because it does not rely so much on memory, the researchers reported online March 10 in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior.

In the three days surrounding ovulation, fantasies became more frequent, reaching an average of about 1.3 per day. Women's reports also indicated these fantasies were more arousing than fantasies during nonfertile periods. [ Sex Quiz: Myths, Taboos & Bizarre Facts ]

The researchers expected to see fertile women become more "malelike" in their fantasies during fertile periods, given this increased interest in sex. Men generally report that their fantasies are more visual and explicit than female fantasies, which tend to contain more focus on emotion. But in fact, women actually became more femalelike in their fertile fantasies.

"They're still focusing on the emotions and the feelings that they have toward this partner in the fantasies as opposed to what the partner looks like, how masculine they are and what sexual acts they're actually engaging in," Dawson said.

The researchers did find, however, that women's interest in men peaked during fertile periods. Women are generally more fluid in their fantasies than men, Dawson said. One 2006 study presented at the International Academy of Sex Research in the Netherlands found that 25 percent of heterosexual women reported that their fantasies included other women, while only 10 percent of heterosexual men included other men in their sexual fantasies.

In the current study, 52 percent of participants reported fantasies that included women. Still, fantasies were primarily populated by men, with about 95 percent male characters across the menstrual cycle. During ovulation, however, the proportion of men went up by a percentage point or so, suggesting that fertility hormones do influence straight women's sexual interests.

"You're going to want to have sex with someone who can actually pass genes on to you, so a man versus a woman," Dawson said.

The researchers also had the women look at images of masculine and feminine men and women at three points across the menstrual cycle, but they did not find more interest in masculine men, or men in general, during fertile periods. The lack of a finding probably has more to do with the fact that the same photographs were repeated at each session than anything hormonal, Dawson said.

The message of the research is that psychologists need to be careful when studying female sexual desire, Dawson said.

"It's really important that we are conscious in these changes of female sexuality when we are researching components of women's sexual interest," Dawson said, adding that little things could make a big difference, "even the timing of when they're answering the questionnaire or when we're assessing sexual arousal."

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By Stephanie Pappas
LiveScience 

With a statement decrying the Obama administration's "blind eye" toward enforcement of federal obscenity laws, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum has brought the subject of pornography into the presidential campaign. But some of Santorum's statements about the ills of explicit material may not hold up.

In a statement first posted last week on his campaign website, Santorum cites "a wealth of research" demonstrating that pornography causes "profound brain changes" and widespread negative effects in both adults and children, including violence against women. There's no such evidence of brain changes, researchers say — though the question of pornography's harmfulness is still in some dispute.

"It's very easy if you want to support one side or the other, to pull a particular study," said Paul Wright, an assistant professor of telecommunications at Indiana University, Bloomington, who has studied sex in the media. "Anybody can support one side or another by simply isolating a particular study and talking about it."

Most experimental studies on the effects of pornography have focused on college students, given their easy proximity to the psychology lab. Looked at individually, these studies seem mixed. Some find that exposing young men to porn increases sexist attitudes and even a willingness to inflict pain, often tested by having the men inflict what they believe are real electric shocks on a woman. (The shocks are fake.) Other studies find little to no effect. [Sex Quix: Myths, Taboos & Bizarre Facts]

To pull this disparate research together, psychologists depend on meta-analyses, or studies that analyze data from multiple single studies. Using this technique, Wright said, the effects of pornography are "fairly clear."

"In experimental settings where actual aggressive behavior is measured as the outcome measure among males, both violent pornography and nonviolent pornography increased the probability of subsequent aggression," Wright told LiveScience.

Not all researchers put stock in experimental findings, however.

"The question became do these little tests that we're having these guys do [in the lab], do they really apply to real life?" said Chris Ferguson, a psychologist at Texas A&M University who studies the link between media and violent behavior.

In real life, of course, researchers can't carry out controlled experiments on pornography. One alternative strategy has been to look at sexual violence rates in countries right after pornography is decriminalized. These studies, many done by Milton Diamond, the director of the Pacific Center for Sex and Society at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, usually find that rates of sexual violence go down after pornography becomes more prevalent. Diamond sees this as evidence that pornography actually provides a catharsis for men who have sexually aggressive tendencies. [A Brief History of Porn]

"The majority of the pornography dissipates the arousal by masturbation and I think that works both for males and females," Diamond told LiveScience. "And usually after somebody masturbates and they have their orgasm, they're not as interested in sex as they were 10 minutes before, so I think it dissipates the interest to go out and do anything illegal."

There's no proof of this catharsis effect in the countrywide studies. It's not even possible to firmly link the drop in violence to pornography at all, given the large number of other factors that could play a role. The decriminalization of pornography could go hand-in-hand with other societal changes that influence sexual violence, Ferguson said. Women might even be influenced by a more porn-saturated society to accept violence against themselves and not report sexual aggression, Wright pointed out. Or some other, non-porn-related factor might play a role.

Nonetheless, some researchers see the countrywide correlations as telling.

"When you have people that are making these kinds of claims, that it's a major contributor to men's aggression toward women, it makes sense to look at if that societal data point exists," Ferguson said. [Internet Pornography Statistics]

If the laboratory studies are correct that pornography does increase male violence, it's a small to moderate effect, said Wright, who is quick to point out that he does not advocate censorship in any case.

Researcher Neil Malamuth of the University of California, Los Angeles, has found that exposure to pornography doesn't affect the average man. But for men with other risk factors that predispose them toward sexual violence, "it can add fuel to the fire," Malamuth said.

"It can make a person who perhaps has a certain proclivity, a certain inclination, a certain risk profile even more likely to act out in a sexually aggressive way," Malamuth said.

Risky characteristics include hostility toward women, a narcissistic personality, and a tendency to derive gratification from power and control over women, as well as background characteristics such as growing up in a violent home.

Perhaps different studies are capturing different proportions of men with these characteristics, which would explain the conflicting results, Malamuth said.

The focus on the link between pornography and aggression glosses over other potential pitfalls of porn, including working conditions for the porn actors and the pressure on women to look or act like a porn star. But some researchers are taking a closer look at the potentially positive sign of sexually explicit media. In surveys, pornography users generally see porn as a boon, said Malamuth.

"Pornography may have many beneficial effects for some people in their sexual lives, and many don't see themselves as harmed in any way," Malamuth said.

In one study published this month in the International Journal of Intercultural Relations, University of Hawaii at Manoa researchers compared poses of women in photographs taken from popular pornography websites, magazines and porn-star portfolios, in Norway, the United States and Japan. These three countries were chosen because they fall in different portions of the United Nations' Gender Empowerment Measure, a measure of women's political and economic power in a nation. Norway is No.1 globally on the scale, the U.S. is No. 15, and Japan is No. 54.

The researchers compared "empowering" and "disempowering" poses in the popular pictorial pornography of each nation. An example of a disempowering photograph would be a woman tied up or contorted, with little care given to her own comfort. An empowering photograph would be the opposite, for example an unbound woman facing the camera with confidence.

The researchers found that disempowering photographs were equally common across all three countries. But Norway had the highest number of empowering photographs, followed by the U.S. The findings suggest that pornography may mirror the gender equality or lack thereof of society at large, according to study researcher Dana Arakawa, a doctoral student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

"It's a reflection of what our culture produces to show what is sexy about women or what should be considered a sexual ideal," Arakawa told LiveScience. The fact that relatively equal Norway exhibits more examples of "empowering" images of sexual women is heartening, Arakawa said. Most Americans have a vision of porn stars as stereotypically pouting Playboy bunnies, but that view of sexuality is limited in scope, she said.

"There is variety," Arakawa said. "Pornography isn't just what we know of in the U.S."

More from LiveScience:

• 10 Surprising Sex Statistics
• Fight, Fight, Fight: The History of Human Aggression
• 6 (Other) Great Things Sex Can Do For You

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By Christopher Wanjek
LiveScience

Sex education is failing to reduce adolescent birthrates in conservative states, according to a new study.

Perhaps paradoxically, states with a majority conservative population and higher degree of religiosity tend to have higher teen birthrates. The findings suggest that the social structure of the state, such as the degree of conservatism, can undermine the effect of the sex curricula.

The researchers, from Washington University in St. Louis (WUSL), do not recommend abstinence-based education, but rather crafting sex education curricula that take into account the influences of a state's sociopolitical composition. The study appears today (Feb. 6) in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

The U.S. adolescent birthrate is by far the highest among industrialized nations. The birthrate among girls ages 15 to 19 was 39.1 per 1,000 teens in this age group in 2009, the most recent year for which statistics are available. The rate in Western Europe ranges from about 24 per 1,000 teens in the U.K. (slightly lower than the U.S. white non-Hispanic rate) to four in the Netherlands.

Broken down by race, the U.S. rate ranges from 70.1 among Hispanic Americans to 14.6 among Asian Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The rate is falling, however, and is at its lowest point since recordkeeping began 70 years ago. Health experts cannot fully explain the cause for the decline after a recent peak in the 1980s, nor do they know the reason for disparity from state to state. Thus, there is an ongoing debate over the efficacy of comprehensive sexuality-based programs, which teach about both abstinence and condom use to reduce the risk of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, compared with abstinence-based programs, which exclude information about birth control and safe sex.

Researchers led by Patricia Cavazos-Rehg of WUSL narrowed their analysis to birthrates among girls ages 15 to 17 in 24 U.S. states during years of steady decline from 1997 to 2005. (The national birthrates climbed slightly in 2006 and 2007 before declining again in 2008 and 2009.) They found what many researchers have stated previously — that an increase in comprehensive sex education in school is associated with lower adolescent birthrates. [ 10 Surprising Sex Statistics ]

The association disappears, however, when the researchers controlled for state characteristics, such as religiosity and abortion policies. The apparent irony is that states with higher religiosity rankings and greater political conservatism had higher adolescent birthrates.

That much was not a total surprise. Researchers at Drexel University reported a similar finding in 2009 in the journal Reproductive Health. The latest findings provide the added twist that a state's level of conservatism might compromise the value or quality of sex education.

The WUSL researchers postulate that girls living in conservative states or counties either get a watered-down version of the sex education curriculum, disregard the lesson, or are less willing or able to have an abortion, all leading to higher statewide teen birthrates.

"State adolescent births vary widely, and these disparities across states should be acknowledged as a major public health concern," Cavazos-Rehg told LiveScience. She noted the difference in birthrates among girls ages 15 to 17 in Arkansas and New Hampshire. Arkansas, with high conservatism, had the highest birthrate in this study, 34.8 per 1,000 girls in this age range. New Hampshire, with high liberalism, had the lowest birthrate, 9.7. [ Teen Pregnancy: A 'Winnable' Public Health Battle? ]

Yet the analysis failed to consider pregnancy rates, which Cavazos-Rehg said are more difficult to obtain than birthrates. Could it be that, despite sex education, girls in both conservative and liberal states are getting pregnant at about the same rate, and that the girls in Arkansas are carrying their babies to term, perhaps as a result of higher religiosity, a lack of access to abortion services, or both?

The analysis also assumed that statewide data faithfully represented all schools within the state. But states are large geographic entities with many different school districts and schools, which individually make choices about what to offer in terms of sex education. Policies are made primarily at the local and individual school level.

"The study shows the difficulty of mounting an intervention at the state level that would be sufficient to shift teenage birthrates," said Freya Sonenstein, director for the Center for Adolescent Health Promotion and Disease Prevention at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "But at the local and school levels, there is plenty of other evidence that implementing particular curriculums can produce improvements in students' risk-taking behaviors."

Cavazos-Rehg said she hopes to conduct a follow-up study with data on pregnancy and sexual behavior. Yet for now, she added, "though it still remains unclear as to what 'truly effective' sex education is, what we now know is that any future evaluations of sex education must consider the effects of sociopolitical characteristics in comprehensive analyses."

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An experimental herpes vaccine protected young women against only one of the two types of the sexually transmitted virus, dashing hopes for widespread use of the treatment, researchers reported in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

For reasons that aren’t clear, the vaccine protected against herpes simplex virus type 1, known as HSV1, but not type 2, known as HSV2, the study of more than 8,000 women aged 18 to 30 found.

“I think this is the end of the vaccine,” said coauthor Dr. Peter A. Leone, an infectious disease specialist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “It would be difficult to imagine marketing a vaccine that would only work against HSV1.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in six Americans ages 14 to 49 is infected with HSV2. Nearly 60 percent of adults in the U.S. are infected with HSV1, federal health figures show.

Still, Leone and his fellow investigators called the vaccine against type 1 “a substantial step forward” in the quest for a future vaccine to protect against both types of herpes.

That's important because many people still think that the type 1 herpes virus causes only cold sores. “It used to be we’d think HSV1 above the waist, HSV2 below the waist,” Leone said.

In his study, though, HSV1 was a more common cause of genital disease in the women who didn’t get the herpes vaccine than HSV2. Scientists have assumed that people have to engage in oral sex to get genital HSV1 disease, Leone says, but his study didn’t find an association.

Women who weren’t infected with herpes at the beginning of the study were randomly assigned to receive either three shots of the herpes vaccine or three shots of the hepatitis A vaccine.

Two previous studies of the vaccine involved heterosexual couples in which either the man or woman was infected with herpes. Those found that the vaccine protected against both types of herpes in women, but neither of the types in men.

Perhaps having regular sex with an infected man primed the women’s immune systems to fight HSV1 and HSV2, or maybe they were naturally resistant, Leone and his coauthors theorized. Leone said it might not have worked for men because the skin covering the penis is different from the membranes lining the vagina and cervix.

So what’s next?

“We’re going to need a different approach,” Leone said. His trial used a vaccine containing an HSV protein designed to trigger an immune response against the virus. Maybe, he said, a vaccine that uses weakened live virus -- like the chickenpox vaccine -- would work better.

Meanwhile, Leone said, many Americans live in fear of contracting herpes. “The idea that you can transmit this and not know it terrifies people.”

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A California man is vowing to continue his do-it-yourself sperm donor operation, despite efforts of federal health officials to crack down on the free service.

Trent C. Arsenault, 36, of Fremont, Calif., told msnbc.com that he has fathered 14 children -- with four more on the way -- and donated sperm to between 60 and 75 families since he started the online operation in 2006.

“Every time I log into Facebook, I’m overwhelmed with all the pictures from the families,” said Arsenault, who regards his donations as a way to help low-income people struggling with infertility.

Last year, federal Food and Drug Administration officials delivered a letter ordering Arsenault to “cease manufacturing,” or halt his service, because the computer security expert had not followed regulations governing safety precautions for transmission of human cells or tissues through donor clinics.

“We have legitimate concerns,” said Shelly Burgess, a spokeswoman for the FDA.

But Arsenault was allowed to continue the operation while the agency decided whether to grant him a hearing on the matter, according to his lawyers.

The lawyers, who work for the nonprofit legal firm Cause of Action in Washington, D.C., argue that Arsenault shouldn’t be held to clinic sperm donor standards because his contracts with recipients are individual intimate partner arrangements allowed under the law.

No hearing has yet been scheduled, Burgess said. Arsenault could face penalties including court action if the agency concludes that his acts were a violation of federal regulations. 

Would-be lovers wondering whether to go forward with a new relationship might heed the advice of Russian scientists: Take a deep whiff.

Sniffing a potential partner’s scent could tell whether Mr. Right has a sexually transmitted disease, according to a small study that found that gonorrhea-infected men smelled “putrid” to a bevy of young ladies.

“Our research revealed that infection disease reduces odor attractiveness in humans …” wrote Mikhail Moshkin, a professor at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Russia, and the lead author of research published in the most recent issue of the Journal of Sexual Medicine.

The off-putting scent may be subtle, more a chemical warning than a blast of body odor, but it definitely has an effect, according to the experiment conducted by Moshkin and his colleagues.

The researchers had long observed that certain animals, such as mice and rats, were not as attracted to the scents of other critters when they were infected with disease. They wondered whether humans, too, would be turned off by the scent of an infected person, particularly one harboring an STD.

So they invited 34 strapping Russian guys, ages 17 to 25, to donate samples of armpit sweat and spit for the cause of science. The group included 13 young men with gonorrhea, 16 who were healthy and five who had had the disease but were successfully treated.

Then they found 18 female students aged 17 to 20 from Kemerovo State University in Russia who were willing to serve as sweat-sniffers.

They obtained sweat samples by dressing the men in tight-fitting T-shirts with cotton pads sewn into the armpits. After an hour of sweating, men bagged their shirts and the pads were placed in glass vials for the women to sniff.

The results couldn’t have been more obvious. The women ranked the infected men less than half as high as healthy or recovered guys on a “pleasantness score” that assessed scent.

And when they were asked to characterize the scent, the gals said that nearly 50 percent of the infected men’s sweat smelled “putrid." (To be fair, the gals also said that 30 percent of sweat from healthy men and less than 40 percent of sweat from treated men smelled putrid, but these are guys -- and it was significantly higher for the gonorrhea group.)

The take-away message, the researchers found, was that it appears that humans, like other animals, might use scent to sniff out appropriate mates.

“We can conclude that unpleasant body odor of infected persons can reduce the probability of a dangerous partnership,” the scientists say.

Heeding olfactory cures might not signal the right partner, but they could warn against the wrong one – unless, of course, the guy uses deodorant.

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Federal health experts say Yaz and other widely-used birth control pills should carry stronger labeling information that emphasizes recent evidence that the drugs have a slightly higher risk of blood clots than older drugs.

The Food and Drug Administration's panel of experts voted 21-5 Thursday that labeling on the popular drugs made by Bayer is inadequate and should be updated with information from several recent studies.

Yaz, its predecessor Yasmin and related prescriptions use a manmade hormone called drospirenone, which mimics the naturally occurring female hormone progesterone.

Panelists spent more than nine hours discussing often conflicting data on the blood clot risk of drospirenone-containing drugs compared with older medications. While the group disagreed on the quality of the evidence, the overwhelming majority said it should be made more explicit in the label, including the potentially fatal nature of blood clots.

"Clearly the wording is inadequate and incomplete," said Dr. Richard Bockman of New York's Hospital for Special Surgery. "Adverse events have to be made graphic so physicians and patients are aware of the consequences."

In an earlier vote, panelists voted 15-11 that the pills remain a beneficial option for preventing pregnancy. The majority opinion amounts to a vote of confidence that the drugs should remain on the market, though well over a third of panelists voted against the drug's overall benefit, especially given numerous other oral contraceptives available.

"I can see no real group of patients that this drug benefited over existing alternatives," said Mark Woods of New York University School of Medicine. "Without any clear benefit, and given the potentially catastrophic risk, I voted no."

Approved in 2006, Yaz grew into the best-selling birth control pill in the U.S. by 2008, backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in TV and magazine advertising that emphasized its ability to clear up acne and other hormonal side effects. But prescriptions have fallen more than 80 percent in the last two years amid safety concerns and a consumer backlash against misleading advertisements that regulators said overstated the drug's benefits.

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Courtesy of Lynsey Lee

Lynsey Lee, 19, was diagnosed two years ago with a blood clot in her left lung, months after she began taking the birth control pill Yaz.

Lynsey Lee hoped Yaz would relieve her severe menstrual cramping and pelvic pain, so she began taking the birth control pills when she was only 16. But, instead of getting better, she started experiencing extreme mood swings, nausea and even more pain.

“I got really, really sick,” says Lee, now 19, of White Bluff, Tenn. “I was just constantly throwing up, and it was getting hard to breathe sometimes.”

Then, she started having unbearable chest pains that sent her to the hospital what seemed like every few days. Doctors initially couldn’t figure out what was wrong. “They kept telling me that it was just my body getting used to the medicine,” she says. “Finally, [when I was 17] I just stopped taking it.”

Later that year, after numerous medical exams, doctors diagnosed a blood clot lodged in her left lung. During one emergency room visit, doctors asked Lee what would become a life-changing question for thousands of young women like her: “Have you ever taken Yaz?”

Now, she is among the more than 10,000 American women who have filed class action lawsuits or claims against the German pharmaceutical giant Bayer, which makes Yaz, a popular birth control pill. Thousands more claims are expected. In documents released Tuesday, the Food and Drug Administration raised questions about conflicting evidence about the risks of taking Yaz and other similar pills, including life-threatening blood clots, and said warning information should appear on labels for doctors and patients.

Thursday, the FDA's panel of outside experts voted 21-5 that current labeling on the medications isn't enough and should be updated with more information on the risks. But that news comes too late for Lee.

“I wish I had known before,” she says. “I never would have taken Yaz.”

A representative from Bayer said the company did not have an immediate response.

The side effects of taking the birth control pill that was touted as having fewer side effects than others have destroyed her life, Lee says.

She had been the captain of the high school dance team, but Lee said after she began developing symptoms, she had to sit on the sidelines because she couldn’t catch her breath. She ended up missing the second half of her senior year in high school, including her senior prom. But, she says, her biggest sacrifice was giving up a full dance team scholarship to Vanderbilt University -- all because of the blood clot that doctors can do little about.

Removing it is too dangerous, they say; Lee takes blood thinners and hopes the clot will dissolve and work its way through her system.

Today, Lee says, she lives with pain and fatigue and isn't strong enough to work. Instead of attending college classes to earn a business degree, Lee makes weekly visits to her doctor for monitoring.

She’s hired Oklahoma City attorney Noble McIntyre, a member of the attorney group The Injury Board, which advocates for patient safety. McIntyre represents 60 Yaz victims and partners with another firm representing 600 Yaz clients.

“She’s missed out on her youth, and she missed out on a scholarship that probably was worth $200,000,” McIntyre says. “We try to give our clients hope that somebody understands what they are going through. We’re trying to communicate with the defendant what these women, through no fault of their own, have experienced. She lost her prom. She lost her freedom, something so valuable to people, because she’s mostly confined to her home.”

Story: FDA panel: Add stronger warnings to birth control labels

Lee says she’s depressed because her compromised health keeps her from living a normal teenager’s life. “I cry a lot,” she says. "It just hurts so much."

She dreams of someday opening a pastry shop and bakes cakes now for her family when she’s up to it. Shehas helped coordinate fundraising efforts for the Ronald McDonald House and the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. But she's still not sure what her future may hold.

“I don’t pray to get better because it’s in [God’s]  hands,” she says. “I pray for happiness.  I pray for others in this world that have it much worse than I do.”

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After six years of marriage, Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore are splitting after rumors of infidelity. Here, they are shown at the launch party for

Demi and Ashton (you don’t really need their last names, do you?) have called it quits. Or, rather, Demi has called it quits, apparently, following rumors of Ashton’s moments with a-woman-not-Demi while visiting San Diego.

I write that not because you necessarily care about Ashton and Demi – though a lot of people seem to – but because it brings up the issue of monogamy and if we humans are truly built for it.

The full answer, as you might expect, is pretty complicated. I am currently writing a book with Emory University neuroscientist Larry Young, one of the world’s leading experts in pair bonding -- the way biologists talk about “love” and monogamy in animals -- that attempts to lay it out. But the short answer depends on two things: First, what do we mean when we say monogamy? Second, what’s going on in our brains?

According to Young, only about 3 to 5 percent of mammals form pair bonds between males and females. But even among those that do, “monogamy” does not necessarily mean sexual exclusivity. It means the partners share a social glue, raise a family together and comfort and defend each other. They might very well have sex with the neighbor critter down the block, though.

"Whether humans are monogamous by nature is debatable, and a matter of semantics," Young said.

Monogamy resides in the brain. Young studies voles, small, furry critters found all over North America. One species, prairie voles, is generally monogamous. Another species, the meadow vole, is not. These two species look virtually identical, and even when you look at their genes, there’s barely any difference. But subtle variations in parts of key, brain-related, genes make one monogamous and one promiscuous.

Even within prairie voles, there’s variation. Some are faithful, some play the field. Mounting evidence suggests this is true for people, too.

We know there are differences between human genders, too, with men reporting higher rates of infidelity than women (though women have been slowly catching up). There are several reasons why this might be so, but one is fundamental: Men, especially younger men, have evolved to be readily turned on. Female libido can vary significantly by cycle day.   

We don’t like to think that something we regard as so basic depends on a couple of molecules in our heads, the action of which can be determined by how we develop in our mothers’ wombs, or certain life events, but such forces do act on our brains, making us more or less likely to have extra-monogamy sex.

It’s not, as Demi suggested in her press statement, just a question of “values” or “vows.” How monogamy plays out for each of us also has a lot to do with how we are wired.     

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