I’m not advocating poking my eyes out or anything but this was posed to me and I was stumped. I would assume a study would interview blind people who received sight later on in life and people with sight that became blind. Is it better, worse?
The thought behind this is that because the absence of sight increases the ability of the other senses that touch would be greater. But does it carry over to sex? What about those with loss of hearing, taste, or smell?
Quite frankly, I think your question is unanswerable.
First, we would have to confirm that in blind people the other senses are enhanced. I have read some scientific articles that suggest this, and a lot of non-scientific articles that assume this, but I personally don’t know if this has been confirmed.
Second, if only some senses are enhanced, are they ones involved with sex? Would enhanced hearing really increase sexual pleasure? Would enhanced taste?
Third, and this is the biggie, what do people like about sex? Personally, vision is a big thing for me in the clinch. Seeing what’s going on is a major turn-on for me. Other’s mileage may vary. Since it is subjective, I don’t think an answer that applies across the board exists.
Sua
I agree, the question is to subjective to get to a difinative answer.
Although, the question could also be asked about the loss fo other senses (hearing, taste, smell).
Of course the blind do not have to roll over in the morning and see what followed them home from the bar the night before. That has to be a plus!
Osip
This question wouldn’t be impossible to answer; maybe impossible to find a satisfying answer, but if we view sexual pleasure on a simple nerve-ending touching nerve-ending level, then all we would have to prove is whether or not losing one’s vision improves the body’s ability to feel. Granted, this is reducing sexual pleasure to its most base level, but it would at least result in some form of an answer.
-H.P.E.
True enough, HP. I stand modified.
Sua
True enough, HP. I stand modified.
Sua **
[/QUOTE]
And I stand Mortified.
and I stand corrected.
Osip
Jim Jarmusch’s film Night on Earth had 5 sections. The most impressive was the third one, set in Paris at 2 a.m.
An African taxicab driver picks up several drunk African guys from various countries. They ask the driver where he’s from. He says “Côte d’Ivoire.” They say “ivoirien” and make a pun on it: “*y voit rien[i/] – he doesn’t see anything there.” They tease him until he gets pissed and orders them out of the cab.
Then he picks up a blind French girl. He asks her questions about what it’s like to be blind. She tells him passionately, “You can’t imagine what I can perceive that you cannot. When I make love, I make love with every fiber of my being. My passion is total.” & stuff like that. Then he drops her off. He is so fascinated with her that he keeps looking in her direction as he drives off. And hits another car. The other driver shouts, “Hey, are you blind?!” The girl just smiles.
Do the blind get more pleasure out of sex? I’ll close my eyes next time I’m with Ms. Astro’s fiancee, and I’ll let you know later! 
A more compelling question might be: what effect does being blind have on attraction and sex roles in flirting?
Consider how much argumentation between the sexes seems to revolve around male visual sexual attraction to females and its role in promoting/provoking male promiscuity! I wonder how women would feel in a world where they could not be seen, and especially how it would impact on sexual harassment.
In the absence of vision, what would be the primary Madison Avenue approach to marketing-by-sexuality–sexy voices? Obviously, the sense of touch is chock full of sexual possibilities, but it is also not something you would experience from/with attractive strangers at a party; for the most part you don’t sample “touches” of people the way we catch glimpses of them.
AHunter3: I dunno. Been to a frat party lately?
Oh, another crip question. Whats up? Surely you had a blind date before.
Other than that I think the whole concept of the question is silly as don’t most of you have sex at night with no lights on?
Well, take a hint, it’s like that.
I’m nearsighted and I really like sex. I like it so much that I’m sure I like it more than people with 20/20 vision. It would stand to reason that if my vision were worse, I’d like sex even more.
Try to argue with that impeccible logic. I laugh at your meager attempts to lay siege to my fortress of reason.
I can’t answer the OP because I stopped when I got a little nearsighted. Ok, very nearsighted…
Seriously, I understand that PET scans show that blind people use some of the optical processing parts of the brain for processing hearing and maybe some of the other senses. So they might have a somewhat more acute sense of feeling not because they get more signal from the nerve endings but because it’s processed more.
Note that the changeover in the use of those brain parts is not instantaneous but rather takes years. So not every blind person will have enhanced non-optical senses.
So I think we can give the OP a definite maybe.
I can’t speak for the blind, but I can relate this to ya:
When I was in massage therapy school, we had to learn alot of anatomy. We used bones as reference points as to where muscles were attached. To better learn this, we did a lot of blindfolded work, because then we had to rely on our sense of touch to find, well, a person’s “stuff” (not well said - I know). With your eyes closed you have to pay attention to how things specifically feel. This makes for a better massage therapist, because sight can lie to you as to what is underneath the skin. Anyways, you get a well developed sense of touch from that. What am I getting at? Next time you’re fooling around, try blindfolding you or your partner, and just pay attention to the sound and touch you give/get. If you like it enough to try it a few times, you might start to keep your eyes closed during sex, just as a natural reaction - and one not derived from low-self-esteem-turn-the-lights-out-dammit. It’s amazing that what we like to see, and what feels great to us can sometimes be entirely different.
punk snot dead,
broccoli!