Thanks to Jeff Ballinger for pointing this out to me, via PR Watch

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.

Such as this study from the University of Toronto, which shows that mice behave just the way lad mags would have us believe humans do, and sing about it. The researchers were listening to the sounds mice make as they have sex, or even contemplate it. Mice communicate in two ways: squeaking (which more or less means unhappy mouse) and ultrasonically (which tends to mean happy, excited mouse). Give a male mouse a whiff of female urine or pheromones, and he makes happy sounds. Give him a female to have sex with, and he gets happier still. Ultrasonic communication zinging all around the place. Female mice, on the other hand, squeak away like mad. They’d rather stay in and wash their hair, obviously. As for other laddish behaviour, well, give a mouse amphetamines, and they go all ultrasonic with delight. But female mice — not even a squeak.

Created by OnePlusYou – Free Online Dating

For the hell of it, and to see if Brits were generally more foul-mouthed than Yanks, I ran a few of my favourite British blogs through the swear machine. I started with Mark Farley’s book blog; being a literary type, he scored a genteel 10.9%. One expects a bit of straight talk from London’s cabbies, so I was pleased to see that a All In A Day’s Work overtook me at 22%. Edging past us even the Black Cab Wisdom was Diamond Geezer. Nearly a quarter of his posts have something in them that Americans would consider foul. Since he writes a great deal about London Transport, it’s hardly a surprise that he swears a lot, is it?

Now, guess what? Australian researchers have gone and done the study. With results I wouldn’t have expected.

The passage in The Wisdom of Whores read:

In the first lecture, we ”reviewed” all the major study types. For example the case-control study, where you find a group of people with a disease, and then look for people who are much the same but without the disease. You compare the two groups to see if they have different risks. It’s a relatively cheap method, but it doesn’t tell you much about the order in which things happen. I can’t remember all the examples used in the lecture, but let’s say you want to look at causes of depression in women. You start with 600 depressed women, find another 600 who match them on age, ethnicity and educational status, and then ask them all about their lives. Let’s say you find out that women who are depressed are six times more likely not to have had sex in the last year as women who are cheerful. That means if you’re not having sex you get depressed, right? But hang on, couldn’t it be that women who are moping around looking miserable don’t get laid much?

Perhaps you’d be better off with a cohort study. You start off with several thousand women who are perfectly happy. Then you follow them over time, recording their behaviours, and see which of them get depressed. If you find that women who have sex are less likely to become depressed than women who aren’t getting any, it suggests it is the lack of sex that causes the depression, not the depression which stops you getting laid. You can throw out the “misery guts” theory and recommend more good sex as an intervention to promote mental health.

The Australian research, led by Sabura Allen, isn’t published in full yet. But according to an AAP report, they found that depressed women have more sex than happy women, at least in Melbourne where the study was conducted. I’m looking forward to seeing the full paper. But I’d be prepared to bet that these results come from a cross-sectional study, not one that follows women over time. If I’m right, we’re still left with the question, which come first, the depression or the sex?

As Melbourne stalwarts Rob Moodie and Gabriel Gate say in their wonderful new book “Recipes for a Great Life”, “We want to be held,kissed, caressed. It’s why we seek relationships”. To this extent, they seem to agree with Allen, who advances the theory that women who are a bit miserable go looking for sex because it makes them feel better. But the Melbourne Life Cooks recipe for better sex? “Have Fun”. Which leaves me with an alternative hypothesis about the link between sex and sadness for women. Perhaps they’re not having fun. Perhaps men in Melbourne are just not very good at sex. That would be depressing…

Looking at some of the advice, I wonder if they can’t see the wood for the tree(hugger)s. Worrying about buying condoms in bulk to save on packaging waste seems to be overdoing it a bit. After all, if you’re not breeding, you are saving whole ponds worth of landfill nappies, not to mention all those air miles that will be saved in grandparent visits etc. I think non-breeders have done our bit for the planet: we can reserve the right to have sex in any colour we like.

Thanks to Unspun for throwing back the covers on this one.

And now Italian scientists are all excited because they’ve devised a test to tell us whether we’ve got what it takes to feel these things — an all-too-prosaic thickening of vaginal tissue. It’s enough to turn one against science.