08/02/08

Wisdom in the BMJ

A comment I made online in a debate about condoms in the British Medical Journal appears in the print edition this week.

Readers’ poll: who agrees with me?

This post was published on 08/02/08 in Good sex and bad.

Send this post to a friend Send this post to a friend

2 comments

You can follow the comments on this post via this RSS feed.

Tags: , , , , .

  1. Comment by Lee Rudolph, 08/02/08, 06:00:

    Although you claim that sex “is lots of fun”, I’m not at all sure that is borne out in the scientific literature. I’ve just electronically searched the 37 volumes of Kluwer’s _Journal of Sexual Behavior_ for the word “fun”. It turns up 64 times (“fear”, by contrast, garners 329 hits). Most of those 64 hits are in book reviews, where, for example, we find a reference to women who “poke fun at traditional conceptions of female beauty” by dressing goose statues in bikinis. In one “Clinical Case Report”, the hit is an artifact (“function” got hyphenated before the “c”–which is just as well, as the article in question is a survey of sexualized cannabilism). Among the (research) “Article”s, proper, there is a quote from a Tanzanian man (to the effect that AIDS has taken the “fun” out of sex), but there’s also a mere mention of “fun” as a general feature of adolescent companionate relationships. Very, very little evidence that sex has been shown to be “any”, let alone “lots of”, “fun” (particularly not These Days).

    Thus I conclude that your hypothesis is of little or no scientific interest, and suggest that you turn your attention elsewhere, possibly to knitting.

    Elizabeth responds: Whereas “knitting” and “fun” turns up 281,000 hits on Google. Off to buy some pattern books, then…
    By the way, in a delicious irony while working on another post about Bush’s idiotic ban on cutting HIV infection among drug users, I ran “Needle Exchange” through Technorati. Top site: “Needle Exchange: A blog about knitting addiction”

  2. Comment by Eve, 15/04/08, 02:26:

    lol!

Comments are closed at this time.