Welcome to the 2017 Annual Review of Sex Research

It is a real delight to present the 2017 Annual Review of Sex Research (ARSR), my second as editor. The 2017 ARSR addresses a fascinating range of sexual topics, including medicalization of erectile dysfunction, space and place, the “one-in-five” statistic, sexual orientation measurement, and parent–child communication. And it focuses on a number of important populations—including trans men, pregnant women, young men who have sex with men, and Black men. This issue’s authors have excelled at providing the in-depth, comprehensive, and insightful treatment for which ARSR is known, while doing so on a number of important, hot, emerging, and/or marginalized topics.

Some of the ARSR articles survey topical areas but, in addition, deftly demonstrate what could be gained by rectifying the gaps in various literatures. Margaret Wolff, Brooke Wells, Christina Ventura-DiPersia, Audrey Renson, and Christian Grov (2017) provide a detailed and sophisticated exploration of how measurement of sexual orientation, identity, and behavior sometimes captures but more generally misses the multidimensional nature of sexuality. To do so, they focus on research related to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Healthy People 2020 goals to improve sexual minority health outcomes. In asking what we know about sexual behaviors during pregnancy and the first year following childbirth, Sofia Jawed-Wessel and Emily Sevick (2017) compellingly document changes in rates of vaginal intercourse but also the overfocus on this sexual behavior in the literature, as well as on birth mothers, whiteness, and heterosexuality. Noting that most trans-related sexual health research focuses on transgender women, Rob Stephenson and colleagues Erin Riley, Erin Rogers, Nicholas Suarez, Nick Metheny, Jonathan Senda, Kate Saylor, and Jose Bauermeister (2017) explore the research on sexual health of transgender men. They highlight significant gaps in this underpopulated literature, especially around sexual risk and structural barriers to sexual health care.

Context plays a significant role in sexuality research, and some of this year’s reviews focus deeply on its implications for sexual meaning-making. Using a rich cross-cultural lens, Emily Wentzell (2017) critically analyzes the medicalization of men’s sexuality in relation to erectile dysfunction. To do so, she skillfully tracks the culturally specific ways that erectile dysfunction creates new normals for men’s sexualities in some parts of the world, even as men in other parts of the world actively challenge this naturalization of sexual dys/function. José Bauermeister, Daniel Connochie, Lisa Eaton, Michele Demers, and Rob Stephenson (2017) provide an innovative exploration of context in the sense of physical location. They document how disparities in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) are linked to geospatial as well as demographic and social characteristics in young men who have sex with men, paying special attention to racial/ethnic sexual minorities. And in their review on parent–child sex communication in the United States, Dalmacio Flores and Julia Barroso (2017) highlight how parents’ cultural contexts inform their sexual communications to their children and how children themselves are also actively involved in creating the context for these communications.

A third grouping of ARSR articles investigates the ways that existing sexual phenomena are understood or misunderstood and the implications that follow. Miriam Forbes, Andrew Baillie, Nicholas Eaton, and Robert Krueger (2017) make a compelling argument that sexual dysfunctions have been left out of psychopathological frameworks. In so doing, they highlight the ways that sexual dysfunctions do and should fit within understandings of psychopathology, especially as part of the larger internalizing spectrum. Charlene Muehlenhard, Zoë Peterson, Terry Humphreys, and Kristen Jozkowski (2017) provide a timely and important exploration of the controversies surrounding the “one-in-five” statistic about women’s experiences of sexual assault during college, highlighting the misunderstandings and clarifying what the evidence does support. This is a valuable companion piece to their previous ARSR article on the complexities of sexual consent (Muehlenhard, Humphreys, Jozkowski, & Peterson, 2016). And finally, Lisa Bowleg and colleagues Ana Maria del Rio-Gonzalez, Sidney Holt, Carolin Pérez, Jenné Massie, Jessica Mandell, and Cheriko Boone (2017) showcase how Black men’s sexual lives matter. To do so, they use a theoretically rich framework rooted in epistemologies of ignorance, which considers not only what we know about Black men’s sexualities in the United States but what we don’t know and, moreover, why.

This annual review, as you can see, showcases some of the most innovative, challenging, and informative writing that sex research has to offer. Given this intellectually rich, rewarding, and important set of articles, I am pleased to present the 2017 ARSR. Of course, as editor, I am currently working on the 2018 issue and laying the groundwork for the 2019 collection. As always, I invite suggestions and recommendations on topics and authors, including self-nominations. These need not be formal; even brief e-mails are welcome. ARSR articles are invitation-only, but I have invited authors in the past based on their self-nominations and expect to do so again. So if you have ideas regarding authors or topics, feel that you have an ARSR article in you, or are even working on a sex research–related review right now, get in touch with me. For the most part, ARSR authors are well-established experts in their field, but I work to ensure space as well for junior scholars who are making compelling contributions to our field.

My goals for ARSR continue from last year: to maintain ARSR’s important role as a resource for sex researchers and those interested in sexuality, to expand its interdisciplinarity, and to cover what’s hot, important, marginalized, and/or emerging in sex research. I am excited for you to discover how the 2017 ARSR issue accomplishes all of this and more.