Why College Students Have Sex
Depending on your age (and sexual preferences) this headline may not have grabbed your attention as well as something like "237 Reasons to Have Sex" or "Why We Have Sex", but lacking a team of underpaid and sexually illiterate editors to assist me in milking every ounce of titillation I can out of a sex story I've chosen to shoot for accuracy over eyeballs. And this headline does a slightly better job of describing a recent study that has received plenty of mainstream media attention, and precious little critical comment.
The study which surveyed 1500 mostly white, mostly young undergraduate students, and is modestly titled "Why Humans Have Sex" is published in this months Archives of Sexual Behavior (free access here).
The paper which attempts to classify all the reasons humans have sex is interesting, and a good start in exploring a topic that, as the authors point out, is understudied. But it's also in desperate need of some perspective, and like any research endeavor, it could use more critique.
What is more annoying than researchers using terms like “comprehensive” when they are really referring to a tiny slice of the population is the way the media, in covering the study have turned off all their critical faculties, just because its about sex. None of the mainstream coverage offers any critical context for us to understand the study. They don’t look at the results except through the lens of the researchers, and they take no time to consider the flaws of the study.
The lack of critical analysis of the study is typical of mainstream media coverage of sex research. I can't decide if it’s merely the result of editors who don't want to ruin a perfectly good piece of fluff with some actual content, or if it’s indicative of the subtle devaluation of any sex research; after all, why take the time to think about something that isn’t important in the first place? Why waste good brain power on sex?
The result, from the New York Times to Men’s Health, is coverage that feels more like Shouts & Murmurs than it does Science Daily.
None of this is to take away from the importance of the research, it’s only to say that wouldn’t it be nice if once in a while science and health reporters would take sex seriously, and start a discussion that’s worthy of the research?
Read more - Weird Sexual Science: Why (Some of Us) Have Sex
While I agree that a more representative sample is more desirable, it is not easily attained. I worked on a similar study at the University of Minnesota last year and we were lucky to get participants at all (likely screwing the data being that these people are probably more sexually free than the people who did not come). The participants we did get were similar to this study’s participants: young white college students, mostly female. It is extremely hard to recruit participants from the general public, though that is no excuse for not trying at all. And, though I have not read the complete study for myself, it seems rather shameful of the scientists involved to use sweeping words like “Why people have sex.”