By Steve Rhodes
Due to technical problems, today’s column won’t be posted. We’re working to fix the issues. My e-mail service has also been temporarily interrupted, but as soon as it’s restored, I’ll be answering your messages again. Until then, thanks for your patience.
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“Scholars in antiquity began counting the ways that humans have sex, but they weren’t so diligent in cataloging the reasons humans wanted to get into all those positions,” the New York Times reports this morning in its Science Times section. “Darwin and his successors offered a few explanations of mating strategies – to find better genes, to gain status and resources – but they neglected to produce a Kama Sutra of sexual motivations.
“Perhaps you didn’t lament this omission. Perhaps you thought that the motivations for sex were pretty obvious. Or maybe you never really wanted to know what was going on inside other people’s minds, in which case you should stop reading immediately.
“For now, thanks to psychologists at the University of Texas at Austin, we can at last count the whys. After asking nearly 2,000 people why they’d had sex, the researchers have assembled and categorized a total of 237 reasons – everything from ‘I wanted to feel closer to God’ to ‘I was drunk.’ They even found a few people who claimed to have been motivated by the desire to have a child.”
Posted on August 1, 2007