To teach safe sex, don't forget about pleasure, study suggests

The best way to prevent sexually transmitted diseases is to center sex education around not just safety but pleasure — namely, making condoms "sexy," new research says. 

Researchers from the University of Oxford, United Kingdom and the World Health Organization set out to find out how effective it would be to incorporate sexual pleasure, the "key driver of why people have sex," into sexual health education efforts. Billions of dollars have been invested into sexual health services and programs, the authors said, but sexual pleasure has been "insufficiently addressed," despite its positive benefits.  

By analyzing studies on the outcome of various sexual health programs that either do or do not provide an emphasis on sexual pleasure, the researchers found that those programs that do focus on pleasure "significantly improved" participants' use of condoms.