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Tuesday, July 31, 2007

237 reasons why

The New York Times tells of a University of Texas study of reasons why people have sex. Four hundred forty-four Texas students and hangers-on came up with a total of 237 different reasons why they have sex; 1500 others were then asked to list how much each reason applied to them. Here's the whole list (MS Word document at the utexas.edu server), but among the reasons are:

Someone dared me.

I wanted to make the person love me.

My friends pressured me into it.

I wanted to capture someone else's mate.

I was slumming.

The longer you read the list, the more it starts to sound like those lists of "classic plots" which are supposed to contain the boiled-down themes of every story, play and film ever written. There are 36 of them, or seven, or perhaps twenty. Things like:

Rivalry of kinsmen

Murderous adultery

Madness

Fatal imprudence

Involuntary crimes of love (example: discovery that one has married one's mother, sister, etc.)

Personally my main reasons for having sex are:

It feels great

I'm fascinated with the other person's responses

I like and feel comfortable with my persona in bed

Now let's compare with the list. Let's see... Those are reasons 15, 41 (sort of), and 95 (sort of). Of course, many of the other reasons have applied at different times.

I think my favorite reason from the list is "The person was famous and I wanted to be able to say I had sex with him/her." Not because it applies, but because it's really funny. I had sex with a slightly famous person once, not for that reason, but because I was curious whether the sexual persona she had displayed in her writing was anything like her real sexual self (reason 41). It was.

Labels: narrative, plots, sex