Turns out it’s actually not. Exercise-induced female sexual pleasure has been the subject of casual discussion and un-researched speculation for years. Even sexologist Alfred Kinsey mentions the phenomenon in his “Sexual Behaviors in the Human Female” (1953). But until now, the experience was mostly anecdotal. Now, a study by Indiana University researchers offers scientific evidence that confirms confessions once incredulously traded in gym class locker rooms.

According to Dr. Debby Herbenick, co-director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at IU and sexual health educator at the Kinsey Institute, the oft-deemed “coregasm” (because of its association with crunches) can actually be linked to various exercises, including abdominal workouts, biking, weight-lifting and climbing.

With co-author J. Dennis Fortenberry, M.D. and professor at the IU School of Medicine, Herbenick surveyed 370 women, ages 18 to 63, all of whom had experienced some sort of exercise-induced sexual experience prior to the study. Most of the women were in a relationship or married, and about 69 percent identified themselves as heterosexual. One hundred twenty-four of them had experienced exercise-induced orgasms (EIO) and 246 had experienced exercise-induced sexual pleasure (EISP). Forty percent of the women reported that they experienced sexual pleasure from exercise 10 times or more.

Published in a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Sexual and Relationship Therapy, the findings may also be included in Herbenick’s new book, “Sex Made Easy,” out in April. “It may be that exercise — which is already known to have significant benefits to health and well-being — has the potential to enhance women’s sexual lives as well,” Herbenick posited.

And while it might be tempting to conclude that ditching your vibrator for more reps at the gym will enhance your sex life, the findings of the recent study actually present a much more complex way of thinking about sexual pleasure. “These data are interesting because they suggest that orgasm is not necessarily a sexual event,” said Herbenick. When orgasms are being had at the gym and on the track, our notion of female pleasure expands beyond the bedroom. When they occur independent of conventionally defined arousal, sensations characterized as “sexual” work to complicate our understanding of women’s bodies and experiences.

The data contributes to a deeper physiological understanding of the female orgasm, a phenomenon historically (when at all) described with mystical language and abounding question marks. The more research done on female orgasms, the more pleasure there is to be had.

Some researchers like Rutgers’ Dr. Barry Komisaruk, co-author of 2006′s “The Science of Orgasm,” are trying to learn how to augment pleasure, as it is intimately tied to lessening pain. The experience behind each woman’s orgasm may be varied, but there are obviously overlaps in bodily processes. And the fact that it took only five weeks to recruit the 370 women for the study suggests that EIO is not so rare as one might think.

If you really want to know what exercises are more likely to bring you there, here’s a breakdown of the findings: 51.4 percent of the women reported experiencing an orgasm while doing abdominal exercises within the last 90 days, 26.5 percent while weight lifting, 20 percent during yoga, 15.8 percent bicycling, 13.2 percent running, and 9.6 percent walking or hiking.

But what about just sitting? The oft-repeated mantra “It’s all mental” can apply to orgasm as well, and it may be more than the muscle contraction involved in exercise that helps escort an orgasm into being. The blank state of mind or mental “transcendence” many report reaching while engaged in intense physical activity might contribute as well. Since for both women and men mental preoccupation and performance anxiety can hinder orgasm, feeling relaxed and in no rush is key. What better state of mind to come than one of abandoned transcendence, achieved by leisurely lunging?

Some women are even able to intentionally think themselves to orgasm. Dr. Komisaruk studies the function of nerve pathways for sexual stimulation in women. He’s researched the phenomenon and reports that the pleasure centers of the brain associated with orgasm light up in women who mentally climax in exactly the same way as when orgasm is reached by more traditional means. So how do they do it? Some use breathing exercises and fantasize, others engage in pelvic floor exercises like the well-known Kegel.

Interestingly, the orgasm activates the same part of the brain as pain: the anterior cingulate cortex and the insula. Komisaruk’s work explores the differences between pleasure and pain, and what makes vastly different experiential extremes translate into the same brain activity.

Techniques used by subjects while “thinking off” varied tremendously. Komisaruk describes, “Some imagined erotic scenarios. But others imagined very romantic scenes such as a lover whispering to them. Others pictured more abstract sensual experiences, such as walking along a beach or imagining waves of energy moving through their body.” Unsurprisingly, the path to pleasure can be as different as each individual.

So take your tingly shavasanas with pride and curiosity. I assure you, the woman in crow pose one mat over has no idea what’s going on.

These days, concerns like Megan’s seem absurdly anachronistic, but they also raise a bigger question: In an age of increasing divorce rates and single ladies celebration, what does this wife material “compliment” really mean?

Perhaps simply the apparent interest in a long-term relationship, one of the many options an independent woman can choose from. Rebecca Traister, Salon contributor, is in the midst of writing a book about unmarried women. “If you lift the social imperative for early marriage,” said Traister, “then the varied sexual and romantic impulses of the people around us are revealed. You see this incredible variety, not only in how people act, but in how they want to act and what might make them happy.” If there’s no longer just one accepted model for fulfilling relationships, people are liberated to choose from a spectrum of lifestyles and arrangements.

Back in the day, of course, being wife material meant you could keep a good home, would make a good mother, and that you were a “good girl” – not like one of those fast women that a guy can’t bring home to meet the folks.  You were respectable, that is, you didn’t challenge repressive gender norms. Surely there’s no need to spell it out, but you were material, literally that which constitutes an object: You could easily be fashioned into the role of wife. What made “wife material” a compliment is the dichotomy between the women who are and those who are not deemed worthy of putting a ring on it (where worthy means chaste).

And today? For one, sex outside marriage isn’t social suicide. Secondly, we’re told marriage isn’t what it used to be. Kate Bolick reports in her popular Atlantic piece, “All The Single Ladies,” that in 1960, the median age of first marriage in the U.S. was 23 for men and 20 for women, while today it is 28 and 26. She writes, “Today, a smaller proportion of American women in their early 30s are married than at any other point since the 1950s, if not earlier.” And according to the Pew Research Center, Americans increasingly think marriage is obsolete.

Of course, that’s not to say that it is. Marriage is unarguably still a cultural norm, even as the conversation expands to include alternatives. Though it’s happening later in life, people are still settling down and doing the whole house-and-kids thing. And whether and when one does tie the knot can often run along geographic and socioeconomic lines. For women with financial and educational privilege, marriage has slowly shuffled out from under the spotlight of Ultimate Goal and has become one choice among many in a broader spectrum of what a fierce fulfilled female can look like.

What replaces this wife-or-spinster mantra is new terrain. Traister stresses that from 1890 to 1980 – for 90 years! – the median age for first marriage fluctuated between 20 and 22 for women. “We now live in a world where it’s normal and expected for women to live independently – professionally, economically and sexually – whether it’s for two years, 10 years or 40 years,” said Traister. “That’s never existed as a norm before. It’s created a whole new life stage for women.”

Before, a woman’s identity was shaped by how she was connected to her family, first as a daughter, then as wife and mother. Now she often has a period of single independence. And being in such a period, as a 20-something single woman, I attest that it can feel both exhilarating and tempestuous, as thrillingly liberating as it is often lonely, surprising, blissful and straight-up mundane. It’s unimaginable how different life would be if I’d married two, three or four years ago, how differently I thought of relationships then.

Interestingly, in his new book “Going Solo,” sociologist Eric Klinenberg found that women living alone are on average more content with their situation than their male counterparts. This is due, it seems, to the cultivation of other close relationships and communities, be it friends, family or neighbors. Men are, of course, as capable of such social networking, but seem to be more susceptible to isolation, especially in older age. Through urbanization and communication technology, modernity makes a wider array of relationships easier than ever before.

It’s also worth noting that even the expectation that all satisfaction can come from one romantic relationship is a new idea. As historian Stephanie Coontz has written, “It has only been in the last century that Americans have put all their emotional eggs in the basket of coupled love.” As new generations couple up, we reinvent the way we think about relationships.

Popular culture sometimes tells the story of a passionate female friendship as important as romantic love. The recent blockbuster “Bridesmaids” – as well as its darker indie twin featured at Sundance, “Bachelorette” – highlights a new anti-rom-com genre where women are the ones making the jokes, and despite the titles, it’s not all about love and marriage. Kristen Wiig’s great success has been praised for representing the multidimensional women the film was made for and by. The once competitive social and economic pressure to become a wife translates (with the exception of “Bridesmaids’” pat ending) into a humorous girl fight for the role of best friend.

As the stigma of raising children outside of wedlock declines – over half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage – and the normative nuclear family is less mandated, a reimagining of the family may be taking place: from same-sex relationships to single parenting, community living to polyamory, and more. This isn’t to say that alternative arrangements are always easier or more satisfying; as often as single parenting isn’t always difficult, it is not always easy. But it is liberating – the idea that family planning doesn’t necessarily have to follow the path prescribed by the conservative right.

Notable events in the effort to legalize same-sex marriage, like the recent overturning of Proposition 8 by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, widen parameters to include many more couples as marriageable, and demonstrate that more and more Americans believe the law should recognize same-sex marriages (53 percent of Americans, according to a 2011 Gallup poll). As marriage equality expands, so too does the notion of marriage.

I’m reminded that “wife material” is meant, deep down, as a genuine, if misguided, compliment. We’ve all met someone and thought, Hey, I want to spend time with this person, this is someone I could picture as my boyfriend, husband, partner — even if rings, wedding cake and forever aren’t regular visitors to our imagination. The assumption that this is something that especially women want to hear is an obsolete translation of a larger, much more correct cliché that people just want to love and be loved.

What Traister described as the lifted imperative to marry really does give us a better view of how different people truly are. I’ve never been one to imagine my wedding or even, really, my romantic future at all, and I don’t say this with particular pride; in the past the realization has freaked me out. My aforementioned friend, on the other hand, has been super-excited about her domestic future since she was old enough to flip through Martha Stewart Weddings. But the idea that one of us is normal while the other isn’t simply isn’t compatible with the present.

And it is increasingly clear that we can all be made of wife material, but only if we want to be.

Over two years and across four continents, historian-journalists Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac have traveled the world in search of harmony – for areas in which different religions, ethnicities and races lived together without violence. Their quest for ethnic peace brought them to Flensburg, Germany (the once tumultuous site of the “Schlesing-Holstein Question”), Kerala, India (a state that leads the country in literacy and healthcare, where Muslims, Hindus and Christians cohabit peacefully), the Russian Republic of Tatarstan (which is both Muslim and Orthodox and is rich in faith and culture), Marseilles, France (a diverse port city with the largest Muslim population in Europe) and finally, Queens, N.Y., which is home to 2.3 million people and 138 languages. Along the way, they tried to answer the question: What is essential for peaceful diversity? 

Salon spoke with Meyer and Brysac about American exceptionalism, the geography of peaceful coexistence and why some cities are simply more peaceful than others.

Historically a country of immigrants, how is our conception of diversity, and the cultural conversation surrounding it, different in the U.S. than in other parts of the world? 

Shareen Blair Brysac: We are an immigrant society. Other than the Native Americans, that’s the only way we’ve populated the country. Everyone’s an immigrant one generation back or further. There’s been a real debate in Europe. They’re not immigrant societies. They have the idea of “guest workers,” that [foreigners] come to work but didn’t become a citizen. And there’s been a real debate in France over assimilation. They want you to be French. They don’t have French-African or Martinique-French, they don’t have hyphens. You’re either French, or you’re not.

When people came to America, it was a long ways away and you didn’t think of going back. That’s changed now, but people that came from Poland or Russia in 1906 after pogroms never wanted to go back or even hear of the old country. Now with Skype and the Internet in general, cheap airfare, cheap international phone calls, people have a lot more contact with their relatives in, you know, Mexico, South America. There’s much more connection, and the hyphens are much stronger. People say, I’m Greek-American, this-American or that-American. Most of us do have some sort of hyphenated identity. In some cases you’re so mixed up it’s hard to say what you [identify with], if you’re Irish American, with a Jewish husband, and you have four different grandparents of four different backgrounds.

Karl E. Meyer: I think the U.S. is the best example of the importance of immigration in the economic and social success of a country. Peak years of immigration coincided with peak years of our economic growth and job creation. A cliché that happens to be true is that diversity has been part of the strength of the society. I think you have a symbolic expression of the whole thing with the president of the United States. If you go abroad and ask, could you have a Barack Obama in England, France, Germany and so on, people look at you and just shake their heads and wonder that you would even ask the question.

How has Obama’s presidency affected our national discussion of diversity?

KM: I think if you look at Time magazine last week, they point out that very likely, in the coming election a crucial if not decisive vote is how the Hispanic-Americans will vote. And demographically if you look at it, you see that in 20 years or so, people of a non-European background will be in a majority in the U.S.

Do you think this affects the discussion of immigration in the GOP primary?

SBB: Absolutely. I think they’re going to have to backtrack from a lot of the comments they’re making, and they’re realizing that. Among the candidates, that’s one place where they’re split – on the topic of immigration. Because they realize that they need that vote.

KM: When you talk about diversity and immigration, the downside tends to be micro and the upside is macro – that the benefits of immigration are cumulative, aggregate and long-term. Whereas the deficits tend to be flashpoint things. One thing I think political leaders need to do is to remind people of the upside of immigration as well as trying to discourage and diffuse the micro aspects.

How did you decide where to travel in your search for ethnic peace? 

KM: Except for Flensburg (which has a very special role in the book because it addresses the notion that there are some [divisions] that are so profound that nobody can solve them), we tried to find examples that would offer different points and ways of looking at the same thing. One of the places that we dealt with is the republic of Tatarstan in Russia, which is about 43 percent Tatar Muslim, 40 percent Orthodox Russian. After the Soviet Union broke up they had a very effective and clever president of Tatarstan who wanted to guarantee the rights of the Islamic group and called for sovereignty, but he never used the word independence. He stressed sovereignty is a way that Tatarstan and its capital Kazan could have their own cultural identity but remain part of the federation.

SBB: Tatarstan had all the same elements of Chechnya but Chechnya has had just a terrible couple of decades where the whole country, well, Grozny the capital, was literally wiped out. And this did not happen in Tatarstan, with the same amount of Muslims and Russian Orthodox Christians – [we wondered] why did Tatarstan not become Chechnya? You can also compare Kerala, India, to Gujarat, which is a much richer state economically but is almost synonymous with ethnic riots, Hindu-Muslim riots, communal riots. In France in 2005, when almost all the northern major cities had riots, Marseilles was calm. So we looked and said, well what is Marseilles doing right that Paris is not?

Of course these places are not perfect — there are still conflicts. But what commonalities stand out in each of the areas you focus on?

SBB: One example is branding: You really have to make people proud of who they are. And whether you call New York the Big Apple or people identify with a football team or soccer team or cricket team in the case of Southeast Asia, you want people to be proud of being what they are.

In Paris, people that live in the suburbs around Paris, when they’re asked they never say they’re Parisian. They don’t feel like they’re Parisian. They say they’re Maghrebian, or they say they’re Algerian, or whatever they are.

You want people to be proud to say, I am a New Yorker or I am from Queens. [Political scientist and professor at Queens College,] Andrew Hacker is one of the people who really introduced us to Queens, and he said, “Nobody lives in Queens, they live in Richmond Hill and say I’m from Richmond or I’m from Astoria or wherever,” but there is a very strong sense of neighborhood in Queens. So that kind of positive identity, whether it’s from a football team, or in the case of Queens, a losing baseball team, the Mets, that’s really quite important.

Rap is another thing that binds people. Even in Tatarstan there are local rappers that people know and are very proud of, and in Marseilles, particularly. And of course Queens has its own brand of rap too.

KM: By and large, multi-polar is better than bi-polar. That is, you tend to have bigger problems when you have two groups pitted against each other, particularly when one group is the permanent overdog of the other. When you have a variety of people – a good example would be Kerala, India, where you have a majority of Hindus but then substantial minorities of both Muslims and Christians — that means that the political system puts a premium on building coalitions. Building coalitions means crossing bridges and bringing together people from different groups. And that’s exactly what happens.

How has Marseilles managed to avoid some of the religious turmoil, in particular, around Islam, found in other areas of France and the Western world?

SBB: It goes back with that diversity issue. There are more Muslims in Marseilles than anywhere else in France, or anywhere else in Europe. But there are also 80,000 Jews, 80,000 Catholic Armenians, Greek Catholics. A mayor of Marseilles founded something called Marseilles Esperance (Marseilles Hope) and when something does happen, like a school is fire-bombed or something like that, they call all the groups together and there’s a representative of the Muslim community, one from the Jewish community, from the Armenian community, and they all get together and see how they can diffuse the problem.

This works very well for Marseilles but it’s really kind of unthinkable for Paris. Paris is really segregated into the very rich who live in the center of Paris and then the immigrant population which lives in the surrounding areas, in big housing projects and things like that. There’s not a sense of community between the two groups.

All the neighborhoods of Marseille are also very mixed. So everybody knows everybody and knows somebody in each area – the same is true in Kerala. There’s not really a Muslim city and Hindu city, or Muslim districts and Hindu districts like there are in Gujarat or in places like Hyderabad. In Kerala, Muslims and Christians and Hindus are side by side.

KM: It’s a port, and as a port, Marseilles has historically thrived on welcoming people from different societies as traders, etc. It also became a center for refugees, from Italy, Spain, Germany. So there’s a tradition of diversity going back from a century or more. Plus the fact, quite obvious when you think about it, that there are beaches. And that is a wonderful escape valve for tension, especially among adolescents, when they can take a cheap bus ride to go to the beach.

I’d throw in an architectural reality too – that horizontal is better than vertical. One of the problems in Paris particularly was in the projects, these high housing units 30 stories up etc., which become hives of despair, alienation and crime, whereas in Marseilles, for example, you don’t have the same kind of high rises with one great exception, the Corbusier, the famous [modernist residential housing unit]. But in Queens, with the exception of LeFrak City, most of the housing is either family-size or very modestly multistory, three to five stories.

What role do environmental factors — like geography, weather, size of country, coasts or landlocked — play in terms of peaceable diversity?

KM: Obviously right away one of the big facts of Marseilles is that it’s encircled by mountains, and so it didn’t spread out into suburbs in the same way that Paris did. In Kerala, there are two other important things. One, that they’re right on the Persian and Arabian Gulf. And they have a million, out of 30 million, Keralites working as migrant workers in the Emirates and elsewhere, and that’s been a major source of income for the city.

SBB: Kerala also has two monsoons a year and very fertile land. So they don’t have the same kind of severe drought that the rest of India has. And they have a lot of tourism in Kerala.

Tatarstan has 10 percent of the oil that comes out of Russia. It also has some minerals. It’s also got heavy industry and fairly good agriculture. So when one thing doesn’t do well, something else does. So when the economy of Russia collapsed in the 1990s, Tatarstan was somewhat insulated from the whole thing because they had not abandoned their agricultural factors.

Queens has a very high rate of foreclosures at the moment. They’re somewhat helped because there’s a lot of small business, and a lot of family businesses, so they can have more leeway, but you do see that lots of storefronts are vacant. Queens also benefits from access to good transportation. And the schools in Queens are by and large better, so we’ve been told and read, than the rest of New York City in general.

Why, then, do you think Queens is often disparaged or unappreciated by Manhattanites?

SBB: Queens has always been a relatively transitional place — in other words one generation may settle and stay there but the next generation tends to want to move out to New Jersey to Westchester, or further out on Long Island. And it used to be that when you made it into Manhattan, it was perceived as defeat if you didn’t stay in Manhattan. That was how you judged success, was getting an apartment in Manhattan. That used to be true of Brooklyn as well. Now, all the writers in New York live in Park Slope, and people perceive Williamsburg in a very different way than they used to. Queens is still behind Brooklyn in some ways in the perception of it as a destination for young people to live. I can remember when Brooklyn was considered beyond the pale. Nobody would really have considered living there, with the exception of Brooklyn Heights. Queens isn’t thought to be as chic as Brooklyn, but it’s got a lot to offer.

At the risk of reducing complexity into formula, based on all that you saw, what seems to be most important in creating peaceful communities of diverse people?

KM: I would say it’s a combination of bottom-up grassroots organization and political leadership. Wherever you have successful cases of multicultural society you generally find there is a leader who has made his or her reputation by bringing out all of the benefits of diversity and making people proud of being in the community that they’re in. What really struck us is that most of the places we write about are unknown even to our best-traveled and best-informed friends, and if we could put a little more publicity and throw a stronger spotlight on examples of civility and success, it would help offset the temper of gloom we have as we look at the all-too-obvious dysfunctional societies around us.

But beyond just being a novel, tongue-in-cheek use of technology, “Dudes From Views” raises interesting questions about the subtle ground between what one might call voyeurism — secretly taking pictures of attractive, half-naked people and posting them in a public space — and public information. To get more insight into this Big Brother-meets-peepshow hybrid, Salon corresponded with the blog’s creator, Brad, over email, about his method, issues of privacy and the Google gaze. Click above for a slide show of images from the site.

How did you come up with the idea for Dudes From Views?

I live in NYC and use Google Maps and Street View a lot in general. I’ve seen sites like 9-Eyes that find serious photography from Street View and have wanted to do my own spin. One time I went to Google’s site promoting Street View at famous landmarks around the world and saw they had photos from beaches, so I thought finding guys in Street View (and other similar sites) would be a fun and novel take on blogs that just post pictures of hot guys.

How do you find your photos? It seems awfully labor intensive — I’m legitimately curious.

I think of public places where people are likely to be without their shirts, like beaches, gyms entrances, running trails, and then I find those places in cities that have Street View (or similar services). Sometimes it’s frustrating because the photos will be taken early in the morning when there’s few people around, or during colder seasons when people are more bundled up. That strategy works better for Google if they’re trying to get pictures of buildings, but not for me. And sometimes it can take a while to find a picture I can use (people need to be pretty close to the camera).

The site raises some interesting questions about privacy — there have been controversies about Google Earth taking pictures of naked people, like recently the woman in Florida. 

It’s an interesting problem. My feelings are that Google only drives their cars through public places and they’re capturing what everyone else out in public can already see. Their cars are clearly marked and have a giant camera on top, and I often see people waving at them. If you’re doing something embarrassing, you’re already exposing yourself to whoever can see you if you don’t do it behind closed doors. Google just needs to make sure they have an easy way for people to notify them, and for them to react quickly, when someone has an issue with the photos. Other sites, like Daum in Korea, sometimes blur out entire bodies, but then Yandex in Russia doesn’t blur anything out at all.

As far as my site goes, I’m using photos that these sites have already allowed, and I wouldn’t want to post anything embarrassing.

In modern photography criticism, it’s become almost common wisdom to associate power and violence with the photographer (and camera’s) position. Do you think this idea translates when thinking about the cameras of Google Earth and Street View?

I’m not sure. There is a sense of “Big Brother” with what Google’s doing, especially with the scale that they’re doing it in, but that applies to all their products in general. The Street View photos are fairly automated, and Google’s limited in the places their cars can travel (either physically or by jurisdictions in the cities or countries they want to map). Other than that, I don’t think the power lies with Google’s cameras at all, just the few people like me who are crazy enough to try to curate them in the arduous way that we can.

What would your reaction be to someone making the equivalent about women — something like Chicks From Views? Have you seen the groupings of Street View pictures of alleged prostitutes? 

There’s definitely a double-standard. I honestly don’t think a Chicks From Views would last very long. It’s a lot more acceptable amongst gay men to (discreetly) ogle at other men, even if they have a boyfriend, than it is for a man to stare at women. And it brings up a lot of issues with misogyny, objectification, etc. Prostitution is an even more sensitive subject, and I wouldn’t want to post pictures of that (or people doing anything else illegal) even if it were pictures of men. The point of my site is to do the equivalent of elbowing your friend to look at the hot guy that just walked by.

View the slide show

Researchers Gayle Brewer of the University of Central Lancashire and Colin A. Hendrie of the University of Leeds wondered too. In a 2011 study on copulatory vocalization (i.e., sex noises), published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, they asked a group of 71 sexually active, heterosexual women, ages 18 to 48, to answer a questionnaire about their vocalizations during sex and whether or not they correlated with orgasm. The answer most often was yes – but not with their own.

Although female orgasms were reportedly most commonly experienced during foreplay, their vocalizations were reported to occur most frequently before and simultaneous with male ejaculation. So basically the women’s sex noises most frequently accompanied their partner’s orgasm. Why? It turns out, it’s because they wanted to help their partners out. Sixty-six percent reported making noise to accelerate their partner’s ejaculation. Ninety-two percent believed these vocalizations upped their partner’s self-esteem (87 percent reported vocalizing for this purpose). Other reported reasons included speeding things up, “to relieve discomfort/pain, boredom, and fatigue in equal proportion, as well as because of time limitations.”

Sex has always had an aspect of performance to it. Even in the animal kingdom, noises are made and poses struck: In fact, female Barbary macaque monkeys let out a yell to help their male partners climax too. Research reveals that for some polygamous baboons, female copulatory vocalization depends on how close the female is to ovulation, indicating her availability and fertility to other males who may want to mate. Alternatively, the male turtle utters a strangely human sigh while penetrating the silent, slightly bored-looking female.

And then there’s porn. Today, the Internet’s endless archive of videos, and their constant availability, must affect how we think about – and therefore have – sex. It’s been argued that certain mainstream heterosexual porn memes – such as gasping and moaning or talking dirty, not to mention widespread trends in pubic grooming – are replicated by heterosexual women especially, with the idea that their men will either be turned on or just expect as much.

Perhaps of greater impact, the images of sex that Hollywood perpetuates are subject to regulations that challenge filmmakers to show without actually showing – an opportunity for non-visuals like vocalization to pick up the slack. Of course, Meg Ryan’s iconic Katz’s Deli orgasm in “When Harry Met Sally” (“I’ll have what she’s having”) showed us that vocal pleasure can be faked – and released under an R rating.

Even in your average PG-13 Hollywood sex scene, sound often works overtime to make up for what’s lacking in pubic hair, nipples and the sometimes-awkward repositioning of reality. The MPAA’s rules about what you can show are murky, demonstrated recently when “Blue Valentine” was slapped with an NC-17 designation, ostensibly because of its female oral sex scene (the designation was later reversed on appeal).

In a globalized world of media sharing, are sex noises culturally specific or do they still vary around the world? “Porn is one valid piece of the puzzle,” said Debby Herbenick, sexual health educator at The Kinsey Institute and author of “Great in Bed.” “But there are nuanced issues as well,” for instance, where you’re living in a given culture, whether in an apartment building, a suburban house, or in your parents’ attic. “There are different places on the spectrum of if you’re likely to be heard, where you live, if you want to be heard, or don’t care, etc., which is probably the same from culture to culture.”

Gayle Brewer, of the aforementioned 2011 study, hypothesizes that in relation to the U.K., “Vocalizations may serve a similar function in other cultures although the degree to which women display these vocalizations (commonly interpreted as a sign of sexual pleasure) may be influenced by the societal restrictions placed on women’s active engagement in sexual behavior.”

And then, some of it is probably biological. The connection between physical activities and vocalization – from athletics to enjoying food to sex – is an interesting one. “The question is how much is show versus a release of physical bodily experience,” said Herbenick. “There’s a lot of unexplored territory. In the relatively young, small field of sex research, [sex vocalization] is just one of those accidentally neglected things.”

Unfortunately, not nearly enough research has been done on the subject of sex vocalization. (A documented, though unvalidated, account of the diversity of orgasm vocalizations of 10 women conducted by a 13th century Arabic physician, Al-Sayed Haroun Ibn Hussein Al-Makhzoumi, seems to exist.) But if you’re reading, woman down the hall, I congratulate you on having a very regular and vocal sex life, and hope that your partner really does know what he’s doing. Because what could be sexier for him than if he were truly and confidently giving you something to scream about?