But still, I thought I had better be on best behaviour on a national breakfast show. Then, as I was just about to go into the studio, I heard Gerry winding up a call with a listener along these lines: “Sure it licks other dogs’ arses. It licks it’s own bollocks. And then you let it lick your face…”. Best behaviour? The dog’s bollocks to that.
You can hear the whole show here (choose May 9, 2008).

Now, back to that sex story. The Beeb was reporting on a study by Mark Bellis and colleagues published in the (wonderful, open access) BMC Public Health. The BBC story said this: “A third of 16 to 35-year-old men and 23% of women questioned said they drank to increase their chances of sex”. Then, a few paragraphs later, it said “this study showed many young people were “strategically” binge drinking or abusing drugs to improve their sex lives.” Having more sex and having better sex seem to me to be two rather different goals. But maybe more sex, any sex, does improve your sex life if you’re a 16 year-old. I’ve just now got down to reading the full study, to sort out the confusion.

Broadly, respondents in nine European cities said they get drunk to increase their pulling power, but they got high to make sex more fun. But when you actually look at the relationship between drug taking and getting laid, you find that it’s the regular users of coke and ecstasy that are having the most sex partners. Forty percent of people who use Charlie or E at least once a month had sex with more than five people in the last year, compared with just 19 percent of regular drinkers (and 20 percent of people who say they’ve been drunk in the last month). On the other hand, regular ecstasy and coke users were the most likely to say they later regretted some of the sex they’ve had while under the influence (28% and 22% had “oh-shit-did-I-really-do-that?” moments, compared with just 12% for regular drinkers).

So: you have more sex with drugs than drink, but you have less bad sex with drink than drugs. It seems to me the “strategic” decisions young people think they’re making — drink to get laid, take drugs to have fun — aren’t that strategic after all.

Readers’ poll: who agrees with me?

So what’s new, I hear you ask? The pub. This study wasn’t conducted down the King’s Head or at the local sports bar. It was in a FlyPub. and the males in question were Drosophila fruit flies. Another interesting finding: after getting drunk (by inhaling ethanol fumes in the FlyPub), male fruit flies started courting other males as well as females. In the paper, Hyun-Gwan Lee and colleagues put it like this: “A salient effect of ethanol is cognitive impairment, which may account for the disinhibited courtship of sexually aroused males under the influence of ethanol.”

Put less politely: getting drunk makes you stupid and randy, and that makes you more likely to try and get laid any way you can. (Leonard Cohen described it even less scientifically in his classic anthem to late-night desperation Closing Time). The study also suggests that the drunker flies get, the randier they get. You can see the lushes queuing up in the hope of getting some action in the right hand petri dish in this video.

The paper was published in (the wonderful, open access) Public Library of Science.

The journal’s editor, Wallace Dinsmore, told The Guardian: “The young people interviewed in this study frequently said that better access to condoms at the time and place they were needed would have enabled them to practise safer sex.” She suggests giving condoms away in pubs, clubs and taxis.

That’s all well and good. We’ve shown in many countries that people consistently use condoms more frequently when condoms are right there on the spot where the spoken or unspoken deal to have sex is struck. But the young people interviewed in this study also said they were plastered, averaging 13 drinks a night, and twice that on a “heavy” night. And again, we’ve shown in many countries that people are less likely to use condoms when they are plastered, even when they have one in their pocket.

I’m all for condoms in taxis. But I do have a “what’s wrong with this picture?” feeling when I look at the results of this study. It’s a testament to the stamina of youth that they can sink 26 pints and still have sex, and a testament to strength of the economy that they can do that and still take taxis. But surely the binge alcoholism is a much gretaer worry than a few drippy dicks.