Sex

choi

(1) Sex education | The Old College Try; Why are America's university graduates earning poor marks in the bedroom?  The Economist, Feb 15, 2025, at page 72.
https://www.economist.com/cultur ... on-lead-to-less-sex

paragraph 2: "This is not unusual. Sexual activity among college-age Americans has dropped by nearly half in the past 20 years, part of broader decline in seual activity that some journalistshave dubbed a 'sex recession' (see chart).

paragraph 3: " * * * A regression [a kind of statistics] analysis of data from the National Survey of Family Growth, a survey of nearly 10,000 Americans conducted by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, suggests that, even after controlling for age, drinking habits, employment, health and marriage status, a university degree is associated with 7-8% less frequent sex, on average. * * * ([across the board (all factors listed in the previous sentence)] married people do it [sex] around twice as often as single people).")

Note:
(a)
(i) Online title: Does more education lead to less sex?
(ii) Paragraph 1 is free: "UNIVERSITY LIFE in America is often portrayed as an alcohol-fuelled, sexual free-for-all. In "The Sex Lives of College Girls,' a TV show [2021- ; in HBO Max] created by Mindy Kaling, a comedian, which just concluded its third season, sexual escapades are as common as beer kegs. In reality, however, the sex lives of American university students are surprisingly tame. In 2024 one in five seniors at Harvard revealed to the Crimson, a student newspaper, that they had never had sex.
(b)
(i) college try: "a zealous all-out effort"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/college%20try
(ii) give it the old college try: "US, old-fashioned : to use one's very best effort : to try very hard  <We can win this game if we give it the old college try!>"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/ ... old%20college%20try
(iii) Neither item supplies origin. Wiktionary for "old college try" explains under Etymology: "From the ambitiousness of college athletes."
(c)
(i) The article lumps college students and graduates together, and compare this group with people of various education.
(ii) The rest of the article tries to puzzle out why.
(d) In Taiwan, I had the privilege to access survey of female patients of 30s who sought help in gynecology or infertility. Roughly had sex once a week. The survey did not include their educational background. I was surprised by the low activity. Now, after viewing the bottom graph (which did not factor in age), I realize that Americans are similar in frequency.

choi

(2) Alexandra Jacobs, Recalling His Lust For 3,000 Men. New York Times, Feb 19, 2025, at page C1 (section was Arts)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/ ... r-edmund-white.html
(book review on Edmund White, The Loves of My Life; A sex memoir. Bloomsbury, Jan 28, 2025)

My comment:
(a) This article is free, which carries a photo of Mr White in his 80.
(b) I am a biologist by training, but have not had sex for decades. Often I am puzzled over the biological basis of gay sex for the bottom males. Anus are erogenous zone for at least some people of either sex. However, inside (rectum or sigmoid colon) does not seem to have receptor(s) for sexual excitement.
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Some people celebrate turning 85 with grandchildren, gardening or a nice cake. Edmund White has published a sex memoir.

“The Loves of My Life,” which follows “My Lives,” (2006) City Boy” (2009) and recollections of Paris and reading, is gaspingly graphic, jaunty and tender: a guided tour of a foreign land — foreign to this female hetero at least — where libido is the wellspring of just about everything. It’s far from a solemn capstone to White’s long and distinguished career. More like a mischievous rock-skipping in the moonshadow.

“We’d dance in the nude in the dark,” he rhapsodizes of an entanglement with a ballerino, “or rather he’d dance and I would stumble about, like Bottom pursuing Titania, breathily caressing him across those bare boards in front of those walls of mirrors illuminated just by the distant, feeble streetlights.”

This is a PG-rated passage from a book for which we should claw back the now-cursed letter X — as in explicit, yes, but also excavatory and excellent. White’s escapades include streams of urine (“We both competed for it like seals begging for fish. I make it sound comical but it was as serious as a christening”), flexing bowels, pubic lice, an incalculable amount of semen. The revolution will not be sanitized.

Devoted fans might find some of the material familiar. White recaps his body count (some 3,000 men: “One of my contemporaries asked pityingly, ‘Why so few?’”) and revisits that William Blake line about sooner strangling an infant in its crib than nursing unacted desires. Readers who have encountered White before will not be surprised either to find mentions of kilts, and Proust. But though I’m not a White completist — by his count he’s written 32 books, including novels and biographies, and there’s also the occasional play — I’m not sure he’s ever delivered it in such concentrated, gleeful hits. Prose poppers, with a few poems as well.

White is not just a Bottom but, as he’ll tell you 90 percent of men in New York City are, a “bottom,” preferring to be penetrated. On Page 1 he mentions his small penis — later modified to “tiny.” He has long worried about his weight, and struggled with self-acceptance even as he wrote the classic manual “The Joy of Gay Sex” with one of his therapists. In one instance he imagines himself Mr. Snuffleupagus from “Sesame Street”; in another he rues his “feeble filiform arms, these useless pale appendages.”

Yet who better than a beast to assess and appreciate a beauty? “His complexion was faultless and glowing, as if a light were shining through the best Belgian linen,” White writes of Stan, a depressive aspiring actor with whom he cohabited long ago in New York (touchingly, they’re still in touch). Of a Spanish Ecuadorean man he met more recently on a website called SilverDaddies: “Pedro had a delicate, shame-faced manner, as if he’d just broken an expensive goblet and was tiptoeing away from the shards.” A blond Floridian body builder’s impressive member, when tumescent, is compared to “the Christ Child in its hay crèche.”

White has told the story of his Midwestern Gothic family before, but there are more peeks here. His grandfather was a Klansman and the racist senator Strom Thurmond was a distant cousin, the memory of which quickly chills White’s adventures with a sexual “slave.” In shocking passing he mentions that his sister was impregnated at 13 by their horrible father, and survived to become happy and productive and at work on her own memoir.

Their mother, a psychologist from Texas and an alcoholic, “colonized every corner of my mind she could understand and made me pick her blackheads and put her into her Merry Widow foundation garment.”

Despite these glimpses, though, the narrative roves and alights rather than burrowing. White’s husband, Michael Carroll — they’ve been together since 1995 — appears only in the acknowledgments and a fleeting anecdote about a pickup on an airplane. “I’ve always thought that writing about someone is the kiss-off,” White writes. While seeming to hold back nothing, he clings to what is most essential.

Danger colors the entire book, first that of being discovered, shunned, blackmailed, robbed, arrested and jailed; then of AIDS; White, who found out he was H.I.V. positive in 1985, outlived many lovers and friends. “We should also recognize we’re still being pushed off cliffs in Yemen — and from the top fronds of Florida palms, for all I know,” he writes. He has witnessed and endured so very much: the  upholstered repression of the 1950s, the way the orgiastic 1970s reassessed the ’60s as a time of “misguided rhetoric, bad haircuts, and fake velvet and near-fur,” the fearful ’80s and the dashed promise of the internet.

In the current political climate, twisting back toward repression, “The Loves of My Life,” slim as it is, lands louder and prouder than it otherwise might have.