“Don’t drop off at the back there - yawning is really interesting. Proving this has become the mission in life of Dutch academic Wolter Seuntjens, whose thesis — The Hidden Sexuality of the Human Yawn — has earned him a well-deserved place on this week’s Improbable Research tour. ‘The yawn has not received its due attention,’ argues Seuntjens, of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, who set out to provide an encyclopaedic overview of all available knowledge about yawning… He then explores whether yawning has an erotic side. Not all readers will agree he has really proved his point about the erotic yawn, despite citing a passage from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie as an example, but it is a good try… Seuntjens has even found one pair of authors who described the feeling that accompanies the acme of yawning as a ‘mini-orgasm’. He adds: ‘In discussing pathology I discovered that yawning and spontaneous ejaculation were mentioned concomitantly in terminal rabies. ‘In discussing pharmacology I found a link between yawning and spontaneous orgasm in withdrawal from heroin addiction. Likewise, yawning and sexual response were associated as clinical side effects of several antidepressant drugs. In one publication an undeniable causal relation was reported: both spontaneous and intentional yawning provoked instantaneous ejaculation orgasm.’” —Guardian (UK)

(Thanks to alanr for the link.)

Mr — or is that Dr? — Seuntjens has made a heavily edited version of his thesis available online. It’s also being published as a book, though PervScan was unable to find it for sale anywhere.

Browsing the edited version, you can’t help but think that the author may have found a lot of links between yawning and sexuality but that he hasn’t found a real connection. He’s compiled a lot of interesting data, and yet for all that his thesis remains unconvincing. On an obvious level, yawning often accompanies sexuality for the reason that they both frequently occur in dark rooms and prone positions. What’s more, yawning expresses a desire for rest and relaxation, and that’s precisely what orgasm can provide: the release of physical tension. So in that light, it should come as no surprise that it’s not difficult to find yawning and sexuality mentioned in the same breath.

On the other hand, though, many of the Seuntjen’s examples actually seem to discredit his own argument. The passage he lauds from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie actually uses a yawn to suppress the mention of orgasm. It presents the yawn as the very opposite of sexuality. And in another example, the author cites a case study in which yawning is linked to spontaneous orgasm. As it turns out, this study is available online, and it clearly indicates that the spontaneous orgasm phenomenon was an unintentional side effect of the anti-depressant drug clomipramine. Yes, yawning triggered orgasm, but it seems to have been the drug that enabled the connection between the two otherwise disparate physical actions.

All that being said, it might be interesting to read the whole book and get a deeper view of the data. On the surface of it, however, the connection between yawning and sexuality seems rather tenuous — at least until some entrepreneurial pornographer gets wind of the book and sets up the first web site dedicated to girls yawning. Astonishingly — and perhaps this is an indicment of the author’s thesis — you can find porn sites of girls doing everything else under the sun, but there doesn’t yet seem to be one dedicated to the eros of the yawn.

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