CARNAL NATION

Is spiritual sex all it’s cracked up to be? According to LiveScience, women who are spiritual are also more sexual. Using the Spiritual Transcendence Scale, Jessica Burris and her research team compared the spirituality and sexual practices of 353 undergraduate students. The spiritual qualities of connectedness, universality, and prayer fulfillment were found to be associated with sexuality and the results indicate that connectedness is linked with more sex and a greater number of partners for women. This quality is also often correlated with engaging in sexual activity without condoms.

“I think people have been well aware of the role that religious and spiritual matters play in everyday life for a very long time, but in the research literature, the unique qualities of spirituality — apart from religiousness — are not usually considered,” explains Burris.

Study participants, (of whom 61 percent were female and 39 percent were male) were asked about their sex lives, alcohol intake, impulsivity, religiousness and spirituality. Items that measured spirituality included statements like, “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.” Alcohol use, impulsivity and religiousness were shown to have less of an impact on young women’s sex lives.

Conversely, spiritual men reported less sex. The researchers suggest that this may be because men are less likely to connect sex with emotional intimacy. They also argue that there is a causal link between spirituality and sexuality. “Research suggests that spirituality provides predictive utility over and above personality traits such as conscientiousness, extraversion, and openness. 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,” says Burris.

Spiritual sex has long been touted as a means toward ecstasy, improved intimacy and even enlightenment. But Burris’ study suggests that although spirituality can play a role in fostering the open-mindedness and connectedness necessary to great sex, it can also be a risk factor for predicting higher-risk sexual activities.