Spiritual women Make moreLove, study finds

[worldnews]

Is it sexy to be spiritual? New research has  found that spirituality has a greater effect  on the sex lives of young adults — especially  women — than religion, impulsivity, or  alcohol.

“I think people have been well aware of the  role that religious and spiritual matters  play in everyday life for a very long time,”  said Jessica Burris, one of the study’s  researchers at the University of Kentucky.  “But in the research literature, the unique  qualities of spirituality — apart from  religiousness — are not usually considered.”

According to a research measure known as the  Spiritual Transcendence Scale, those  qualities are connectedness, universality and  prayer fulfillment. But the data found that  of the three, connectedness plays the largest  role in spiritual sexuality and leads to more  sex with more partners, often without the use  of condoms.

“Believing one is intimately tied to other  human beings and that interconnectedness and  harmony are indispensable may lead one to  believe sexual intimacy possesses a divine or  transcendent quality in itself,” Burris  writes. “In fact, ascribing sacred qualities  to sex has been positively associated with  positive affective reactions to sex,  frequency of sex, and number of sexual  partners among university students.”

The study’s participants indeed were  university students; 353 undergraduates (61  percent of whom were female) answered a  questionnaire that asked them about their  alcohol use, impulsivity, religiousness,  spirituality, and sexual practices. The  statements on spirituality, which were ranked  by level of agreement, included “In the quiet  of my prayers and/or meditations, I find a  sense of wholeness,” and “Although individual  people may be difficult, I feel an emotional  bond with all of humanity.”

The study found that spiritual men weren’t  sexually affected — in fact, their frequency  of sex decreased. The researchers figure men  might not view spirituality as sexual because  they biologically don’t think of sex as a  gateway to emotional intimacy.

For women, however, spirituality was the  strongest predictor for the number of sexual  partners, the frequency of sex, and the  tendency to have sex without a condom.

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“It is possible female young adults yearn for  greater connectedness with other humans,”  Burris writes. “Spirituality, at least for  women, could be considered a risk factor.”

(A separate review of studies last year found  that sexually unsatisfied women who practiced  the Eastern techniques of mindfulness and  yoga reported improvements in levels of  arousal and desire, as well as better  orgasms.)

But is it really spirituality that makes  women more sexual, or does spirituality just  imply an open-mindedness that manifests  itself through sex?

“Research suggests that spirituality provides  predictive utility over and above personality  traits such as conscientiousness,  extraversion, and openness,” Burris told  LiveScience. “So while it may be the case  that spirituality is correlated with other  variables that show similar relationships  with human sexuality and sexual practices  (such as openness to experiences), the  relationship we observed, in my opinion,  cannot simply be explained away by other  variables.livescience.com

[sunny]

Is it sexy to be spiritual? NO. I doubt if this is true..