The American Medical Association published what is considered by experts to be the most comprehensive sex survey in fifty years. Not since Dr. Alfred Kinsey's landmark studies have researchers gathered so much information on the sexual health of the nation. Their findings, presented by the study's lead author Dr. Edward Laumann (a sociologist at the University of Chicago) represented years of work that included in-depth interviews with 1,749 women and 1,410 men. The results were not good. In fact, the problem appears to be twice the magnitude experts had predicted. It is no exaggeration to say that Americans are in the midst of a sexual epidemic.
The disease diagnosed in 43% of the women and 31% of the men is SEXUAL DYSFUNCTION. Now think about that. Can you imagine the media response, the blaring headlines and grim faced television news anchors, if the results were the opposite; if researchers had discovered that sex was in some way hazardous to your health?
If anything, it's a lack of sex that can be deadly. The British Medical Journal reported on a long-term study of nearly a thousand men between the ages of 45 and 59. In this age of "Just Say No" it's perhaps not too surprising that the findings have not received the attention they deserve. You see, the data showed that the amount of sexual activity enjoyed by a man is directly proportional to both his health and longevity. Men who reported twice as much sex were half as likely to die prematurely.
Archaic religious and political restrictions on apparently essential sexual behavior may actually be taking years off people's lives. Yet it's the greatly exaggerated and often wholly imaginary "Wages Of Sin" that continues to make the front page. The fact that it's abstinence that turns out to be the really risky behavior and that sexual dysfunction has reached epidemic proportions gets short shrift.
Of the women taking part in Dr. Laumann's study, 33% said they never wanted to have sex, 26% said they didn't experience orgasm when they did have sex and 23% said sex simply wasn't pleasurable. On the other side, 33% of the men said they had persistent problems during sex, 14% said they didn't want to have sex and 8% said they derived no pleasure from sex. Tie this to the fact that subjects diagnosed as suffering from sexual dysfunction also tended to describe their relationships as unsatisfactory and their lives in general as unhappy and the devastating nature of the problem becomes apparent.
Dr. Domeena Renshaw of the Loyola University Medical Center said that although the numbers were twice what the experts had predicted, she was not surprised considering the long lines of couples waiting for treatment at the sexual dysfunction clinic she has run since 1972. Many of her patients have never had sex and this includes one couple that had been married for 23 years.
Dr. Raymond Rosen of the R.W. Johnson Medical School in New Jersey was appalled by the sheer size of the sexual dysfunction epidemic. "It's terrible." For years Americans have been "getting their information about sex from magazines bought at the grocery store checkout." And those Americans include many so-called experts who then dispense their ill-gotten notions to millions. That God ever invented sex in the first place was clearly a mistake so they continue to create caveats that will at least make it as unpleasant as possible
When Pfizer's director of sexual-health products, David Brinkley, was asked about the different stories he's heard since his company began the commercial production of Viagra, he was quoted as saying "People are strange when it comes to sex."
Look At It This Way
Recorded history goes back about 10,000 years. Cave paintings go back twice that, communal living twice that and ancestors indistinguishable (given a haircut and shave) from modern Man go back twice that. What this means is that today's rules are a mere blip on the evolutionary screen...a passing fad that, when taken seriously, results in a third of all males and almost half of all females unhappy with their lives dissatisfied with their relationships and sexually dysfunctional.
It has been said that those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it. Perhaps one day, students will learn about Holland's Tulip Mania, Britain's South Sea Bubble and America's Sexual Epidemic.
