How are sex statistics like a soluble fish?

Wednesday May 23, 2007

Today’s Washington Post has a completely surreal piece on statistics about sexual behavior that offers another example of what’s wrong with mainstream media coverage of sex. It starts off with a reasonable premise: sex survey results are often contradictory and, despite progress in sexual health research, research into sexual satisfaction and quality of life remains under-funded and the topic remains largely unexplored.

Too bad the premise is just a thinly veiled excuse to print the same old laundry list of sex statistics provided by privately funded research from for profit companies (people in Greece have more sex than people in Japan, men feel this way/women feel that way, blah, blah, blah).

Occasionally the writer approaches interesting material, like the difficulty in getting public funding for research into sexual pleasure, or potential conflict of interest inherent in privately funded “research” but each time she quickly steps away from what’s interesting to offer us another fascinating sex fact, which is clearly all the paper wants.

This kind of reporting drives me crazy on so many levels. It’s not like there aren’t researchers out there devoting their lives to studying human sexuality without the posh and problematic “support” of for profit companies. It’s not like there aren’t real problems in accessing Federal funds for sexual health research. And it’s not like sex statistics are only something you can apprehend through a Harris Interactive Poll.

What’s surreal about the piece, and sort of soluble-fishy, is how it reading it makes you feel at once like its pointing out what’s wrong with our understanding of sex and enacting the very problems, leaving you grasping for an object only to find that it disappears into your hand.

Read more – Washington Post: How’s Your Love Life?