MALE PATTERN FITNESS: sex Archives

March 28, 2007

Married to the Media: A Bad Deal All Around

Rannoch Donald sends along this study from my alma mater:

A new University of Missouri-Columbia study found that all women were equally and negatively affected after viewing pictures of models in magazine ads for just three minutes.

"Surprisingly, we found that weight was not a factor. Viewing these pictures was just bad for everyone," said Laurie Mintz, associate professor of education, school and counseling psychology in the MU College of Education. "It had been thought that women who are heavier feel worse than a thinner woman after viewing pictures of the thin ideal in the mass media. The study results do not support that theory." ...

The study suggests that the majority of women would benefit from interventions aimed at decreasing the effects of the media, regardless of weight.

So how do you "intervene" when it comes to the media? Lock the women up in a dungeon with no access to the Internet or cable TV?

I was also curious about how "all women" are defined (the study's abstract isn't any help). Were the 81 women in the study college students, or all ages? Mostly single, mostly married, or somewhere in between? Exclusively hetero? All we know is that they were "European-American" -- white chicks.

If they were predominately single and hetero, there is some good news:

According to a New Zealand study on women and aging, single women have more orgasms than those with partners, leading researchers to conclude that removing men from the equation allows women to "better connect with themselves." ...

It found that 56 percent of sexually active women could reach orgasm every time they masturbated, while only 24 percent of the women with partners could bring themselves to orgasm.

Looks like all us married guys owe our wives an apology, assuming that 100 percent of us can reach orgasm 100 percent of the time during masturbation, and that that doesn't change with marriage.

Finally, in the interests of gender equality, I should mention this study, which got some attention when it came out two years ago:

[M]en's self-rated body satisfaction decreased after viewing images of muscular men but did not change after viewing images of average men. Thus, it appears that men's body satisfaction may be influenced by exposure to brief images of muscular models. These results are congruent with results of previous investigations of the effects of viewing images of thin models on womens body satisfaction.

So we're all screwed, which is only fair.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:54 AM | Comments (0)

Mother and Child Disunion

I once knew a pregnant vegetarian. She was one of the most judgmental people I've ever known, a self-righteous scold who took offense at pretty much everything. Unfortunately, she was married to a friend of mine, so we had to find ways to engage in polite conversation when we found ourselves in the same room.

About the only time I ever liked her was when she was pregnant. She told me she'd started craving beef, and had to back off from her militant vegetarianism for a while. I liked hearing that, not because I care one way or the other what vegetarians do, but because it seemed to give her an insight into what it means to be human. Sometimes you have to do what your instincts tell you to do, and instincts rarely follow a strict ideology.

I bring that up because of this story about the perils of maternal meat-eating:

U.S. women who eat a lot of beef while pregnant give birth to sons who grow up to have low sperm counts, researchers reported Tuesday.

They believe pesticides, hormones or contaminants in cattle feed may be to blame. Chemicals can build up in the fat of animals that eat contaminated feed or grass, and cattle are routinely given hormones to boost their growth.

"In sons of 'high beef consumers' (more than seven beef meals a week), sperm concentration was 24.3 percent lower," the researchers wrote in their report, published in the journal Human Reproduction.

More than seven burgers or steaks a week? How many pregnant women actually eat that much beef? Turns out, that's a telling question:

The team at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York studied data on the partners of 387 pregnant women in five U.S. cities between 2000 and 2005, and on the mothers of the fathers-to-be.

Of the 51 men whose mothers remembered eating the most beef, 18 percent had sperm counts classified by the World Health Organization as sub-fertile.

"The average sperm concentration of the men in our study went down as their mothers' beef intake went up. But this needs to be followed carefully before we can draw any conclusions," said Shanna Swan, who led the team.

You start with 387 pregnant women. You track down their baby daddies. Then you track down the mothers of the baby daddies. Of those, you find 51 who remember eating beef more than seven times a week when pregnant. And you discover that nine* of the men who sprang from the loins of those 51 women have low sperm counts.

Quick show of hands: If you asked your mother what she ate when she was pregnant with you, do you think she'd remember accurately?

Dr. Swan thinks she would:

"When you are pregnant you are very aware of what you eat -- you are watching your weight and some things make you sick and you need to get enough of x and y so you focus on that," she said.

The mothers of the men were asked only if they ate beef more than once a day or less -- something Swan believes they could remember accurately.

She's studying something important -- low sperm counts in contemporary men -- so I'll give her some slack on this. But still, it seems like a pretty big conclusion to make based on such shaky evidence. Pregnant women are already freaked out over the mercury in fish. Is it really worthwhile to get them freaked out over the hormones in beef?

* Reader Rob Siders pointed out a typo in my original version of this post. I misread the article I was quoting, and thought it referred to 18 people, when it clearly said 18 percent of 51 people. He did the math for me -- that's nine moms who bore sons with low sperm counts, which actually makes a better argument against taking the study seriously.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:48 AM | Comments (2)

March 27, 2007

Why Angels Are Incapable of Multitasking

Did you know our concept of angels was based on castrati?

[T]he eunuchs of antiquity were models for our depiction of angels. God is thought to surround himself with angels as advisers and emissaries, who are identical in appearance to males castrated before puberty: tall, beardless, nonsexual beings with voices like the legendary castrati.

It appears that from the Judeo-Christian standpoint, the occupants of heaven were exalted eunuchs. In turn, earthly rulers aspired to reach this divine ideal. In The Perfect Servant (University of Chicago, 2003), Kathryn M. Ringrose notes that by the 10th century the Byzantine court was "perceived to be an earthly replica of the court of heaven where the emperor functioned as Christ’s representative on earth and was attended by an 'angelic' corps of eunuchs."

The author is a medical doctor who underwent chemical castration as part of his treatment for prostate cancer. That led him to this discovery:

Understanding angel (and eunuch) psychology has even helped me overcome the cognitive side effects of hormonal therapy. Angels may be omnipotent, but they undertake just one task at a time. According to the Talmud, they are not permitted to attempt more. Biblical angels blessed, cursed, relayed messages and even killed, but they were never on two missions at once. It seems that thousands of years ago it was already recognized that androgen deprivation makes multitasking difficult -- but doesn’t prevent one from accomplishing a single task well.

Speaking of multitasking, here's another New York Times story on that subject, this one advising us to be more angelic in our work habits:

“Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes,” said David E. Meyer, a cognitive scientist and director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan. “Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information.”

The human brain, with its hundred billion neurons and hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections, is a cognitive powerhouse in many ways. “But a core limitation is an inability to concentrate on two things at once,” said René Marois, a neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:39 AM | Comments (0)

March 23, 2007

Plastic Therapy

I wonder if this is going to put some therapists out of business:

Breast enlargement surgery may help boost a woman's self-esteem and feelings about her sexuality, according to a study conducted by a University of Florida assistant professor. ...

On a 30-point scale of self-esteem, the score after breast enlargement surgery rose from 20.7 to 24.9 on average. In terms of sexuality, the study found there was a 78.6 percent increase in sexual desire, an 82 percent increase in arousal and a 57 percent increase in satisfaction.

So, really, what we're talking about is magic headlamps. Rub them and the sexual genie appears. Only drawback? Some installation required ...

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:48 AM | Comments (0)

February 14, 2007

Happy Lupercalia!

It's February 14, and love is in the air. Sleet, however, is on the ground, so the kids will be home from school for the foreseeable future. Which means that our mid-winter holiday of love is strictly an academic and culinary issue in this corner of the greater Allentown metropolitan area.

You probably know that many of our modern holidays were superimposed onto existing pagan holidays -- Christmas, Easter, Halloween, Fourth of July ...

Okay, just kidding about the last one.

What I didn't know until just this morning is that even St. Valentine's Day is based on a Roman festival called Lupercalia:

February occurred later on the ancient Roman calendar than it does today so Lupercalia was held in the spring and regarded as a festival of purification and fertility. Each year on February 15, the Luperci priests gathered on Palantine Hill at the cave of Lupercal. Vestal virgins brought sacred cakes made from the first ears of last year's grain harvest to the fig tree. Two naked young men, assisted by the Vestals, sacrificed a dog and a goat at the site. The blood was smeared on the foreheads of the young men and then wiped away with wool dipped in milk.

The youths then donned loincloths made from the skin of the goat and led groups of priests around the pomarium, the sacred boundary of the ancient city, and around the base of the hills of Rome. The occasion was happy and festive. As they ran about the city, the young men lightly struck women along the way with strips of the goat hide. It is from these implements of purification, or februa, that the month of February gets its name. This act supposedly provided purification from curses, bad luck, and infertility.

Long after Palentine Hill became the seat of the powerful city, state and empire of Rome, the Lupercalia festival lived on. Roman armies took the Lupercalia customs with them as they invaded France and Britain. One of these was a lottery where the names of available maidens were placed in a box and drawn out by the young men. Each man accepted the girl whose name he drew as his love -- for the duration of the festival, or sometimes longer.

As Christianity began to slowly and systematically dismantle the pagan pantheons, it frequently replaced the festivals of the pagan gods with more ecumenical celebrations. It was easier to convert the local population if they could continue to celebrate on the same days ... they would just be instructed to celebrate different people and ideologies.

Lupercalia, with its lover lottery, had no place in the new Christian order. In the year 496 AD, Pope Gelasius did away with the festival of Lupercalia, citing that it was pagan and immoral. He chose Valentine as the patron saint of lovers, who would be honored at the new festival on the fourteenth of every February. The church decided to come up with its own lottery and so the feast of St. Valentine featured a lottery of Saints. One would pull the name of a saint out of a box, and for the following year, study and attempt to emulate that saint.

You may wonder who was St. Valentine. I'd never given him much thought, figuring he was semi-mythical, like St. Christopher. But I was wrong:

At least three Saint Valentines are mentioned in the early martyrologies under the date of February 14th. One is described as a priest in Rome, another as a Bishop of Interamna, now Terni in Italy, and the other lived and died in Africa. ... However, most scholars believe Valentine of Terni and the priest Valentine of Rome were the same person.

Claudius' Rome was an extremely dangerous place to be Christian. Valentine not only chose to be a priest, but was believed to have been a leader of the Christian underground movement. Many priests were caught, one by one, and imprisoned and martyred. Valentine supposedly continued to preach the word after he was imprisoned, witnessing to the prisoners and guards.

One story tells that he was able to cure a guard’s daughter of blindness. When word got back to Claudius, he was furious and ordered Valentine’s brutal execution -- beaten by clubs until dead, and then beheaded. While he was waiting for the soldiers to come and drag him away, Valentine composed a note to the girl telling her that he loved her. He signed it simply, "From Your Valentine." The execution was carried out on February 14th.

Another legend touts of a well loved priest called Valentine living under the rule of Emperor Claudius II. Rome was constantly engaged in war. Year after year, Claudius drafted male citizens into battle to defend and expand the Roman Empire. Many Romans were unwilling to go. Married men did not want to leave their families. Younger men did not wish to leave their sweethearts. Claudius ordered a moratorium on all marriages and that all engagements must be broken off immediately.

Valentine disagreed with his emperor. When a young couple came to the temple seeking to be married, Valentine secretly obliged them. Others came and were quietly married. Valentine became the friend of lovers in every district of Rome. But such secrets could not be kept for long. Valentine was dragged from the temple. Many pleaded with Claudius for Valentine's release but to no avail, and in a dungeon, Valentine languished and died. His devoted friends are said to have buried him in the church of St. Praxedes on the 14th of February.

You may wonder how Cupid made his way into the picture. It helps to remember that Cupid is the Roman version of Eros, the Greek god of love. And Eros didn't just make people fall in love with each other -- he could shoot someone with a lead arrow and make him indifferent. He was not considered a benevolent fellow. Although the Greeks wouldn't have described him that way, he was kind of a dick.

The most famous story about the god of love and desire is Cupid and Psyche:

Once upon a time there was a king with three daughters. They were all beautiful, but by far the most beautiful was the youngest, Psyche. She was so beautiful that people began to neglect the worship of Venus, the goddess of love and beauty. Venus was very jealous, and asked her son Cupid (the boy with the arrows) to make Psyche fall in love with a horrible monster. When he saw how beautiful she was, Cupid dropped the arrow meant for her and pricked himself, and fell in love with her.

Mixed marriages have never been simple, and relationships between gods and mortals were more complicated than most. (Check out the story of Leda and the Swan if you want to see the extreme consequences of god-on-human hookups.) For the life of me, though, I can't figure this one out. I first read the story in college -- it appears in The Golden Ass of Apuleius, a Roman who helped invent the novel in the second century AD -- and still can't figure out why Cupid decided to marry Psyche, but wouldn't allow her to see him in daylight.

I guess there's something happening on a metaphorical level, along the lines of Shallow Hal, when Hal gets hypnotized by a gigantic motivational speaker and can only see the inner beauty of the people he encounters. Except in this case Psyche isn't allowed to see the outer beauty of her husband. And when she does try to see what he looks like -- goaded by her jealous sisters, naturally -- she accidentally burns Cupid with lantern oil, and damned near ruins the marriage.

Eventually, the story would become part of our Disneyfied romantic mythology; it appears to have inspired Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, and, who knows, maybe Starsky and Hutch. As long as you have two beautiful people who want to be in love but struggle to get past seemingly insurmountable obstacles, you can trace it back to Cupid and Psyche.

What I find most interesting is that modern Valentine's Day is a lot more like the ancient Roman tradition -- simple, sweet, and inclusive of everyone who wanted to be included -- than any of the baggage that's been strapped onto its roof rack in the past 2,000 years. We don't really need to venerate a Roman priest who was clubbed to death on orders of the emperor, or celebrate a mythical god who wouldn't let his own wife see what an attractive hunk of godliness he really was.

Just let it be about love. And, as the poet once sang ...

Turn your heartache right into joy,
She’s a girl, and you’re a boy.
Well get it together,
Make it real nice.
You ain’t gonna need any more advice.

And there’s a rose in the fisted glove
And the eagle flies with the dove,
And if you can’t be with the one you love, honey,
Love the one you’re with.

Posted by LouSchuler at 06:57 AM | Comments (0)

January 26, 2007

Ram-on-Ram

I don't follow pro football closely -- in fact, I follow it so not-closely that I only watch the Super Bowl for the commercials, and take my bathroom breaks when play resumes. But even I know that this is the first Super Bowl involving two African-American coaches.

My older brother and I listened to the Chicago-New Orleans game as we were driving out of St. Louis Sunday afternoon, and one of the first things the radio announcer said when the game ended was that the Chicago coach, Lovie Smith, would be the first black coach to take a team to the Super Bowl.

I think the story line should be that Lovie Smith is the first person named "Lovie" who wasn't laughed out of his profession. But that's just me.

So, with thoughts of identity politics already percolating in my head, I read this in yesterday's New York Times, about the scientist who had the misfortune of studying an obscure subject that somehow turned into a political football:

Dr. Roselli, a researcher at the Oregon Health and Science University, has searched for the past five years for physiological factors that might explain why about 8 percent of rams seek sex exclusively with other rams instead of ewes. The goal, he says, is to understand the fundamental mechanisms of sexual orientation in sheep. Other researchers might some day build on his findings to seek ways to determine which rams are likeliest to breed, he said.

But since last fall, when People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals started a campaign against the research, it has drawn a torrent of outrage from animal rights activists, gay advocates and ordinary citizens around the world -- all of it based, Dr. Roselli and colleagues say, on a bizarre misinterpretation of what the work is about.

According to the Times story, written by John Schwartz, gay activists somehow got the impression Roselli was trying to find a way to end homosexuality in male sheep. (Funny coincidence department: Lovie Smith used to be defensive coordinator of the Rams. Get it? "Lovie"? "Defensive coordinator"? "Rams"? You can't make this stuff up!)

And if you can keep the rams off their fellow rams, well, that's just a short step from breeding homosexual orientation out of humans. It's like Twilight of the Golds, only with sheep!

Except ... that's not what the research is about. Not even close:

Dr. Roselli, whose research is supported by the National Institutes of Health and is published in leading scientific journals, insists that he is as repulsed as his critics by the thought of sexual eugenics in humans. He said human sexuality was a complex phenomenon that could not be reduced to interactions of brain structure and hormones.

On blogs where attacks have appeared, the researchers point out that many of the accusations, like The Sunday Times’s assertion that the scientists implant devices in the brains of the sheep, are simply false.

So where does that leave us? Well, I think it's safe to say that rams will remain free to, as they say, "get wild and woolly" with other rams. And did you hear about the coaches in this year's Super Bowl?

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:50 AM | Comments (0)

January 10, 2007

Waisted

In TC Luoma's Atomic Dog column on T-nation last week, he brought up this point about female beauty:

While it's often said that beauty is ever changing, skin-deep, and superficial, that line of thinking is largely bunk. Regardless of cultural preferences, two things remain timeless and irrefutable markers of beauty: facial symmetry and the mystical .7 waist-to-hip ratio, or WHR. If you haven't heard of the WHR before, Professor Devendra Singh of the University of Texas at Austin originated the concept in a paper he wrote in 1993.

Quite simply, the .7 WHR reflects the size of the waist to the size of the hips. Non-obese men, obviously, have a WHR closer to 1, while non-obese women, more wasp-waisted, have a WHR smaller than 1, the ideal being close to .7.

Singh came to the conclusion that across the ages, across cultures, regardless of body fat levels or preferences for fuller breasts or butts, the .7 WHR remains a rock solid predictor of female desirability.

Now the BBC's news site has a story about Dr. Singh's latest research:

Slim waists have been the mark of attractive women throughout history, says a U.S. scholar who has analysed thousands of ancient texts. Dr. Devendra Singh scoured references to fictional beauties from modern times back to early Indian literature.

He found that slimness was the most common term of praise from an author.

The study, published in a Royal Society journal, adds to evidence highlighting the role of the ratio between waist and hips in attracting a mate.

The article says he studied more than 30,000 texts, including erotic poetry from ancient India and China. And, while breasts were the most common female feature mentioned in those writings, slim waists came up 66 times. So, across history, there's some consistency in what turns our cranks, even if there were some moments when the ideal shifted:

There was trend for slightly larger women in the 17th and 18th centuries -- a trend typified by the paintings of Rubens -- but demand for a slimmer waist was generally constant throughout the centuries.

Dr. Singh said: "The common historical assumption in the social sciences has been that the standards of beauty are arbitrary, solely culturally determined and in the eye of the beholder. The finding that the writers describe a small waist as beautiful suggests instead that this body part -- a known marker of health and fertility -- is a core feature of feminine beauty that transcends ethnic differences and cultures."

Isn't it nice to know there's a biological reason why pictures like this tend to raise the temperature in the room.

(Thanks to our man in Scotland, Rannoch Donald, for the link. Welcome back!)

Posted by LouSchuler at 06:51 AM | Comments (0)

December 14, 2006

"Cut Me, Mick!"

Ah, crap. This is not what I wanted to hear:

Circumcision reduces the risk of HIV infection by half, according to a new study conducted among nearly 8,000 adult males in Kenya and Uganda, researchers reported Wednesday.

Circumcision proved so effective that the study was halted a year early and the procedure was offered to all study participants.

Previous research has suggested that circumcision is beneficial, but the new trial is "definitive," according to Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which cosponsored the study with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

"It's not a magic bullet," said Dr. Kevin De Cock, director of the World Health Organization's department of HIV/AIDS, but it has the potential to prevent "many hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of infections over coming years."

I apologize, but my inner third-grader can't pass up the opportunity to note that the doctor's name is De Cock. Is it pre-ordained that people with names like that end up studying things that originate in the pelvic region? (Then again, Dick Pound missed his calling as a porn star, so there goes my theory.)

Back to the story:

The reason it bothers me is that I made the decision not to circumcise our son, who turns 11 in two months. My wife didn't like the idea of circumcision -- it seemed unnecessary and barbaric to her -- but she left it up to me. (She got to decide when our daughters would get their first haircuts -- not exactly analogous, but it did involve sharp instruments and frightened children.)

At the time, I couldn't see a reason to have him circumcised. And I heard a lot of arguments for why boys shouldn't be cut, the main one being that it would decrease sexual sensation. The arguments in favor -- primarily that a circumcised boy looks like all the other boys in the locker room -- didn't seem particularly strong.

Back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the driving force behind routine circumcision was the idea that a cut weasel was less likely to be wanked. In other words, the original motivation for the procedure was to reduce sexual pleasure.

I wasn't unaware that uncircumcised men had higher risk of getting or spreading STDs. The idea was already out there in the mid-'90s. But we were told by a pediatrician that good hygiene negates the risk. (Funnily enough, the doctor was Paul Fleiss, Heidi's father, who was indicted a year after our son was born for helping his daughter launder money.)

We were living in California at the time (hence the contact with Dr. Fleiss, who visited our childbirth class), and were told that only about half the boys in our state were getting snipped. It seemed like a trend -- Europeans were no longer doing it, Californians weren't doing it as much, and the rest of the U.S. would soon follow.

Except the rest of the nation didn't follow. About 80 percent of boys in the U.S. get trimmed. Plus, we now live in Pennsylvania, where I would assume circumcision rates mirror the national average.

Medical science may yet vindicate our decision. And I still think the procedure is barbaric. But right now, I'm not feeling too confident in the call I made nearly 11 years ago.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:46 AM | Comments (2)

December 09, 2006

Bangalore Torpedoes

If I were a man living in India, I don't think I'd want this news getting much play:

A survey of more than 1,000 men in India has concluded that condoms made according to international sizes are too large for a majority of Indian men.

The study found that more than half of the men measured had penises that were shorter than international standards for condoms. It has led to a call for condoms of mixed sizes to be made more widely available in India.

The two-year study was carried out by the Indian Council of Medical Research. Over 1,200 volunteers from the length and breadth of the country had their penises measured precisely, down to the last millimetre.

Josh Marshall writes:

There must be some globalization joke in here. But I'm afraid to find it. Maybe about outsourcing?

That's a good start. I'd also look for some yuks in the area of customer support: When an Indian man calls the Trojan hotline, who answers? I'll bet this guy could use the work ...

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:22 AM | Comments (0)

November 27, 2006

Monday Math

A handful of fun and interesting stories to check out this morning:

TV + exercise = weight loss.

A schizophrenia drug + a blood-pressure drug = an ejaculation-preventing contraceptive pill for men.

Slow reaction times + poorly functioning memory = heart attacks.

Making more money may or may not = more happiness. (And check out this New York Times story on how the really rich are separating themselves from the merely successful and affluent. Is anyone happier because he's making millions instead of hundreds of thousands?)

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:51 AM | Comments (1)

November 08, 2006

Don't Bother Us with Facts

Continuing with today's theme that voters chose moderation over extremism, and echoing last week's post about the numbskulls in our government who think it's their place to preach abstinence to unmarried American adults, there's this:

Most Americans, regardless of their political leanings, favor comprehensive sex education in schools over abstinence-only programs, researchers reported Monday.

Currently, the federal government champions the abstinence-only approach, giving around $170 million each year to states and community groups to teach just-say-no sex education. This funding precludes mention of birth control and condoms, unless it's to emphasize their failure rates.

However, critics point out that studies have failed to show that abstinence-only education delays sex or lowers rates of teen pregnancy.

This latest study, according to the authors, suggests that the federal government is out of step not only with research, but also with public opinion.

Of the nearly 1,110 U.S. adults they surveyed, 82 percent supported programs that discuss abstinence as well as other methods for preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Half were in outright opposition to abstinence-only education.

Even among self-described conservatives, 70 percent supported comprehensive sex ed., while 40 percent opposed the abstinence-only strategy.

The findings "highlight a gap between policy, and science and public opinion," said Dr. Amy Bleakley of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and lead author of the new study.

So our government spends $170 million a year promoting abstinence-only sex ed, but four-fifths of Americans -- i.e., the people the government ostensibly serves -- want comprehensive sex education.

Is it any wonder that the opposition party, the Democrats, didn't cough up a single seat in the House or Senate, or a single governorship, in yesterday's midterm elections? Is it any wonder that a religious-right extremist like Rick Santorum lost by 18 points here in Pennsylvania?

It's one thing to have deep religious faith and strong convictions. I think most of us, no matter our political leanings, respect that. But it's another to try to cram your religious beliefs down the throats of the rest of us.

The strongest political conviction I have is probably this: The government works for us. When I cast a vote, it's because I'm trying to hire that person to work for me, with his salary and expenses coming out of my tax dollars.

I've had that feeling my entire life, going back to college. I never skipped class because, in my view, I was paying that professor or graduate assistant to teach me. I paid most of my own tuition and expenses, and I just couldn't justify throwing that money away. If I paid him or her to teach and then didn't show up to be taught, it was no different in my mind than buying a plane ticket and then not showing up for the flight.

My tax dollars don't discriminate between Republicans and Democrats. Whoever wins the election gets my money. I understand that if the guys I voted against win, they'll make decisions that will better reflect the views of the people who voted for them, rather than mine. That's why I vote. If my money is going to pay these people anyway, I'd rather they be the people I chose for the job.

So I never expected a guy like Rick Santorum to see things my way in office. But when he and people like him support extremely unpopular policies, whether it's abstinence-only sex ed or a minimum wage that's too low in the eyes of Americans, they deserve to lose, and lose big.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:52 AM | Comments (0)

November 01, 2006

More Sex Please, We're British

This news doesn't come as a huge surprise:

Monogamy is dominant across the world, but multiple partners are more common in rich countries, according to the study published in the Lancet. This was despite developing countries having higher rates of sexually transmitted infections and HIV.

London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine researchers gathered data from 59 countries for the study. They said factors such as poverty and mobility had more of a role in sexually transmitted infections than promiscuity had.

So people in wealthier, more industrialized countries have sex with more partners, but suffer fewer consequences. And the study also found that teens in developed countries don't start having sex earlier than their counterparts in poorer countries -- in the U.K., the average age of first intercourse is 16.5 for men and 17.5 for women. Across the globe, the study says, the kids start getting their jollies between the ages of 15 and 19.

A researcher throws in this rather pointed comment:

[T]he report's author, Professor Kaye Wellings, said: "This suggests social factors such as poverty, mobility and gender equality may be a stronger factor in sexual ill-health than promiscuity."

And she added that the results showed flexible approaches to tackling public health had to be adopted.

"Men and women have sex for different reasons and in different ways in different settings," she said. ... "The selection of public-health messages needs to be guided by epidemiological evidence rather than by myths and moral stances."

It's not hard to guess which country she means when she talks about "myths and moral stances" guiding public-health policy. Here in the U.S., the anti-sex message just gets louder and weirder:

The federal government's "no sex without marriage" message isn't just for kids anymore.

Now the government is targeting unmarried adults up to age 29 as part of its abstinence-only programs, which include millions of dollars in federal money that will be available to the states under revised federal grant guidelines for 2007.

The government says the change is a clarification. But critics say it's a clear signal of a more directed policy targeting the sexual behavior of adults.

"They've stepped over the line of common sense," said James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit that supports sex education. "To be preaching abstinence when 90 percent of people are having sex is in essence to lose touch with reality. It's an ideological campaign. It has nothing to do with public health."

Here's the government's response:

Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the Department of Health and Human Services, said the revision is aimed at 19- to 29-year-olds because more unmarried women in that age group are having children.

Government data released last month show that 998,262 births in 2004 were to unmarried women 19-29, the ages with the most births to unmarried women.

"The message is 'It's better to wait until you're married to bear or father children,'" Horn said. "The only 100 percent effective way of getting there is abstinence."

So here's a question:

At what point does religious ideology cross the line into condescension?

I understand that zealots have a need to keep repeating the same things over and over; if they were capable of forming original thoughts they wouldn't be zealots.

But I'm beginning to wonder if some of the people making health policy in our government truly believe that young adults in America don't understand the connection between sex and children. Do our bureaucrats think anyone is unclear on the whole sperm-and-egg concept?

If they do, they'd better start rethinking "no child left behind," because clearly the people making government policy need some remedial education on what goes on in the real world.

Posted by LouSchuler at 06:55 AM | Comments (1)

October 31, 2006

The Sound of One Hand Slapping

If you ever found yourself in a conversation about pornography with a lockstep feminist back in the '70s or '80s, her opening gambit would be something like this: "Pornography is bad because it objectifies women."

The problem with that argument is that it plays a lot better with women than with men. It's human nature to celebrate beauty, and while one man's celebration might be another man's whacking material, it's hard to demonize objectification in the abstract.

Sooner or later, the feminist would pull out the trump card: "Pornography leads to rape."

But, again, that's a tough argument to make with an actual consumer of erotica. I subscribed to Playboy back then, and I guarantee there was nothing about looking at pictures of naked women that inspired violence. I always figured the opposite occurred, and that a guy who spent too much time with his private collection would spend less time and energy seeking an actual partner. To me, pornography was more likely to lead to passivity and loneliness than to aggression and violence.

You could also flip the argument around: Do men in prison rape other men because they spend their days and nights looking at pictures of naked cowboys?

So now, thanks to this Internet thingy, anyone capable of Googling a few choice keywords has instant access to all the pornography he can handle. If pornography leads to rape, then of course the sexual-assault rate should be skyrocketing. It's not, according to economist Steven Landsburg in this column for Slate:

What happens when more people view more of it? The rise of the Internet offers a gigantic natural experiment. Better yet, because Internet usage caught on at different times in different states, it offers 50 natural experiments.

The bottom line on these experiments is, "More Net access, less rape." A 10 percent increase in Net access yields about a 7.3 percent decrease in reported rapes. States that adopted the Internet quickly saw the biggest declines. And, according to Clemson professor Todd Kendall, the effects remain even after you control for all of the obvious confounding variables, such as alcohol consumption, police presence, poverty and unemployment rates, population density, and so forth.

Landsburg also notes something else that's news to me:

What happens when a particularly violent movie is released? Answer: Violent crime rates fall. Instantly. Here again, we have a lot of natural experiments: The number of violent movie releases changes a lot from week to week. One weekend, 12 million people watch Hannibal, and another weekend, 12 million watch Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

University of California professors Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna compared what happens on those weekends. The bottom line: More violence on the screen means less violence in the streets. Probably that's because violent criminals prefer violent movies, and as long as they're at the movies, they're not out causing mischief. They'd rather see Hannibal than rob you, but they'd rather rob you than sit through Wallace & Gromit.

I say that's the most probable explanation, because the biggest drop in crime (about a 2 percent drop for every million people watching violent movies) occurs between 6 p.m. and midnight -- the prime moviegoing hours. And what happens when the theaters close? Answer: Crime stays down, though not by quite as much. Dahl and DellaVigna speculate that this is because two hours at the movies means two hours of drinking Coke instead of beer, with sobering effects that persist right on through till morning. Speaking of morning, after 6 a.m., crime returns to its original level.

That's interesting, but here's what I really want to know: Does the incidence of people doing crazy shit with sports cars decline after they've watched a Vin Diesel movie?

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:57 AM | Comments (2)

October 26, 2006

For the Drunken Preteen Slut Who Has Everything

Can the news possibly get any stranger than this?

Tesco has been forced to remove a pole-dancing kit from the toys and games section of its website after it was accused of "destroying children's innocence".

The Tesco Direct site advertises the kit with the words, "Unleash the sex kitten inside ... simply extend the Peekaboo pole inside the tube, slip on the sexy tunes and away you go! Soon you'll be flaunting it to the world and earning a fortune in Peekaboo Dance Dollars."

The £49.97 kit comprises a chrome pole extendible to 8 ft 6 ins, a 'sexy dance garter' and a DVD demonstrating suggestive dance moves.

This isn't a joke. (If you click on the link, you can see a photo of the actual product.) Tesco is described in the article as "Britain's number one chain," which I assume makes it the equivalent of Wal-Mart. And they're selling pole-dancing kits aimed at pre-teens.

Meanwhile, as long as I'm working the teen beat, there's this:

New animal research suggests that teenagers' brains may be better at adapting to certain short-term effects of drinking. But that's not a good thing, researchers say.

In experiments with rats, scientists found that adolescent rodents developed an "acute tolerance" to alcohol, quickly recovering from the immediate effects alcohol had on their social behavior, while their adult counterparts remained impaired for a longer stretch.

For rats, social behavior essentially consists of sniffing and play fighting. In human terms, the animals' alcohol-induced impairment was akin to being unable to speak with your drinking buddies.

The teenage rodents, however, quickly regained their social skills. Thirty minutes after being given alcohol, their social behavior appeared normal; in contrast, the adult animals were still unable to interact normally, according to findings published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

The take-away here is that teenagers may drink to excess simply because they can, whereas an adult will generally stop when he realizes he's inadvertently placed a hand on the boss' wife's breast.

Finally, there's this:

Teen girls actually believe that they can control as well as lose weight by smoking. However, researchers say this is a load of rubbish. In fact, smoking has absolutely no impact on weight loss, and research proves that both smokers and non-smokers among teen girls gain weight at the same rate.

Teen boys, in fact, have a lot to lose by smoking, since it actually retards their growth. They end up leaner and shorter than non-smoking boys. Igor Karp, a McGill University researcher, interprets that this is not so in the case of girls, since they achieve maximum growth before puberty unlike boys.

And now we've hit the trifecta of parental fear: If you want your daughter to end up fat, drunk, and promiscuous, we now have the formula.

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:23 AM | Comments (0)

October 25, 2006

Not Seeing Is Still Believing

Sexual images affect your brain, even if you can't consciously see them:

In an experiment, 40 men and women were shown erotic images that had been manipulated to bypass conscious detection. The participants consisted of both heterosexual and homosexual individuals. ...

In general, the erotic images attracted or repelled attention depending on the gender of the nude model and also the sexual orientation of the subject. For example, heterosexual males tended to perform better on the pattern task when it followed the presentation of an invisible female nude than a male nude. Gay males, in contrast, showed more enhanced performance when exposed to invisible male nudes compared to female nudes.

"We didn't predict that," study team member Sheng He of the University of Minnesota told LiveScience. "We just wanted to see if invisible images can attract your attention or not."

For women, the results were more mixed. Heterosexual females performed better after exposure to invisible male nudes, but their performance didn't necessarily worsen when exposed to female nudes.

The performances of homosexual and bisexual females were somewhere in-between heterosexual male and heterosexual female groups.

Take-away message: No matter what the woman in your life says about erotica, she probably likes seeing some southern exposure.

What color is your pubic chute?

Here's one of the oddest sex-related stories I've seen in a while: A wealthy socialite is marketing a line of pubic-hair dyes called Betty. Here's how she explains what the name means:

"I was at a party last night where I took Betty as a gift for somebody. They opened it up and were like, 'Oh my god, is that blah-blah dye?' I said, 'It's color for the hair down there.' 'What's it called?' 'Betty.' 'So it's for your ... ?' 'It's for your betty.' From that point on, everybody just started talking about their betty. It happens all the time. They'll say, 'Wow, I just found a gray hair down there,' or, 'I haven't seen my betty in 20 years, but I feel like I want to do something with my betty.'"

"Do I have a betty?" I ask.

"Of course, men have betties, too. Everyone's got one!"

Sorry, but I do not want my manifestation referred to as "betty." "Moose" would be fine. "Archie" isn’t bad. I’d settle for "Jughead." But the Louminator is not a betty.

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:55 AM | Comments (0)

September 10, 2006

News About Naked People

Several readers sent me links to the story about the Detroit Lions assistant coach who got busted twice for DWI; the first time, according to the initial news report, while naked. I was all set to post it -- you don't often get a chance to blog about naked NFL assistant coaches -- but then I heard on ESPN radio that he wasn't really naked. The host, if I recall correctly, said he was wearing underwear and a vest. There went my blog meat. I could write about guys in their underwear any day of the week.

But then my wife sent me this one, which has all the hallmarks of premium blog chow: Not only is there a naked person, but the story takes place in a red state and involves law-enforcement personnel:

The police chief, the mayor and a councilman from a small, southwestern Oklahoma town resigned Friday, saying they were fed up with the public attention and criticism they received after the chief's wife appeared in various nude poses on a Web site and the photos began circulating around town.

"This has turned into a media circus," Chief Tod Ozmun said Friday. "I don't feel like me staying in office is going to benefit my department or my staff. This has turned into a mess. This is ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous."

Dozens of local residents had called for Ozmun's resignation, but the City Council decided last week that Doris Ozmun's adult pictures were protected by the First Amendment. A prosecutor had called for an investigation.

An investigation? What in the world are they going to investigate? If that's a euphemism for "we're going to look at naked pictures of the police chief's wife," I don't envy them the challenge they face:

Earlier Friday, the chief said the whole issue involving his 43-year-old wife had been blown out of proportion. "People in this country do what she does on a daily basis," he said. "It's absolutely ludicrous. Makes no sense at all."

He said he has had lengthy discussions with his wife about the photos but does not tell her what to do.

"My wife is 6-foot-3 and weighs 300 pounds," he said. "If there is somebody that thinks they can control her, have at it. I have tried for 11 years and haven't been able to."

Doris Ozmun is known worldwide for her work as a plus-sized model on a pornographic Web site.

Gives new meaning to the phrase "large and in charge."

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:51 AM | Comments (0)

August 28, 2006

The Titty-Cut Follies

In Australia, a politician has proposed new laws making it more difficult for teens to get cosmetic surgery:

Teenage girls should not get breast implants simply to boost their confidence, [New South Wales] Premier Morris Iemma says.

The NSW government is considering introducing legislation to make it harder for teenage girls to undergo cosmetic surgery, with Mr. Iemma concerned by an apparent trend of girls seeking packages including breast implants, nose jobs and botox.

"There's a disturbing trend of more teenage girls seeking breast implants and tummy tucks, these sort of makeover packages," Mr. Iemma told reporters.

"It's timely that we put out the alternative message, which is the right one, and that is to respect people for who they are, not what they ought to look like."

As you might imagine, Australian plastic surgeons aren't wild about their specialties being singled out for approbation:

Doctor Norm Olbourne, of the Australian Society of Plastic Surgeons, says while there may be a few more patients, it is always done with parental consent and a cooling-off period.

He says most teenagers who do have cosmetic surgery are worthy cases and legislation could interfere with that.

"I think that the Premier may not have sufficient numerical data and statistics to justify rushing to legislation," he said.

"But I'm concerned that if there was legislation it might preclude young people who not only deserve but need cosmetic surgery for their well being."

Dr. Olbourne says many teenagers have worthy cases for plastic surgery. "A young person whose ears stick out, or somebody who's had an accident and their nose has been pushed out of shape, a young girl of 15 or 16 who's had huge breasts and won't do sport and has pain around her neck," Dr. Olbourne said.

Let's go to the science: Is there some inherent danger with teenage girls getting cosmetic procedures? This University of Pennsylvania study, published in 2005, doesn't suggest that:

Thirty (5 percent) of the 559 women surveyed reported that they had undergone cosmetic surgery. Two thirds of respondents reported knowing someone who had received cosmetic surgery, and approximately one third indicated that a family member had undergone surgery. Overall, participants held relatively favorable attitudes about surgery. Regression analysis suggested that a greater psychological investment in physical appearance and greater internalization of mass media images of beauty predicted more favorable attitudes toward cosmetic surgery.

I guess you could read that two ways. It could be that young women don't feel bad about having plastic surgery, and don't judge others who've had the procedures harshly. Or you could say that young women are being turned into beauty-obsessed zombies by the mass media, and don't even realize they're supposed to feel bad about the investments they and their friends have made to improve their appearance.

Hard to say which is the more realistic take.

This study, from 2003, looked at the attitudes of younger girls, juniors at a suburban high school:

Although two thirds of the respondents knew someone who had undergone cosmetic surgery, only one third would choose it for themselves. Those who desired aesthetic surgery described people who have cosmetic procedures as "motivated," whereas those who would not choose this option believed individuals who do so are "vain." The most desired procedures were liposuction, rhinoplasty, and breast augmentation. The main reasons for not proceeding were health risks, cost, and fear of a bad result. The most common source of information about plastic surgery among the students was teen magazines and television.

The part I highlighted, I would guess, applies to society as a whole.

Some see nose-reshapers and boob-builders as people eager to make their way in a world in which we're all judged by our appearances: "Hey, if a weird-looking nose or tiny titties are going to prevent me from getting what I want, why shouldn't I fix the problem and get on with pursuing my dreams?"

And some look at the same bulbous nose or less-than-luminous headlamps and say, "Hey, that's the way your genes lined up. Get over it and focus on what matters."

Who's to say which is the superior attitude? I don't spend a lot of time around young women, but it seems to me that it's increasingly rare to see someone who doesn't have straight and unnaturally white teeth, or hair that's been highlighted and permed. Is it really that big a leap to a nose job or retail rack?

I've written before about how odd it is to consider how few celebrities or public figures who appear on TV do so with their original equipment. Everyone has capped teeth, most of the ones over 30 have had brow lifts, many of the men have had hair transplants, and most of the women you see have upgrades in the thoracic region.

If that's the standard, it's hard to tell girls and young women that they have no right to achieve it. On the other hand, the idea of cutting up teens gives me the creeps.

Final thought:

Here's an argument for one type of elective surgery for teens:

How about a radical solution—stomach stapling for teenagers? It may sound crazy and desperate, but several major children's hospitals, including Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, Texas Children's Hospital, and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford, have started offering obesity surgery in recent years. Nightline recently followed a 16-year-old Texas girl who underwent stomach stapling and lost 129 pounds in six months, down from a starting weight of 368.

The worry is that such stories distract from workaday efforts to improve school lunches, promote exercise, and establish good eating habits for kids. Critics also point out that stomach stapling is expensive and can cause serious complications, like intestinal leakage, bowel obstruction, and nutritional deficiencies.

But for extremely obese teens -- especially those who already have a related health problem -- less radical treatment options may not work, or at least not work fast enough. Surgery, by contrast, can not only lead to dramatic weight loss but also improve or reverse conditions like sleep apnea and diabetes. Only a small group of kids should be eligible for the surgery, but for these few, it can be a very good thing.

Hard to argue with that, as long as the emphasis remains on that small group of kids.

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:36 AM | Comments (0)

August 15, 2006

It's Not Just You: Women Really Do Lose Their Sex Drives in Long-Term Relationships

Here's evidence -- as if we really needed it -- that the man-woman thing is designed to be out of synch:

Researchers from Germany found that four years into a relationship, less than half of 30-year-old women wanted regular sex.

Conversely, the team found a man's libido remained the same regardless of how long he had been in a relationship.

Naturally, there's an evolutionary explanation:

Dr. Dietrich Klusmann, lead author of the study and a psychologist from Hamburg-Eppendorf University, believed the differences were down to human evolution.

He said: "For men, a good reason their sexual motivation to remain constant would be to guard against being cuckolded by another male."

But women, he said, have evolved to have a high sex drive when they are initially in a relationship in order to form a "pair bond" with their partner.

But, once this bond is sealed a woman's sexual appetite declines, he added. He said animal behaviour studies suggest this could be because females may be diverting their sexual interest towards other men, in order to secure the best combinations of genetic material for their offspring.

Or, he said, this could be because limiting sex may boost their partner's interest in it.

Does that mean our sex lives are being manipulated systematically by our partners? And that nature designed it this way? Horrifying!

Another researcher in the same article puts it more bluntly:

"The rationale for why a woman's sex drive declines may be down to supply and demand. If something is in infinite supply, the perceived value would drop."

How come women understand the economics of sex, but men don't? That hardly seems fair.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:55 AM | Comments (6)

August 11, 2006

Is Our Children Rutting?

Toward the end of my vacation, I heard news of this study, which shows that teens who listen to music that portrays women as sex objects or men as heroic seed-spreaders will tend to have sex at earlier ages.

The study doesn't say so, but I suspect that sort of music also encourages kids to dress like village idiots and engage in any number of IQ-lowering behaviors.

I know this sort of news is supposed to get middle-aged people like me in a red-assed uproar, but I remember my teen years well enough to shrug it off. Some kids are going to do crazy shit, and my guess is that those kids are likely to gravitate toward thump-thump-thump music in the first place. There still might be a stimulus-response effect, but we all know that some fuses are shorter and more easily sparked than others.

But here's an ironic twist on all this:

Risky sexual behavior by U.S. high school students ... has declined over the past 15 years, a new federal report finds. ...

To examine changes in U.S. teen behavior in recent years, CDC researchers analyzed data from eight national Youth Risk Behavior Surveys conducted between 1991 and 2005. The surveys were completed anonymously by the students. [Side note: These are the stats I used to discuss teen steroid use here.]

During that time, the number of teens ever having had sexual intercourse decreased from 54.1 to 46.8 percent; the prevalence of multiple (four or more) sex partners decreased from 18.7 to 14.3 percent; the prevalence of current sexual activity (within the past three months) decreased from 37.4 percent to 33.9 percent; and the prevalence of condom use increased from 46.2 percent to 62.8 percent.

The most reassuring statistic, Horberg said, was the increase in condom use. "That was very encouraging," he said. "Safer-sex messages are being heard, not just preached."

An editorial note in the report pointed out that gains in behavior coincide with a simultaneous decrease in gonorrhea, pregnancy and teen birth rates.

Great news, right? There's just one downside:

But certain subgroups of teens, including Hispanic and black students, have shown less progress or no progress at all.

Which begs the obvious question: Are these the same kids who're listening to music that divides the world into playas and hos?

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:15 AM | Comments (0)

June 12, 2006

Bustin' Out

I have some more serious stories to blog this morning, but I couldn't resist starting with this one:

Alice Alyse is quite plainly a bombshell, a knockout: She's slim, leggy and gorgeous, with long, dark hair and a great set of cheekbones.

Also, she's stacked.

And that, she says, is why she's out of a job.

Alyse claims that her generous breast size got her fired from the cast of Movin' Out, the Broadway show choreographed by Twyla Tharp to songs by Billy Joel. Alyse was an ensemble dancer in the national tour until her bra size "naturally increased" from a C cup to a D, according to her lawsuit against the production company. The growth spurt happened while she was on leave last year with an injured big toe; the 29-year-old says she neither gained weight nor got implants. When she returned to the show, she needed new bras sewn into her costumes, and for this, she alleges in her 42-page complaint, she was sexually harassed, verbally abused and wrongfully dismissed.

Does the lawsuit have merit? I have no clue. In entertainment, as in politics, things are rarely as they seem. But, in terms of pure entertainment value, you can't do much better in a mainstream newspaper than this passage:

"It's a virtue to have bigger breasts on Broadway, in my expert opinion," Klayman [Alyse's attorney] observes one balmy evening, over dinner with Alyse at a seaside restaurant called Bongos. It certainly seems to be a virtue to have them in Miami: The city is awash in well-endowed women wearing tight-fitting tank tops and cleavage-baring camisoles.

Yet big breasts cannot truly be said to be a virtue for a dancer, unless her routine includes thigh-high boots and a pole. The Ziegfeldian hourglass shape has flattened out over time. On current stages, in the view of many directors and choreographers, a B cup might be just sexy enough, while a D may be too much. From ballet companies to Broadway, the preferred look is slender, long-stemmed and minimally jiggly. Especially when we're talking about fitting into a group, whether a kick line or the corps de ballet.

God forbid anyone should stick out. Prevailing theater wisdom warns that an ensemble dancer must not distract, and in many shows, that means buxom chorines no longer need apply. A D cup, according to Roberta Stiehm, a musical theater veteran, could commit the major no-no of pulling focus.

If she wasn't "pulling focus" before, she sure is now.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:29 AM | Comments (0)

May 16, 2006

"Viewing Sexuality Among Young People as Natural and Good"

The Washington Post has a special report this morning on teen sexuality. But if you're expecting a fear-and-loathing, "these kids today are demented" kind of report, you're in for a shock. The collection of stories compares attitudes about teen sex in Europe and the U.S. and finds that the Europeans have a healthier outlook.

Try this for starters:

Pierre-Andre Michaud, chief of the Multidisciplinary Unit for Adolescent Health at the University of Lausanne Hospital in Switzerland and a leading researcher in European teen sexuality, dismisses the idea -- widely held in the United States -- that sex constitutes risky behavior for teens. In an editorial in May's Journal of Adolescent Health, he wrote:

"In many European countries -- Switzerland in particular -- sexual intercourse, at least from the age of 15 or 16 years, is considered acceptable and even part of normative adolescent behavior." Switzerland, he noted, has one of the world's lowest rates of abortion and teen pregnancy. Teens there, like those in Sweden and the Netherlands, have easy access to contraceptives, confidential health care and comprehensive sex education.

A 2001 Guttmacher Institute report, drawing on data from 30 countries in Western and Eastern Europe, concluded: "Societal acceptance of sexual activity among young people, combined with comprehensive and balanced information about sexuality and clear expectations about commitment and prevention childbearing and STDs [sexually transmitted diseases] within teenage relationships, are hallmarks of countries with low levels of adolescent pregnancy, childbearing and STDs." The study cited Sweden as the "clearest of the case-study countries in viewing sexuality among young people as natural and good."

This certainly confirms what many of us have long suspected: Demonizing sex doesn't lead to less sex, it just leads to more unprotected sex, which means more unplanned pregnancies, more STDs, and in the most unfortunate cases, both at the same time.

Not surprisingly, European experts see why the American approach to teen sexuality -- preach abstinence -- isn't working:

"My feeling is that it is impossible to have a double message toward young people," Michaud said, in a phone interview from his Lausanne office. "You can't say at the same time, 'Be abstinent, it's the only fair, good way, to escape from having HIV . . . and at the same time say, 'Look, if you ever happen to have sex, then please do that and that and that.' You probably have to choose the message."

Abstinence, he said, is not something the Swiss press on teens. "We think it's unfair. It's useless. It's inefficient. We have been advocating the use of the condom ... and I think that we tend to be successful."

If you're thinking that there's a socioeconomic angle to all this -- that it's the poorer Americans who are skewing the statistics -- you've certainly asked a good and fair question. But the stories do a pretty good job of shooting that one down:

Poverty alone (the United States is home to a greater proportion of poor teens than Western Europe) doesn't account for the disparity in teen sex behavior here and abroad. According to a 2001 Guttmacher study, the poorest U.S. teens are nearly 80 percent more likely to have a child by 18 than similar teens in Britain.

Finally, here's an interesting statistic:

U.S. and Western European teens start sexual activity at about the same age--the median age for first intercourse is 16 in Sweden, 17 in Switzerland, Germany and the United States, and 18 in France.

Who would've guessed that the decadent French would be last out of the starting gate?

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:25 AM | Comments (0)

May 08, 2006

Virgin Spring Break

This will come as a shock, but it seems some young people aren't taking their "virginity pledges" too seriously. Not the "virginity" part, anyway:

More than half of the adolescents who make the signed public promises give up on their pledges within a year, according to the study released last week.

Virginity pledges were introduced in the early 1990s as part of the Christian Sex Education Project. Their adult champions hail the promises, which rest solely on the individual's word, as being a major step toward reducing teen pregnancy and raising moral values.

By some estimates, at least 2.5 million adolescents around the world have publicly vowed to postpone sex until marriage. They include virgins, as well as those who have had sexual experiences but who swear to refrain from further activity. ...

For the Harvard report, researcher Janet Rosenbaum analyzed data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a survey conducted by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. It is the only government-sponsored study that asks about virginity pledges.

The 14,000 survey subjects were interviewed in 1995 and reinterviewed in 1996 and 2001. They ranged in age from 12 to 18 and came from across the country.

Rosenbaum found that 52 percent of those who said they had signed virginity pledges had had sex within a year. And of those who had sex after telling the first interviewers they had taken the pledge, 73 percent denied in the second interview having made the pledge. ...

The adolescents also were unreliable in reporting their sexual experiences, Rosenbaum said. More than a quarter of nonvirgins in the first interview who later took a virginity pledge said in the next interview that they had never had sex.

"That puts a lot of error in these studies," Rosenbaum said. Virginity pledgers, she concluded, "are more likely to give bad information -- unreliable data -- about their sexual history."

I could be wrong, but I think we can take away a few lessons from this:

* Kids don't always tell the truth.

* Kids like to have sex.

* Kids will tell adults whatever they think the adults want to hear ... after which they'll go out and do whatever they were going to do anyway.

Who would've guessed?

Boning up

In other non-virginity news, a new study shows that 6 percent of college men have popped boner pills -- Levitra, Cialis, or the granddaddy of them all, Viagra.

Some of these men may actually have had legitimate reasons to take the pills (the sample size was so small that it could've just been a couple of dudes telling the researchers what they wanted to hear), but most just got the pills off the Internet with no prescription and no medical reason for taking them.

One line in the story explains the phenomenon:

The pills also allow men to have sex when they're in an altered mental state ...

So you get drunk, get high, and still pop functional wood with whomever you happen to be with. Isn't that like cheating on your entrance exams?

Meanwhile, in the Bizarro World ...

So in a world in which kids promise to keep their virginity but have sex anyway, in which kids have learned to chemically bypass nature's best protection against ill-advised procreation (boys who were drunk and high traditionally couldn't get it up long enough to impregnate anyone), how do we prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases?

Well, according to some, we tell them to abstain from sex.

Yep, nothing like an injection of reality into the debate.

Posted by LouSchuler at 06:07 AM | Comments (0)

May 04, 2006

Boys on the Slide

Slate's Liza Mundy finds the bad news in declining teen-pregnancy rates:

Between 1990 and 2000 the U.S. teen pregnancy rate plummeted by 28 percent, dropping from 117 to 84 pregnancies per 1,000 women aged 15-19. Births to teenagers are also down, as are teen abortion rates. It's an achievement so profound and so heartening that left and right are eager to take credit for it, and both can probably do so. Child-health advocates generally acknowledge that liberal sex education and conservative abstinence initiatives are both to thank for the fact that fewer teenagers are ending up in school bathroom stalls sobbing over the results of a home pregnancy test.

What, though, if the drop in teen pregnancy isn't a good thing, or not entirely? What if there's a third explanation, one that has nothing to do with just-say-no campaigns or safe-sex educational posters? What if teenagers are less fertile than they used to be?

Not the girls -- the boys?

Mundy cites research showing that sperm counts are, indeed, declining. I confess this is hard for me to believe, speaking as a man who impregnated his wife with our third child while using birth control in a hot tub. Then again, maybe I'm part of the last generation of hyperfertile men.

And, since declining sperm counts could doom our species, we have to take fertility issues seriously. But it gets even worse than that:

Among the evidence presented are several trends that seem to point to a subtle feminization of male babies: a worldwide rise in hypospadias, a birth defect in which the urethral opening is located on the shaft of the penis rather than at the tip; a rise in cryptorchidism, or undescended testicles; and experiments Swan has done showing that in male babies with high exposure to compounds called phthalates, something called the anogenital distance is decreasing. If you measure the distance from a baby's anus to the genitals, the distance in these males is shorter, more like that of ... girls.

I guess we should all enjoy football while we can. The days of manly men may be numbered.

Posted by LouSchuler at 10:04 AM | Comments (0)

April 28, 2006

Foolproof Contraception (Some Disassembly Required)

Last summer, I wrote a proposal for a book that would challenge many of the assumptions we hold about health, fitness, nutrition, and sports. My coauthor, an exercise physiologist, and I had both read Freakonomics recently, and we both thought our field of expertise was ripe for the same treatment.

The proposal covered a wide range of topics, some innocuous (why it's a bad idea for kids to specialize in single sports at early ages) and some deliberately controversial. Every argument would be based on published research that, for various reasons, was ignored by the mainstream media and the most influential people in the worlds of health and fitness.

The most controversial chapter was the one on steroids. We argued that the dangers of steroids have been overblown, while the benefits have been ignored. One of the biggest benefits is that testosterone injections are a pretty good form of male contraception. Combined with a female hormone called progestin, they're nearly foolproof.

We've known this since the 1990s, and it was confirmed in 2003.

This was the dealbreaker, my agent told me. Even if we found a publisher for the book, which was doubtful, we'd have to spend all our promotional capital defending ourselves against doctors and scientists who'd argue in favor of the conventional wisdom. That is, if we were lucky enough to get on CNN, we'd only be used as punching bags -- those who disputed our position would look more reasonable than us, and would inevitably get the last word. The overwhelming impression would be, "These guys are nuts! Don't buy their book!"

So we dropped the idea. My agent is a very, very smart guy, and if you don't take the advice of smart people, you tend to have a short career. Besides, I'm free to write about anything I want on this weblog, so it's not like I'm somehow forbidden from ever talking about the potential health benefits of steroids.

Take today, for example. A new study shows that the testosterone/progestin treatments are reversible:

Researchers looked at data on more than 1,500 men around the world who had taken part in tests of some form of hormonal contraception.

On average, men took three to four months to recover full fertility, according to a paper in the Lancet. Experts say the research offers men reassurance that their fertility can be restored.

I know there are some big stumbling blocks here. Some men simply won't want injections or implants, even if what's being injected or implanted is the juice. And I assume some won't like the idea of a female hormone like progestin entering their systems, even though the testosterone is more than enough to balance. (In the 2003 study, some men reported an increase in libido.)

Is the testosterone needed for male contraception enough to increase muscle mass or strength? It could be, and that's one of the biggest challenges involved in male contraception. Female contraception involves blocking one egg every 28 days. Men create millions of sperm cells a day, so whatever testosterone product is developed for men has to be strong enough to counter the progestin, which would be in pill form and swallowed daily, without being so strong that it produces the side effects of anabolic steroids -- hair loss, acne, nut shrinkage. But there's a lot of room in between those extremes, and doctors would inevitably have to work closely with patients to figure out the right dose. That dose could be strong enough to create bigger muscles and a more manly bench press without side effects, but it's probably going to take some trial and error.

And that, it seems to me, would be the second big stumbling block for men. Few of us want to see doctors that often, and get that many blood tests, all to accomplish something our wives or girlfriends could achieve with one simple pill that has relatively few side effects.

That said, I still hope the research comes to fruition. I have to think that plenty of men will choose the juice over condoms, especially those who aren't yet ready for a vasectomy.

And if the pot can be sweetened with the promise of bigger muscles? It's gotta be worth a try.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:19 AM | Comments (1)

April 25, 2006

Sperm Limits

Every guy's nightmare: You and your girlfriend are going through a rocky stretch of breakups and makeups, and then one day she announces she's pregnant. Is the baby yours?

According to this, if you think it is, you're probably right:

In the United States, men confident about their paternity are almost always right, but those who insist that children are not their own are correct only 30 percent of the time, a new study finds.

A review of more than 65 studies of paternity has concluded that actual rates of nonpaternity -- cases in which a man incorrectly believes he is biologically related to a child -- are much lower than the widely cited 10 percent.

"Many of our beliefs about nonpaternity are based on anecdotes or hearsay," said Kermyt G. Anderson, the lead author of the study and a professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma. "We don't know exactly how many men think they're the father and how many don't. But the 10 percent figure is almost certainly inflated."

Using the most extensive data on nonpaternity rates assembled to date, the researchers tentatively concluded that men confident about their paternity are usually right: they are biologically unrelated only 1.7 percent to 3.7 percent of the time.

The 10 percent figure was popularized in a book called Sperm Wars, by Robin Baker, which came out in 1996. I read it and found it one of the most fascinating books about human behavior, and the biology driving that behavior, that I'd ever read. (A new edition was published this year; I have no idea if it contains new information, or is the same book with a different cover.)

This blog post summarizes what we know and have thought we knew about paternity, mentioning studies going back to the 1940s.

The bottom line seems to be this: If you're confident the baby is yours, there's about a 98 percent chance you're right. If you're pretty sure it's not yours, there's a 30 percent chance you're right. And in cases in which the researchers didn't know how confident the father was in his own paternity, there's about a 17 percent chance the baby wasn't conceived by the putative father.

Overall, the chance that your child is really yours is about 96 percent. That's reassuring, although I can't help but feel bad for the unlucky 4 percent of guys who're unknowingly raising someone else's kid.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:34 AM | Comments (0)

April 19, 2006

How to Become a Complete Idiot In One Easy Step

When I was browsing around for health and nutrition stories this morning, I was struck by how many stunningly obvious headlines I came across: "Stress causes anxiety!" "Lousy marriages are bad for your health!" "Middle-aged people actually have sex!"

But I settled on this one, because it has the advantage of being obvious in a way we men can appreciate:

Catching sight of a pretty woman really is enough to throw a man's decision-making skills into disarray, a study has found. The more testosterone he has, the vaguer he will be, according to work by Belgian researchers.

Men about to play a financial game were shown images of sexy women or lingerie. The ... study found they performed worse than men who had not been exposed to the alluring images.

The suggestion is that the sexual cues distract the men's thoughts, preventing them from focusing on their task -- particularly among those with high natural testosterone levels.

Gee, ya think?

Actually, the high-test connection is pretty interesting. The more T you have, the easier it is to slip off the rails and do something you'll later regret.

And it's interesting to note that women have no such mechanism for losing touch with reality:

The researchers are conducting similar tests with women. But so far, they have failed to find a visual stimulus which will affect their behaviour.

No wonder they live longer.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:40 AM | Comments (1)

March 02, 2006

The Best Time to Be a Man

You won't find this in history books, mostly because it took place before the invention of written language. But scientists now believe the best time to be a man was 10,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age:

According to the study, north European women evolved blonde hair and blue eyes at the end of the Ice Age to make them stand out from their rivals at a time of fierce competition for scarce males.

The study argues that blond hair originated in the region because of food shortages 10,000-11,000 years ago. Until then, humans had the dark brown hair and dark eyes that still dominate in the rest of the world. Almost the only sustenance in northern Europe came from roaming herds of mammoths, reindeer, bison and horses. Finding them required long, arduous hunting trips in which numerous males died, leading to a high ratio of surviving women to men.

Lighter hair colours, which started as rare mutations, became popular for breeding and numbers increased dramatically, according to the research, published under the aegis of the University of St Andrews.

“Human hair and eye colour are unusually diverse in northern and eastern Europe (and their) origin over a short span of evolutionary time indicates some kind of selection,” says the study by Peter Frost, a Canadian anthropologist. Frost adds that the high death rate among male hunters “increased the pressures of sexual selection on early European women, one possible outcome being an unusual complex of colour traits.”

Man, those were the days. Women outnumbered men, and were so desperate for our company that they developed mutations to get our attention. When's the last time a woman mutated for you?

I suppose the high death rate for men kind of mitigates the joy of having hot mutant babes fighting to share your cave. And, considering the average life span was about 20 years, there wasn't a lot of time to enjoy the cornucopia of carnal delights available to the man who managed to hunt wooly mammoth without getting stomped or gored.

Sadly, the blonde mutation may have outlived its usefulness as a man-magnet:

A study by the World Health Organisation found that natural blonds are likely to be extinct within 200 years because there are too few people carrying the blond gene. According to the WHO study, the last natural blond is likely to be born in Finland during 2202.

Gentlemen, you see the problem, and it's up to you to meet the challenge. If you have any blond genes, it's your sacred duty to impregnate a light-haired woman. I've already done my part -- my wife and I have one blonde-haired child to go with a redhead and one with brown hair. Now it's your turn. The future of the Swedish Bikini Team is at stake.

(Thanks to John Williams for the heads-up.)

Posted by LouSchuler at 11:44 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

February 23, 2006

Worst Husband Ever!

Relax: It's not you, and it's certainly not me. But it's very possibly this guy. From The Smoking Gun:

This country, as you know, is filled with the deranged. And then there's Travis Frey, a 33-year-old Iowa man who is facing charges that he tried to kidnap his own wife (not to mention a separate child pornography rap). Frey, prosecutors contend, apparently is a rather demanding guy. In fact, he actually drew up a bizarre four-page marriage document -- a "Contract of Wifely Expectations" -- that sought to establish guidelines for his spouse in terms of hygiene, clothing, and sexual activities.

The contract required his wife to give him three hours a night, which he called "my time," in which she had to be naked and was not allowed to argue, complain, criticize, or "be distracted from me, by other things." He also wanted her "to do what you are asked, when you are asked, exactly how you are asked."

I won't go into any more detail here, but if you click through and read the contract, you'll see his explicit instructions for her sexual subservience.

I know it's foolish to try to apply logic to the thoughts and actions of people who have mental illnesses. But, because fear of foolishness has never stopped me before, I can't help imagining the carnage if I told my wife she was no longer allowed to argue or criticize, and that she had "to do what you are asked." For starters, I'd have to change the name of this blog, because I don't think any distinctly "male" parts would survive.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:15 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

February 15, 2006

Just a Little Bit Longer ...

When my wife sent along this link, about the failure of penis-enlargement surgery to actually make penises larger, she noted that she didn't even have to read past the headline to know it was prime blog meat.

She was right:

"For patients with psychological concern about the size of the penis -- particularly if it is normal size -- there is little point in offering them surgery because it makes no difference," said Nim Christopher, a urologist at St Peter's Andrology Centre in London.

Christopher and his colleagues, who questioned 42 men who had the surgery, found the dissatisfaction rate was very high. Often the men requested another surgical procedure.

"The average increase in length is 1.3 cm which isn't very much and the dissatisfaction rate was in excess of 70 percent," said Christopher.

He added that spam e-mails advertising penis enlargement surgery were inaccurate and gave men unrealistic expectations.

Rather than having surgery, he and his colleagues, who reported the findings in the Journal of European Urology, said the men should be referred for psychological counselling.

"We now know that the majority of these patients are dissatisfied after these procedures. Research should be directed towards non-surgical options," said Yoram Vardi, of the Rambam Medical Centre in Haifa, Israel, in an editorial in the journal.

I only included that last quote because I find it hard to believe there's actually a Rambam Medical Centre, in Israel or anywhere else. Unless it's affiliated with Thank You Ma'am University. That would make sense.

The measure of a man

As luck would have it, Slate magazine has a feature on how penises are actually measured for scientific research:

The penis elongation industry has created the need for careful studies to determine who should and should not be considered for "augmentation." Urologists worldwide are busily stretching and measuring and reporting their findings. Most recent articles hail from outside the United States -- the Italians, Turks, and Greeks seem especially engaged. There is a fascination with determining the dimensions of newborn boys of different ethnic pedigrees. From Ben-Gurion University in Israel, we have "Clitoral and penile sizes of full term newborns in two different ethnic groups" (Jewish and Bedouin), and from Singapore General Hospital, "Penile length of [Chinese, Malay, and Indian] newborns in Singapore."

As the article points out, there's no single standard of measurement. From the top or bottom? Flaccid or erect? And who should measure? Self-measurement produces non-surgical enlargement -- when a guy measures his own Johnson, Mr. Stubbs on average ends up a half-inch closer to Mr. Long than it would if a laboratory assistant were doing the measurement.

Scientists then hit on the idea of stretching flaccid penises and comparing those lengths, which is ... well, it sounds like something they'd come up with at Rambam Medical Centre.

For what it's worth, here's the tale of the tape:

When self-measured, the median length of a stretched flaccid penis is about 5.1 inches. For an erect penis, most studies come in at 5.5 to 6 inches. The average flaccid penis is in the 3.5- to 4-inch range. If someone else is doing the measuring, well, the numbers come out lower.

Then again, when it's the attractive graduate assistants at Thank You Ma'm University who're handling the equipment, the numbers come out longer. Go figure.

UPDATE:

Reader J.R. clues me in:

As an FYI, Rambam is more accurately pronounced "Rum-Bum" and is an acronym for Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (Miamonides), a talmudic scholar in Spain during the 12th Century.

Just for the record, I'm not making fun of anyone's religion here, just the juxtaposition of a discussion of male sex organs and the word most of us would mispronounce as "ram-bam."

You'll also note I passed up the chance to mention our vice president -- the guy whose first name is synonymous with the subject of this post. Once the shooting victim took a turn for the worse, it wasn't funny anymore.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:31 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

February 14, 2006

Spread Thin

The Washington Post takes a peek at one of the underreported consequences of celebrating Valentine's Day. There's a much greater chance a cheating spouse will be exposed. Here's why:

It's the day most cheaters dread and the day many cheaters get caught. The spouse and the side dish both want attention, and, during the juggling act, the two-timer slips, right in front of a private eye's camera lens.

Most private investigators are booked solid today. They probably worked all day yesterday and will be catching up on work tomorrow. It's the time of year most of their cases begin or end.

The Post reporter collected some juicy tales from private investigators, including this one:

In 15 years of working cases, most of them unfold like the one a few years ago, when a woman discovered her man's cell phone records burning up with his old flame's number and found Russell's name in the yellow pages.

"The wife wanted to stop by her husband's office for lunch on Valentine's Day. But he told her he'd be busy, he couldn't do lunch. He had a meeting," Russell said. "She knew what was up. She hired me to follow him."

Sure enough, the meeting happened right at the lunch hour, not in a boardroom but at the Courtyard Marriott on Connecticut Avenue NW. The man left his office, picked up the woman at the Dupont Circle Metro station and headed to the hotel, where they walked past the green awning and into a marble lobby. They checked in under her name. Whirrrrrr. It was all on video. The "lunch" in the hotel lasted three hours, Russell said.

Russell delivered the video to the wife and waited for the call from a divorce lawyer that usually follows these cases. "Turns out, it never came. The woman didn't want a divorce," Russell said.

"See, she had a boyfriend of her own. She just wanted something in her back pocket, in case she ever got caught."

Since it's so much easier to be faithful, it's a wonder more people don't try it.

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 28, 2006

Balls vs. Brains

Let's say you're a bat, a particular species of bat in which the females are, shall we say, of casual virtue. How do you adapt? Probably like this:

A research team led by Syracuse University biologist Scott Pitnick found that in bat species where the females are promiscuous, the males boasting the largest testicles also had the smallest brains. Conversely, where the females were faithful, the males had smaller testes and larger brains.

"It turns out size does matter," said Pitnick, whose findings were published in December in Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Science, an online journal.

The study offers evidence that males -- at least in some species -- make an evolutionary trade-off between intelligence and sexual prowess, said David Hoskens, a biologist at the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at the University of Exeter in England and a leading authority on bats' mating behavior.

"Bats invest an enormous amount in testis, and the investment has to come from somewhere. There are no free lunches," said Hoskens.

Let that be a lesson to all the evolving species on the planet: Be careful what you wish for.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 26, 2006

The Best-Laid Plans

If you get nervous before you give a speech or presentation, here's some news you can use:

[H]aving sex can help keep stress at bay.

However, only penetrative intercourse did the trick -- other forms of sex had no impact on stress levels at all.

Professor Brody monitored how various forms of sex affected blood pressure levels in a stressful situation.

For a fortnight, 24 women and 22 men kept diaries of how often they engaged in various forms of sex.

Then they underwent a stress test involving public speaking and performing mental arithmetic out loud.

Volunteers who had had penetrative intercourse were found to be the least stressed, and their blood pressure returned to normal faster than those who had engaged in other forms of sexual activity such as masturbation.

Those who abstained from any form of sexual activity at all had the highest blood pressure response to stress.

The lead researcher on the study says it makes evolutionary sense for the horizontal hoedown to produce this kind of effect: