The Science of Love: 40 Enchanting Facts About Sex, Love & Relationships

Ronda Rousey has remarked that she tries to have “as much sex as possible” before a match since she says it boosts testosterone levels.

27. Male penguins have been observed having sex with other male penguins, having sex with dead penguins, and having sex with unwilling female penguins. When this was discovered in 1912, it was considered too lewd to publish.

28. 8% of Canadians have had sex in a canoe.

29. Ottoman Sultan Murad III was impotent. According to historians “his arrow was working but was unable to reach the target of union and pleasure.” After many attempts by his mother, a cure was found with one side effect: his libido increased so much that by the end of his reign he had over 100 children.

30. The 1969 book “Naked Came the Stranger” was a literary hoax. The book was written to be disjointed and terrible, but full of sex scenes, to prove that any book could succeed if enough sex was thrown in. The novel spent 13 weeks on the New York Times Best-Seller List.

English sailors on the HMS Dolphin in 1766 discovered that native women on islands would trade sex for iron, and began pulling nails out, causing loss of the ship’s structural integrity.

32. In 1920, a disciplinary tribunal called the “Secret Court” was formed at Harvard to investigate and take action against allegations of homosexual activities among students. Its existence was not known until 2002 when a student encountered a file labeled “Secret Court” in the university archive.

33. Mind-blowing sex can give you transient global amnesia, a condition that causes you to lose all of your memories for a couple of hours.

34. Quack Doctor John R. Brinkley amassed a great fortune in the 1930s by performing an operation that transplanted goat testicles into humans as a cure for impotence.

35. Condoms should be replaced every 30 minutes when engaging in a long sex session.

There is a ritual in Malawi called Sexual Cleansing in which young girls after their first mensuration cycle are forced by their parents to have sex with a community-chosen man in order to get accepted by the community. This has led to high rates of HIV/AIDS in the country as some of these men have HIV.

37. While sudden heart attacks during sex are rare, most of them happen to men who are cheating on their wives.

38. The first sex dolls were created by 16th-century European sailors who were isolated during voyages. The dolls were often made of sewn cloth or old clothes. Later, the Dutch sold some of these dolls to the Japanese, and the term “Dutch wives” is still sometimes used in Japan to refer to sex dolls

39. Cold sores can be spread to the genitals causing genital herpes, and up to 50% of new genital herpes cases are caused by oral sex from a partner that has cold sores.

40. Kim Kardashian’s 2007 sex tape continues to generate a stable income for Ray J, with $360,000 in yearly sales.