Jackson Free Press

A Zogby/MSNBC study has uncovered some pretty surprising stuff about American sexual mores.

Among other things, the poll suggests that:

65 percent of Americans have had six or more sexual partners ;
66 percent have had unprotected sex while under the influence of alcohol ;
Although 73 percent of Americans are in a monogamous relationship, 35 percent of them have been in the relationship for less than 3 years ;
At least 15 percent of Americans have paid somebody for sex.

More evidence that abstinence education, while worthwhile, is unlikely to have any practical effect on STDs and unintended pregnancy. Requiring health insurance companies to cover birth control pills and contraceptive devices, just as they cover Viagra, would probably help matters some--but people are still living a certain Jimmy Buffett song often enough that no amount of public policy assistance is going to solve these problems completely.

And that's not the only reason I find this poll depressing.

It was about eight years ago. I was sitting outside with the smokers at Cups Espresso Cafe in Rainbow Plaza, sipping the flavor-of-the-day. Up to our table came a middle-aged man, skinny, moustached. We'd never met him before. I was just sitting with men that day--fairly unusual; my social circle has always been gender-diverse--and after he ordered his coffee, he came out, fidgeted nervously, and tried to strike up a conversation. Seems he was from Texas, recently divorced. "Hey," he said, his drawl trembling with phony, stilted self-confidence. "You know where I can meet some women?"

And what did Kirk Fordice and Rudoph Giuliani say when they were caught having their respective affairs? In both cases: "My cancer made me more aware of my own mortality." In other words, sex was the hill they wanted to die on. The relationships they had built with their wives were less important. The respect of their children was less important. Their legacies were less important.

Don't even get me started on Bill Clinton.

I don't have any business telling people what to do with their lives. But I think of the lifetimes that are being spent, the careers ignored, the works of art not produced, the relationships destroyed, the women facing unwanted pregnancies, the diseases spread, the people used when they think there's something more to it all--and, so much of the time, presumably just to get that endorphin rush. Study after study has shown the dramatic effects sex has on pair-bonding, and I see dignity in that--and yet I've crossed paths with people training themselves to treat sex as just another appetite, and sexual partners as disposable commodities: Find one, purge yourself, and discard. It reminds me of that scene in Robin Cook's Brain, where the brain-in-a-vat is plugged into a machine that can charge it with unimaginably intense pleasure--a reward mechanism to be triggered whenever it performs as the mad scientist wants, so that the rest of its pathetic existence is a litany of "Please press that button! Please press that button!"