Though there are probably precedents for the dragon sex fetish in the pages of kinky horror pulp Weird Tales, I think it's safe to say the phenomenon was popularized by McCaffrey and her Pern novels. These books, published starting in the late 1960s and continuing into the present, focus on a civilization of humans who evolved from the crew of a spaceship of colonists who landed on planet Pern. Using biotechnology, the humans genetically modify the local firelizards to be giant, flying steeds that the "renewable air force" rides. The genemodded dragons also have psychic links with their riders, which forms when the dragons are hatched and select humans "impress" themselves onto the creatures.

Dragonriders aren't warriors; they are protectors. Pern experiences a seasonal weather pattern called "threadfall," where deadly spores from a neighboring star fall to the planet, destroying everything in their paths. Unless, of course, the dragons can zoom around and burn the threads before they hit the ground. Guided by their trusty humans, the dragons protect all the people of Pern from the terrible thread.

They also have sex. And when dragons have sex, their riders - in constant psychic connection with their mounts - have sex too. This means a lot of "whoa I didn't want to have sex with you but now that our dragons are having sex damn let's do it" kinds of stuff. In addition, the most common types of dragons, the blues and greens, only get impressed by gay boys (and occasionally straight girls). So: Lots of gay psychic dragon sex. This strange scenario has meant that Pern's large and talkative fandom has spent many years debating the sexuality of dragons in discussion forums and at conventions like the Weyrfest at Dragon*Con.

In her infamous essay on Pern's renewable airforce, McCaffrey responded to fan speculation by talking a little about how dragon/human sexuality works:

In the Beginning of Dragonriders of Pern™, females rode green or gold. Males rode blue, brown or bronze. (I made it easier for myself in the beginning by remembering that Boys impressed Brown, Bronze or Blue, and Girls impressed Gold and Green.)

Since greens are females and tend to be 'loving', they mated with any dragon they fancied. When not enough girls elected to stand on the Hatching Grounds after the first disastrous Plague, males with feminine personalities Impressed green dragons. Blue riders, not to mince words, tended to be gay with masculine temperaments. Browns, who were not so inclined to mate with a green's rider, made an arrangement so that two pairs of riders were involved in a green's mating.

The dragons act in the way they were bio-genetically designed . . . While the main and most important application of the [telepathy-enhancing substance] Mentasynth was to increase mental function and innate empathy in the 'dragons,' a secondary use was to allow the newly hatched young dragon recognize the most suitable symbiotic partner. At hatching, the dragon recognizes by the sweat pheromones the appropriate sexual partner. Therefore the dragonet, just out of its shell, would approach only the male or female candidates exuding the proper pheromones for its basic sex type.

The green dragons are particularly sensitive not only to the mental empathy of possible candidates but also to pheromones.

McCaffrey's dragon sex scenario is probably the most highly developed in the world of science fiction, but it's not an aberration. Jane Yolen's young adult Dragon Pit series explores the dragon reproductive cycle in great detail, and the psychic human-dragon bond does involve romance. Similarly, Christopher Paolini's Inheritance series explores dragon sexuality and romance. Main character Eragon's dragon Saphira is the last female dragon alive, so the issue of mating and reproduction is unavoidable for her. There is even a psychic dragon sex subplot in the recent Captain Marvel Annihilation series.

Several years ago, dragon sex became one of the most hotly-debated topics at the book-oriented World Fantasy Convention when a publisher handed out excerpts of Janine Cross' Touched by Venom, the first book in her intense, harrowing Dragon Temple Saga. The excerpt, which describes a dragon-keepers' ritual on an alien planet, includes a scene where young adepts are beaten with dragon-venom laced whips. Because the venom has aphrodisiac properties, the result is a bizarre parade where young dragon-keepers are marched through the streets covered in blood and brandishing giant erections. Unfortunately, it wasn't the greatest excerpt to hand out: Con-goers found it laughable when they read it outside the context of the rest of the series, which is about a peasant revolt in an oppressive monarchy.

So why does dragon sex inspire such passionate debate? Why, indeed, does dragon sex even happen at all in science fiction?

There is one obvious answer, which is that dragons represent sex because they are enormous, fiery, beautiful, uncontrollable creatures of fantasy. The urge to have sex is one of those giant, burning desires that is particularly difficult to slay. It's also an urge that is fueled by our fantasies. So there's a kind of no-duh analysis of dragon sex, which is nevertheless true, that says simply that dragons are metaphors for sexual desire. This certainly explains the zillions of pages of Otherkin slashfic on the internet.

But of course everything is always more complicated than that.

Let's consider the role that dragon sex plays in books like Yolen's series or Pern - both of which have large young adult audiences. In his book Killing Monsters, comic book writer Gerard Jones talks about why kids are drawn to stories about monsters. He says it's because kids identify with what it's like to exist in a world ruled by the whims of giant creatures and megapowerful humanoids. Though Jones focuses on why kids like to watch monsters engage in violence, I think a similar thing might be said for why young adults might also be fascinated by giant creatures having sex. Sex belongs to the exotic world of adults. It's something that young adults are aware of, possibly in internet-enhanced detail, but it's also not something most of them are experiencing firsthand. So it makes a certain amount of sense that young people might identify with characters for whom sex is something they're connected to mentally, via the acts of creatures more powerful than themselves.

Philip Pullman explores this idea in young adult trilogy His Dark Materials too. When his young adult characters finally have sex at the end of the series, they begin by petting each other's animal daemons. These daemons follow every person around, acting as external representations of their feelings and desires. The same way McCaffrey's characters sometimes express the sexual feelings of their dragons. In both cases, the smaller creatures act out the desires of larger ones.

Dragons are a simple metaphor for sexual desire, and they may also evoke the way young adults feel about sex. But those assertions still don't entirely explain way dragons function in the venom cock scenario from Janine Cross' Dragon Temple Saga.

I would suggest that the dragons in Cross' novels are something like the worms in Dune. Cross' dragons don't have much of a psychic connection to their riders - they are more like animals, and so to the extent that they communicate telepathically it's not much of a conversation. Not only do these dragons provide a drug that fuels a thriving black market economy (like Spice but less useful), but their eggs are a major source of nourishment to the people of the kingdom. And the fastest way to get around is by riding a flying dragon. So dragons are a cornerstone of the kingdom's economy, crucial for food and transport. That's why Cross depicts dragons as being hoarded by the ultra-rich. A major part of the peasant revolt involves redistributing access to the dragons.

Cross is doing something tricky with her dragon sex. She's talking about those uncontrollable, giant forces that I mentioned earlier in connection with Jones' book. But instead of her dragons standing in for adult sexual relationships, they stand in for the often-abusive relationships between aristocrats and peasants. She uses weird scenes of these dragons jabbing their venom-laced tongues deep inside our heroine's special spot to show us how peasants are debased by their aristocratic overlords. At the same time, the peasants are made complicit in their degradation because they crave the high they get from the dragon venom. So Cross' dragons stand in for the overwhelming desire people have for power over each other. Power that gives them the right to enslave, rape, and rule over other people.

Of course, sometimes a dragon is just a dragon. But dragons and sex often go together in science fiction because it's an inherently metaphorical genre. SF stories about fantastical monsters are often fables that contain messages about our own world. A perfect alloy of beauty and violence, the dragon is an enduring figure for the power of sexual desire - and for the way power often finds its most brutal expression in sexual acts.

Top image by Boris Vallejo. Fan art from Dragonchoice.

Serial and Parallel Monogamy

What it might look like:
A discovers sex and love at roughly the same time, among his group of friends. Some of them he's met at school; others are people he knows from social networks. He and his friends don't think of hooking up and dating and being friends as different things – it's hard to say where one ends and the other begins. As a result, A has sex which is as casual as meeting up over coffee, and friendships that are as intense as first love. And vice versa.

When he grows up and starts to think about settling down and having a family, his models for love and intimacy are based on what he experienced when he was younger. He considers love, friendship, and sex to be overlapping and interchangeable. For several years, he lives with three close friends. He has sex with two of them some of the time, and eventually one of them decides to get pregnant. The two of them decide to become a monogamous couple to raise the child, but remain living with their two other friends.

Years pass, and A and the mother of his child both fall in love with other friends. They decide to form a poly marriage, where they remain a couple but also have other long-term relationships too. Their two housemates have sex with each other once in a while, but start fighting. One of them moves out, and a new friend moves in. A winds up having sex with the new housemate one night when his two long-term lovers are off vacationing with their kids.

Where will this scenario come from?
In the west, changing norms around marriage have already made serial monogamy a reality for many people. They may be monogamous, but they will have several partners throughout their lives. Add to this the changing ideas about friendship and sex that is popularly associated with the social network generation, and you have a population of people who expect multiple partners drawn from extremely interconnected but casual friendship networks. As a result, long-term romantic relationships start to look more like friendships. The emotions are no less intense, but the structure of the relationships might take on the characteristics of friendships today: Constantly-changing groups of people whose feelings for each other range from talk-every-day closeness to casual meetups at the pub. Stability will be provided by the network, and by a few long-term close connections like A's monogamous relationship and later his two long-term lovers.

The idea that humans will one day live in poly marriages is a popular one in science fiction, and can be found in novels by authors from Ursula Le Guin and Charles Stross, to Octavia Butler, Iain M. Banks, and Robert Heinlein.

The Female Minority

What it might look like:
B is always one of four girls in her classes at school. Everybody else is a boy. At first this seems normal, but then they all go through puberty and she starts to realize that she is the focus of intense attention from all those hormone-charged boys. In the country where she lives, girls are considered less valuable than boys, but you'd never know it based on how the young men treat her. In fact, B manages to grow up believing that girls are more special than boys, because after all she and other young women are the object of fascination and desire among their peers wherever they go.

In college, B falls in love for the first time after going on hundreds of dates and being told no less than two dozen times that she's broken some young man's heart. She's received gifts and plaintive love letters and weird homages but all of it made her feel weird and slightly guilty until at last she meets a man who shares her passion for puzzle games.

Of course, it's so hard for her to know what men are thinking. That's why B's romance almost didn't bloom. On their first date, she tells him all about her favorite kinds of word puzzles and her college classes and where she grew up and he just nods and smiles like all the other young man did. Occasionally she can pry some detail out of him about himself, but half the time when he's talking about himself he's really talking about his family or demurring that her opinions on most things are probably more informed than his. Finally, though, she challenges him to a game of chess and sees that they actually do have something in common.

Years later, he admits that he waited by the phone almost constantly waiting for her to call about a second date. She was busy with exams and didn't manage to get back to him for five days. While she finds having a steady boyfriend a relief – at least she isn't pressured by all the other men anymore – her female roommates in college are enjoying playing the field. They go to meetups and matchup balls and speed date events, amused by all the ways the men get gussied up and try to grab their attention. Her friends explain with bursts of giggles that some men prefer each other's company to these awkward competitions, and there are bars and clubs where no woman ever goes – she only hears rumors of them.

Where would this scenario come from?
In many parts of China, medical technology has merged with traditional beliefs and population control to leave some regions of the country with 150 men to every 100 women. This imbalance was produced after just one generation, and we may see repeats of this scenario in other nations where governments try to limit the birthrate. Many people still regard sons as the only way to continue the family line and ensure that elders will be cared for by a stable breadwinner.

The result of a skewed gender ratio, however, may wind up reversing gender roles. Men who want to get married will find themselves in the position that marriage-minded women were once in: Waiting by the phone, trying to please their dates by not speaking up too much and seeming too opinionated.

Ian McDonald has written about this in his short story collection about a future India, called Cyberabad Days. A twist on this scenario appears in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, where women are plentiful but fertile women are not. Women in Atwood's novel become the property of men, and there is no gender role-reversal.

Neo-Courtly Love

What it might look like:
C and D are raised in an affluent community where everyone goes to church, elders are respected, and a King rules the land. From a young age, C and D have known that they are promised to each other as husband and wife – it was arranged by the priest and the community's prominent families before they were born. All marriages are arranged, except among the poor, and C and D have only seen the favelas from a distance when they pass through the community gates in a tram to travel to a neighboring town or air station.

Nobody expects C and D to love each other, least of all C and D. They will certainly make a home together, raise children, and take care of each others' parents when the time comes. But they will seek love outside the bounds of marriage. They call it courtly love, after the medieval notion that marriage is for duty and romance happens in highly codified, covert ways that everybody knows about but politely pretends not to.

C and D are married when they turn 16, and their families buy them a small starter house in the heart of town, near the shopping mall. C works in her mother's hat shop and D is going to school to become a biotech entrepreneur like his father. Although C and D like each other, they cannot imagine a romantic spark growing between them. Passion has no place in an orderly home.

And so they both discover love a few years after they are married. C meets an intense young man from outside the community who aspires to one day own his own home. He works in the mall as a physician's apprentice, and C's effortless, money-bought beauty embodies everything he hopes to have for himself one day. He sends her secret poems via an encrypted channel; they meet in places nobody will ever find them. D knows she has a lover, but as long as it never interferes with family dinners and she leaves no clues anywhere, he is happy. D has a lover too, a waitress who works at the gentlemen's club where he goes with his father. She always serves him port with a salacious smile, and his liaison with her is looked upon as the sweet folly of a young man.

Where would this scenario come from?
Courtly love, historically, grew out of a society infused with traditions that were so old they felt more like window-dressings than true social mores. It was also associated with the ultra-rich aristocracy, who had time to engage in court intrigue and romance rather than having to work for a living. We can see certain trends like this in our world today, where ancient, devout societies pay lip service to tradition while indulging in decidedly modern activities with a wink.

As strong religious cultures from the Middle East slowly blend with the secular and religious cultures of the West, it's possible we might see the emergence of a neo-courtly love tradition. Especially among the wealthy elites. People who value the old ways, but want to experience Hollywood-style romance, may find themselves in a marriage very much like C and D's.

Authors like Robert Charles Wilson (Julian Comstock) and Elizabeth Bear (Carnival), who have written about neo-traditional cultures, often touch on this idea of people who lead hidden, unconventional lives in conventional society. Steampunk novels and Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age have a touch of neo-courtly love in them, as do many modern fantasy novels like Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Legacy series.

"Beijing Opera Bride," "Sakura Bride," and "Green Tea Bride" via Kimiko Yoshida.

Of course there are about a zillion human/alien pairings in scifi, going all the way back to John Carter's dalliance with that red hot princess from Mars. But some couples stand out (like Hulk and Caiera in the recent Planet Hulk series) and some are forgettable (like Karen Allen and the glowy Jeff Bridges alien in Starman, which is sadly not based on the comic book of the same name). While of course we prefer our human/alien pairings to involve lots of sex, some of the hottest human/alien couples are purely romantic. Their liaisons lead to marriage or children, which doesn't necessarily make them less scrumptious than couples whose trysts are basically excuses for a lot of tentacles and crazy lubrication scenes.

So without further ado, here are nine of the hottest human/alien couples we could think of, and one couple whose horribleness will remind you why some intergalactic smoochfests should never be blessed by starship captains.

Margaret and the invisible aliens who kill her lovers in Liquid Sky
Let's start in the most obvious place, shall we? Liquid Sky is a completely insane movie from the 1980s, about a bunch of punk/new wave models who are addicted to coke, totally genderfucked, wear neon-streaked clothes, and have a lot of gaybiwhatevs sex. Margaret is one such model, pictured fetchingly above, whose main goal in life is to destroy her rival male model (played by the same actress who plays Margeret) and to have a ton of meaningless sex with her freaky girlfriend and a bunch of other cute clubsters. You're whirled in and out of the new wave dreamscape until suddenly a floating pie pan enters the picture, and starts zapping Margaret's lovers to death at the moment they orgasm. At first, Margaret thinks her pussy has the power to kill, and she manages to pick off several of her lovers before targeting her frenemies. But at last she realizes that some aliens are behind the whole thing, and she decides that these aliens are the only creatures who truly care about her. I won't spoil the ending for you, but suffice to say that an insane-looking punk wedding dress is involved.

Thomas Newton and Mary-Lou from The Man Who Fell to Earth
In Nicholas Roeg's movie version of the (very different) Walter Tevis novel, David Bowie plays Thomas Newton, a sexy, geeky, genderfucky 1970s alien (yes, the 70s and 80s were a time of androgynous aliens, and hence an awesome time for love). Trying to save his home planet from a terrible drought, Thomas comes to Earth, a planet he's heard is entirely covered in water. Unfortunately his ship crashes, and he's stuck on our watery ball until he can raise enough money from various alien inventions to build another ship and return home. As he gets unbelievably rich from things like a tiny silver ball that plays music, Thomas slides into human decadence. A young woman named Mary-Lou introduces him to sex and booze, and pretty soon he's revealing his alien side to her with ass-biting and (later) showing her his true (lube-covered) alien form. There is even a lubey alien/human sex scene the likes of which you'll never see anywhere else. Plus, hot young Bowie in full alien mode! On the hotness scale, this couple is in the danger zone.

Dick and Mary from Third Rock from the Sun
Human/alien love went all domestic in the 1990s with sitcom Third Rock from the Sun, where a group of aliens are sent to Earth to study the natives while posing (poorly) as some kind of nuclear family. Dick (John Lithgow), the captain of the team, becomes the family father-figure, taking a job as a physics professor and wooing his office-mate Mary, played with goofy charm by Saturday Night Live alum Jane Curtin. In fact, "goofy charm" is what made this sitcom so terrific, and made the middle-aged romance between Dick and Mary so fun to watch.

Lilith and Nikanj in Lilith's Brood Trilogy
Octavia Butler has written some of the smartest and sexiest science fiction novels you'll ever read. Possibly the most unsettlingly romantic of her works is the Lilith's Brood Trilogy, about a human woman named Lilith who "marries" into a family of alien Oankali who have kidnapped what remains of the human race after we've annihilated ourselves with nukes. Though she genuinely comes to love her new alien family, Lilith's relationship with them is complicated because she realizes she has little choice but to breed with them - she is essentially their captive, and moreover their mating ritual involves intense chemical bonding that she can't resist. The Oankali have three genders, and the ooloi gender is a creature who can insert chemicals into its husband and wife via two specialized tentacles (yes! tentacles!). Lilith and a human man wind up in a relationship with an ooloi named Nikanj. Nikanj's tentacles release chemicals that cause intense pleasure and feelings of bonding. To create children, the ooloi mixes genetic material from itself, the male and female, and creates a child that combines all their traits.

Valerie and Mac from Earth Girls are Easy
A less complicated coupling occurs in 1980s comedy Earth Girls Are Easy, where the mega-cute Valerie (Geena Davis) falls for a furry blue alien named Mac who turns out to look like a smokin' hot Jeff Goldblum after he's depilated. Joining them in this silly romp, filled with song and dance scenes, are Jim Carey, Julie Brown and Damon Wayans. Valerie's doctor boyfriend has been cheating on her, but she's such a nice girl that she still takes her time getting busy with Mac out of respect for ex-doughboy. But when they finally do start making out, you'll be glad she dumped her doc for an alien.

Hulk and Caiera from Planet Hulk
It's hard for Hulk to find a woman who can handle his green side, but when he smash-landed on alien world Sakaar he met his match. 2006 series Planet Hulk, which led into crossover extravaganza World War Hulk, is one of the best Hulk plot arcs in recent memory. Hulk finds himself on a world so savage that his monstery side makes him a hero. He finds true friends among the giant insects and monsters of Sakaar, who are fighting to liberate themselves from the brutal Red King. Caiera is one of the Red King's slaves who fights in his army. Though at first she and Hulk fight - and what a fight it is! - eventually she switches to the side of Hulk and his liberators. They defeat the Red King together, get married, and become king and queen of Sakaar. Of course, Hulk can't stay happy, though . . . the spaceship he came in explodes, killing the whole planet, and he goes back to Earth ready to SMASH the Illuminati who made the ship. And thus World War Hulk began, out of Hulk's amazing romance with a kickass lady from another world.

Max and Liz from Roswell
Late-1990s TV series Roswell was the perfect combination of romantic teen angst and alien weirdness. Imagine Escape to Witch Mountain, but with high school kids instead of elementary school ones. Max and his three siblings are human-alien hybrids, clones of great leaders from their home world who survived the Roswell crash back in the 1950s. Now they're trying to figure out their powers, and get back home to save their people. But how can they do it when there's, like, homework? And cute girls and stuff? Not only did Katherine Heigl get her start in this show, but it clearly inspired Twilight with its Max-loves-Liz subplot. Liz is a human girl, and therefore (sorta) forbidden to Max, but he falls for her anyway - first he revives her from the dead after she's shot, then they go on the run together, and eventually he turns a rock into a diamond and proposes to her. Plus, they are cute as little buttons.

Just check out the fanvid schmoopiness that Roswell inspired!

Willis and Jeriba from Enemy Mine
A human named Willis (Dennis Quaid) crash lands on a harsh, remote world along with an alien named Jeriba (Louis Gosset, Jr.). Unfortunately their peoples are at war with each other, and they don't speak each other's languages. But they are stuck on the forbidding rock for years, exposed to terrifying creatures and even more terrifying weather, so they strike up a friendship that grows into something much deeper. They are clearly in love, though in a chaste way - Jeriba's people have no gender, and create babies via some kind of budding process. Eventually Jeriba has a baby, but dies in the process, leaving Willis to raise "their" baby on his own. Though cheesy in some ways, this movie is still intensely moving, as well as a pretty gutsy exploration of what human/alien love might really be like.

Doctor Who and [Insert Your Favorite Companions Here] from Doctor Who
The beauty thing about Doctor Who is that the Doctor has so many different companions that you can pretty much project any kind of sexual orientation onto him that you want. I prefer to think of the Doctor as bisexual and polyamorous, which is why this picture of him with companions Martha and Captain Jack makes my pervvy little heart go pitter-pat. But if you prefer things all monogamous and hetero, you can focus on the Doctor and Rose. Or you can remove humans from the equation and think about the Doctor with the Master when he was played by John Simm (OMG). Though the Doctor never technically gets romantically involved with any of his companions, he does get emotionally entangled with almost all of them. For a Timelord who never really has any sex (that we see), the Doctor has got to be the sexiest alien in any space-time continuum.

Special Turn-Off Section: Ickiest Human/Alien Couple

Ickiest Couple: Troi and Riker from Star Trek: TNG
Feeling like you need a cold shower after all that action? Well allow me to give you the closest thing there is to a freezing shower to the libido: The coupling of Betazoid Deanna Troi and human William Riker in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Seriously, is there anything more horrendous and woody-weakening than this couple? What happened to Troi and Worf, a couple worth fighting for? Or Riker and the Trill? Seriously, I had to scrub my eyes with sandpaper after Troi and Riker had their naked wedding in that Star Trek movie whose memory I am trying to wipe out. What the hell, people? Some weddings should never happen.

These breakthroughs are roughly in chronological order.

Non-procreative sexual behavior is common
In 1886, a psychiatrist named Richard von Krafft-Ebing revolutionized the discipline of sexology by publishing his exhaustively researched tome Psychopathia Sexualis. He'd documented every case he could find of what he called "sexual perversity," including those he'd encountered first-hand among his patients. He defined sexual perversity as pretty much anything that deviated from procreative, heterosexual sex, and put each perversion into its own special category. Though he intended to document perversity, the book had the opposite effect: Many doctors and ordinary people read it and realized that many kinds of "perversity" were so common that they were almost normal. The (relatively) unbiased reporting and taxonomic structure of Krafft-Ebing's book inspired countless other early-twentieth-century researchers, including Sigmund Freud, Magnus Hirschfeld, and Alfred Kinsey. Though published over a century ago, Psychopathia still has the power to shock.

Bisexuality exists
Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychiatry, is famous for remarking that everyone is bisexual. His idea was remarkable for two reasons. One, it acknowledged that there was a middle position between gay and straight (a relatively rare belief among doctors); and two, it paved the way for a more nuanced understanding of how sexuality exists on a continuum rather than as a binary system. Jumping off from Freud's idea, infamous twentieth century sex researcher Alfred Kinsey created what has come to be known as the Kinsey Scale for sexual orientation. On that scale, 0 is completely heterosexual and 6 is completely homosexual. Kinsey and his colleagues did decades of in-depth research to determine that most people fall somewhere in the middle of the scale. You can see their research in Kinsey's most famous works: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. All research was based on thousands of anonymous interviews conducted all over the United States.

Medical science can transform men into women, and vice versa
Throughout recorded history, there have been women who lived as men and vice versa. Many cultures even have the idea of a "third sex," often a shamanistic role, which is for people who are neither male nor female. But it wasn't until 1930 that the first sex change operation was performed on a famous Dutch artist named Einar Wegener, who emerged as the woman Lili Elbe. Unfortunately, the operation was crude - it involved implanting ovaries - and she eventually sickened and died (you can read her intriguing memoirs about her transition). The first successful male-to-female sex change operation was performed in Denmark in 1952, and its recipient, Christine Jorgensen, became an international celebrity. Since then, thousands of people have had successful sex reassignment surgeries, moving from female to male and male to female with the assistance of medical science.

Women have orgasms
The female orgasm has been "discovered" several times over the past 130 years. In the nineteenth century, doctors used vibrators to help relieve women of "hysteria," though almost no medical accounts from the time acknowledge that this therapy was basically masturbation. The Victorian Era had given rise to the myth that women didn't have orgasms, and many medical researchers adopted this idea as truth because it was impossible to prove that women were orgasming the way you could prove men were. Though anecdotal reports and throughout the twentieth century indicated women could orgasm the way men could, it wasn't until the experiments of sexologists William Masters and Virginia Johnson in the late 1950s that the female orgasm was finally proven to exist in a scientific manner. Masters and Johnson observed women in the process of orgasming while monitoring everything from blood flow to muscle spasms in their vaginas. (Yes, they actually inserted a dildo-shaped measuring device into the women's vaginas to do their research.) After Masters and Johnson published their research in 1966, several other researchers investigated women's sexual response cycle, quickly discovering the G-spot, female ejaculation, and even looking at orgasming women in MRI machines (you can see a picture of that at the top of this post). Recent research into female orgasm has focused on the neurochemistry of women's brains while they are aroused.

Pregnancy can be prevented with a pill
In 1960, the birth control pill debuted on the market as a contraceptive for women. In the late 50s it had been prescribed to women who suffered extreme menstrual cramps. But in the early 60s the pharmaceutical known as "the Pill" became not just a sexology discovery but shorthand for a sexual revolution that had more to do with culture than science. Freed from cumbersome birth control devices like condoms that depended on male cooperation, women could suddenly have sex without the constant worry that they would become pregnant. Many historians have argued that the Pill helped start a new wave of feminist consciousness. The Pill is an excellent example of how a scientific discovery can have widespread, unintended social consequences.

Homosexuality is not a disease
In 1973, homosexuality was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-II). That meant that after decades of debate, the professional psychiatric community would no longer treat homosexuality as a disease. Certainly an unhappy homosexual might be viewed as neurotic, but a happy, well-adjusted gay person would be given a clean bill of health. Many sexologists had been arguing for decades that homosexuality was not a disease, most notably the openly gay psychiatrist Magnus Hirshfeld, who founded the Berlin Institute for Sexology (which was later burned down by the Nazis). But the removal of homosexuality from the DSM made it official: Licensed doctors now agreed that gayness on its own was not an illness.

Many kinds of male impotence can be cured with a pill
In 1998, men got their own version of the Pill. A chemical called sildenafil citrate came to market under the name Viagra. Sildenafil works by relaxing muscle tissues, allowing more blood to flow into the penis. Just as the Pill liberated women from fears of pregnancy, Viagra liberated many men from fears of impotence. While sildenafil didn't set off a cultural revolution, it did represent a major scientific breakthrough - and has helped researchers understand male sexuality better. Viagra and similar drugs like cialis are among the bestselling "lifestyle pharmaceuticals" of all time, raking over 1.5 billion dollars per year.

Orgasms can be caused via direct neural stimulation of the spinal cord
In 1998, the same year Viagra hit the market, Dr. Stuart Meloy made a strange discovery while operating on a woman's spinal cord. He was stimulating her nerves in order to locate the source of her back pain, and when he hit one particular nerve he gave her an instant orgasm. "You should teach my husband to do that," she told him. Meloy went on to patent a spinal implant device, which he hopes to market as a cure for female sexual dysfunction (i.e., an inability to have orgasms). He's in the process of testing the device now, and is actively seeking volunteers - female and male - so that he can perfect the device and bring it to market. Once he's got a version of the device that people can use easily, you can expect a sexual revolution that will make the Pill look like a walk in the park.

Women ovulate more than once per month
In 2003, a researcher named Roger Pierson at the University of Saskatchewan overturned the almost century-old scientific belief that women ovulate once a month. He and his team used simple ultrasound scans on 63 women with normal menstrual cycles, and discovered that a significant number of them ovulated 2 or 3 times per month. Their finding could have a significant impact on how we understand female hormonal cycles and fertility.

Top image, an MRI of a woman during sexual arousal and orgasm, from British Medical Journal.

Psychopathia Sexualis image by drjoanne

Annie Sprinkle reading Alfred Kinsey via The Bohemian

Annalee's Thursday edition of irregular sex column Fully Functional (That's a column about sex that runs on an irregular schedule, not a column about irregul - Oh, you understand. Never mind.) certainly seemed to raise the ire of the vampire haters in our audience:

QimatPower: "I just wanted to make this clear: vampires are not interesting. (I felt this way before Twilight, 30 Days of Night, True Blood, Let the Right One In, and everything else.)"

Indigen: "Nice article but I'm left a little mystified, because I never found vampires sexy. I understand the perversity of the whole schtick, and I know there are people out there into bloodletting and domination etcetera, but are there really that many of those people to write a whole article addressing every reader as if they agree? Nobody I know would."

Convair 990A: "Hmm. I have a hard time conceiving of them as anything other than highly-optimized killing machines along the lines of a xenomorph from LV426 or something from Skynet... Modern anti-Victorians can read all they want into Bram Stoker, but I think the common thread remains: These things are not your friends and they're not acting in your interests. You're an ultimately expendable and ambulatory supply of resources for them that just happens to share some aspects of external appearance with them."

Kaiser-Machead: "Sure, they're sexy in pictures, but just imagine the smell of carnage on their breath..unless you're into that sort of thing, then vamp away."

Okay, maybe not that last one. But still; dissent was clearly in the air - Even those who agreed that blood sucking = teh hawtness had nits to pick:

Belabras: "Really, Braum Stoker's Dracula is more about power than seduction - Dracula himself is regarded as repugnant by everyone who encounters him, but he is able to dominate others through his supernatural power. He's not a player, he's a rapist."

theizz: "You have to read Dracula in the context of repressive Victorian society. Dracula was popular b/c he allowed readers of both sexes to think about forbidden sex without feeling ashamed. It's not that the human characters (and readers) are depraved for finding Dracula sexy, it's that hypnotic sex appeal is one of Dracula's powers and the humans are too weak to fight it. The humans are absolved of guilt. The women get fantasize about a sexy lover and the men get to fantasize about "respectable" women clamoring for and enjoying sex."

bonniegrrl: "That's one of the few things the Victorians got right in my book — erotica masked as vampire tales of terror."

Thankfully, some commenters were trying to be constructive and helpful to those tracking the sexy vampire trail:

Spiral: "I wonder if we could pinpoint the exact time vampire myth changed. Earlier myths had vampires as repulsive, ugly, more zombie-like beings that just happened to be alive after their time and needed blood- you see that myth picked up more in things like Nosferatu. At some point they became young, beautiful and sexual. Was it the Victorian era, or is their a source before it where the myth changed?"

geekgrrl: "my rudimentary guess would be, it seems more like a change in locale.. you found the repulsive, board-up-your-windows vampires in Eastern Europe, but they took on a sexier stance in the West. like you said, i'm sure there was a turning point, but travel made it more pronounced."

MinervaAlpaca: "That's Polidori's doing. He based his vampyre, "Lord Ruthven," on his associate Lord Byron—and thus popularizd the idea of the vampire as a dashing Byronic seducer."

AngryEddy: "At what point did they all start shopping at Hot Topic?"

taxbaby: "I think I remember that from Stoker. Didn't Jonathan Harker describe the 'three sisters' as wearing chokers and Invader Zim T-shirts?"

But, in reality, only Killa_Charlie truly got to the heart of the matter:

Why are they so sexy? Cause we're all 14 year old girls in reality.

Factually incorrect, perhaps - in reality, I'm actually male and twenty years older than that, sadly - but on some cosmic allegorical level, so, so true.

Vampires are the sexpots of the undead. Zombies are usually too blood-dribbly and rotted to be players. And ghosts are, well, insubstantial. Which leaves us with vampires, who are permanently young, beautiful, and possess a fierce need to suck things. How could they not be the poster-children for weird sex after death?

Of course, vampires rarely have sex as we know it. Often their only outlet is blood sucking, which leaves them free to form erotic relationships that don't exactly fit the nuclear family mold.

Let the Right One In is the story of a 12-year-old boy named Oskar who falls in love with his mysterious neighbor, the wide-eyed, tragic, manipulative girl-boy Eli (she looks girlish but says she's not a girl). As the film unfolds, we discover that Eli was first drawn to Oskar when she saw him stabbing a tree with a knife, playacting a Columbine solution to his problems with the school bullies. She senses that his imagination is as blood-drenched as her reality, in which she has to kill people and drink their blood to survive.

As they grow closer and share secrets, the taboo aspects of their relationship begin to outweigh the innocent ones. Eli admits she's been 12 years old for "a really long time," and crawls in bed naked with Oskar one night after a particularly harrowing death scene. Given that she's perhaps hundreds of years old, her relationship with Oskar seems a little, well, pedophilic.

And Eli isn't exactly the first eroticized little girl whose vampire antics broadcast a sexual uneasiness. In the novel and movie Interview with the Vampire, our two main characters Louis and Lestat decide to have a preternatural child and turn a gorgeous little girl named Claudia into a vampire like themselves. Everything is great until she's the mental age of an adult and realizes that she'll be trapped in a little girl body forever.

In the Anne Rice novel, which takes place partly during the nineteenth century, Claudia uses her girlish looks to attract men who are looking to buy a little pederasty for the night. She plays into the Victorian appetite for young girls, and thus assures herself a steady supply of blood. But she never actually has sex with these men, or anyone for that matter. Rice's vampires are chaste, though we are given to understand that the act of drinking blood provides a kind of sexual thrill for them. (Which makes it even weirder when Lestat converts his mother into a vampire in a moment of chompy excitement in sequel The Vampire Lestat.)

Rice may shy away from overtly dealing with the sexual implications of her child vampires, but Octavia Butler tackles them head-on in her last novel Fledgling. It's the tale of a 50-something vampire named Shori who has adult desires, but is still in the body of a child (she will eventually grow up, but vampires age much more slowly than humans). To survive, she creates a human "family" of lovers - male and female, all adult - who dote on her because when she drinks their blood she releases some kind of chemical that causes intense pleasure. She feeds a little on each lover from night to night, never drinking enough to harm them, but needing all of them to maintain a steady blood supply.

And she also has sex with them. Shori's first lover is a man who understands what she is, but still finds it difficult to reconcile their adult lovemaking and her child's body. Later, she teaches a middle-aged, bookish woman to accept her latent lesbian desires. Though Fledgling was intended as the first in a series of novels, tragically Butler died after finishing it. So we never get to see Shori grow into an adult body.

Where did all this sexual rule-breaking come from? Certainly Bram Stoker's late-19th century bestseller Dracula helped. He took legends of blood-sucking beasts, mixed them with a little Transylvanian history, and created a mesmerizing creature who drained British ladies of their blood and turned them into wantons. Cinematic versions of Dracula have played up the erotic side of this story, casting gorgeous men and lovely ladies with blood-red lips and strange desires.

And as cult moves like the 1971 Vampiros Lesbos make clear, there's always been room for a little same-sex dalliance in vampire tales - back in the days before gay marriage made homosex wholesome. There are plenty of gay vamps in Anne Rice, and Poppy Z. Brite's early-1990s Lost Souls is packed with gothy clubster vamps who love their gender-bendy homoeroticism. Dozens of other writers and filmmakers have played with the idea that vampires' otherworldly needs make them hunger for men and women indiscriminately.

You can see the apotheosis of this idea in the HBO series True Blood, based on a series of novels about the adventures of a psychic detective and her vampire lover who died during the Civil War. Though the show may be corny at times, and the whole vampire rights/gay rights subplot is clumsy at best, it's still red-hot sexy. There's gay vampire action, plus straight vampires having sex and sucking blood at the same time in a graveyard. I dare you to watch main character Sookie in her see-through nightgown being sucked on by loverboy Bill, without getting a little fanged out yourself.

Whether vampires actually have sex or merely exchange bodily fluids, they always seem to star in tales about sexual desire that oversteps the boundaries of the conventional. Sure there are exceptions - who wants to pork the dudes in 30 Days of Night? But most vampires leave us with lingering questions about our own perverse erotic wishes. Do those wishes make us monsters? Or do we only become monsters when our desires are repressed and twisted into something horrifying?

You've been reading another installment in my occasional column about scifi and sex, Fully Functional. Got scifi sex questions? Just ask. Maybe I'll answer!

Under the law, the difference between an act of sex and an act of assault hinges on one idea: consent. If a person agrees to have sex with you, you're having sex. If they don't agree, or actively disagree, it's a crime. Obviously there are gray areas, and that's why rape trials exist - in the best cases, such trials are intended to determine whether consent was given.

But what about robots? Do you think the blondie bot in Cherry 2000 was really capable of giving consent to have sex with her human boyfriend? Or did her programming simply force her to always have sex, whether she wanted to or not? And what about the Romeo Droid in Circuitry Man, or the Sex Mecha in AI, who live entirely to sexually please women, even when those women are abusing them or putting them in danger?

Then there's the opposite problem, which Ekaterina Sedia tackles in her recent novel Alchemy of Stone. Her main character is a robot whose creator built her without genitals. Even when she wants to have sex, her body makes it impossible for her to consent in a recognizable way (though she does manage to figure out a technical workaround).

Whether programmed to have sex, or designed to refuse it, the problem these fictional bots face is a lack of control over their own desires. You can't really be said to consent to sex if you're never given the option to choose between "yes" and "no."

Cat Rambo has written a short story where one of the characters is a female superhero whose mad scientist creators made her hyper-sexual. No matter what happens, she's always aroused, regardless of whether she wants to be or not. Her solution to this design feature is never to have sex with anyone. She doesn't like the idea of being trapped inside a sexual desire that a bunch of men designed into her without consent.

Researcher David Levy got a lot of media attention for his recent book Love and Sex with Robots, where he argues that by 2050, people won't just be having sex with bots - they'll be falling in love with them, and even marrying them. He talks about the development of emotional and social robots, creatures programmed to perceive and imitate human emotions. Already, roboticists at MIT have created several models of bot that respond to facial expressions and tone of voice with so-called appropriate emotions: An angry voice makes the bot cower; a smile returns a smile.

But of course these emotional robots have been programmed with what somebody thinks is an appropriate response - sort of the way Rambo's superhero has been programmed to respond to everything with sexual arousal. If we accept that robots will achieve human-like intelligence, it seems likely that such bots will sense a difference between what their programming makes them do and what they actually want to do.

So if a robot has been programmed to respond to human sexual arousal with more sexual arousal of its own, is he actually consenting? Or is he just going through the motions of pleasure and desire, wishing that he could control his own responses enough to choose whom he had sex with, and when?

Questions like these, raised in science fiction or speculative science writing like Levy's, are inevitably really questions about ourselves. As of yet, we have no bots who are sophisticated enough to experience intimate relationships with humans - by programming, or by choice. But as humans, we often exist in the gray areas of consent when it comes to sex. Our physical desires, our basic sexual programming, may conflict with what we actually want to do.

Certainly there are many situations where it is obvious that consent has not been given, or has been. But for all the situations in the middle, we are like the bots we imagine that one day we will fall in love with. We cannot untangle what we think we should do (our social programming) from what we want to do. Or we can't disengage our raging physical urges (more programming) long enough to ask, "Wait, do I really want to have sex with this person? Or do I just want to have sex with anything, including furniture?" In Charles Stross' excellent novel Children of Saturn, the always-randy sexbot heroine knows the answer to this question, and responds by humping hotel rooms and spaceships.

So will you ever be able to have consensual sex with a robot? Maybe. Sometimes. Unless you aren't bothered by having sex with a slave or a brainwashed victim, having relationships with robots will probably be just as complicated as having them with humans.

This is the first in a series of columns called Fully Functional that I'll be writing about science fiction and sex. If there are any topics you want me to tackle, pipe up in comments. Nothing is too weird for me. Really. Nothing.