Sexual Activity, Pleasure, and Testosterone: A Biopsychosocial Analysis of Women Living With and Without HIV in British Columbia, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sexual health research comparing women with and without human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) often pathologizes women living with HIV, overlooking biopsychosocial factors that may drive differences between groups. Low testosterone levels have been reported among women living with HIV; however, how this may impact sexual health outcomes remains unclear. We compared the prevalence of sexual activity and sexual pleasure between women with and without HIV in British Columbia and examined associations with psychosocial variables and testosterone. There were no significant differences in the prevalence of partnered sexual activity (45.7% vs. 52.8%) or sexual pleasure (64.1% vs. 70.4%) between women with and without HIV, respectively. Women with HIV reported less masturbation (43.2%) compared to women without HIV (64.6%). In multivariable logistic regression models, both HIV and testosterone were independently associated with masturbation, but not with partnered sexual activity or sexual pleasure. Several psychosocial factors were associated with sexual outcomes including age, relationship status, income, substance use, physical health, and children. In HIV-stratified analyses, knowledge of Undetectable=Untransmittable (U=U), having an undetectable HIV-RNA viral load and a CD4 count > 500 cells/μl showed significant associations. This work highlights positive aspects of sexuality and the confluence of social norms, internalized perceptions, and biology in shaping women's sexual well-being.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".