|
ARCHIVES
|
A New Study Shows Posting Date: Oct 29 2007 1:31AM Researchers at the University of Texas, which has a very good football team, recently completed a study that compiled “the 237 reasons people have sex.” I didn’t realize we needed that many, but whatever.
The study appeared in the respected pages of the Archives of Sexual Behavior right after an article on lubricants in Victorian England and just before a photo essay on vegetable lust. The research took five years to complete and involved answers from 444 people. The researchers, presumably unable to attract a genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation, funded this investigation out of their own pockets. I suppose this makes them selflessly dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge, kind of like if Mother Theresa skipped a day with the leapers every now and then to ponder subatomic physics.
Now, there are 1,825 days in the five years of the University of Texas study, depending on where your leap years fall. That means our dogged pursuers of enlightenment managed to survey a quarter of a person a day. That’s stunning progress. No wonder they had to fund the work themselves … no granting agency could afford to support such radical and vigorous work.
I’m not privy to the doctors’ research methodologies (and yes, the principle investigators were actual doctors), but here’s the way I picture it going.
INTERIOR – CROWDED COLLEGE BAR – NEAR CLOSING TIME:
Enter a professor wearing a white lab coat and glasses with thick rims. She is carrying a clipboard. She approaches DRUNK GUY at the bar.
Doctor: Excuse me. Do you mind if I ask you a question?
Drunk Guy: You betcha. Whateveryouwant.
Doctor: Why do you have sex?
Drunk Guy: (looking around for the camera) Is my bar stool a camera?
Doctor: No. This is for science.
Drunk Guy: (looking around for cops) Are you a cop?
Doctor: No. Like I said, this is for science. Why do you have sex?
Drunk Guy: Because I can?
You may think I’m making this up for comedic effect, but this appears to be about the level of scientific rigor applied to the study. The number one reason people have sex was, apparently, “I was attracted to the person.” Finally, mystery solved!
Our researchers didn’t so much bother to interpret or organize the findings as simply list them. They started with the most common reason – attraction – and finished with the thankfully least common response, “I wanted to give someone a sexually-transmitted disease.”
There’s a sentiment you don’t see on a lot of Valentine’s Day cards.
The gruesome criminality of that reason was balanced off by the sheer glee of the people who managed to push “It’s fun” all the way up to fourth position among men and eighth position among women, which got me thinking. Does this mean sex is less fun for women than it is for men or does it mean that men just couldn’t think of seven other things to say before they had to resort to “It’s fun?” (For the record, I’m surprised we men managed to come up with even three things that rated higher than “It’s fun.” I just spent an hour working on this challenge and I could only come up with two – “She said I could” and “Nice boobs.”)
I haven’t had the opportunity to scrutinize the entire list of 237 reasons, but reason 173 was “To get rid of a headache,” which is a little piece of information that must send chills down the drug companies’ share values. If people knew that making the two-backed beast could cure a migraine, no one would ever buy Advil again.
Cindy Meston, the study’s co-author and the proud holder of an actual degree from a Canadian university that is (thankfully) not my alma mater, commented that, “Originally, I thought that we exhaustively compiled the list, but now I found that there should be some more added.”
Two hundred and thirty-seven reasons, and apparently, there is still work to do. This is truly the final frontier. Until that new, more comprehensive list is complete, humanity’s knowledge of itself will be woefully incomplete and there will be millions of people out there who won’t know how to impress the next door neighbours (reason 207).
|
