The Big Lie About Sex - Louise Perry

 

Sex with more than 20 women reduces risk of prostate cancer, according to study

Antonia Molloy in The Independent

There’s good news for the Casanovas of the world – sleeping with numerous women could help to protect men from prostate cancer, according to a new study.

Researchers at the University of Montreal and INRS-Institut Armand-Frappier found that men who had slept with more than 20 women during their lifetime were 28 per cent less likely to develop the disease.

They were also 19 per cent less likely to develop an aggressive type of cancer, compared to those who had had only one female sexual partner.

However, the same did not apply to gay men, according to the Canadian scientists. They found that having more than 20 male partners doubled the risk of prostate cancer and made an aggressive cancer five times more likely. Sleeping with one male partner did not affect the risk.

Meanwhile, men who were virgins were almost twice as likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer as those who were sexually experienced.

The findings are from the Prostate Cancer & Environment Study in which 3,208 men answered questions about their lifestyle and sex lives.

Of these men, 1,590 were diagnosed with prostate cancer between September 2005 and August 2009, while 1,618 men were part of the control group.

Overall, men with prostate cancer were twice as likely as others to have a relative with cancer, but the study also found a possible link with their number of sexual partners.

Lead researcher Professor Marie-Elise Parent, from the University of Montreal, said: "It is possible that having many female sexual partners results in a higher frequency of ejaculations, whose protective effect against prostate cancer has been previously observed in cohort studies."

According to one theory, large numbers of ejaculations may reduce the concentration of cancer-causing substances in prostatic fluid, a constituent of semen.

They may also lead to fewer crystal-like structures in the prostate that have been associated with prostate cancer.

Suggesting why the same did not apply to male partners Professor Parent admitted she could only provide "highly speculative" explanations.

One explanation she said "could be that anal intercourse produces a physical trauma to the prostate".

The age at which men first had sexual intercourse, and the number of times they had been infected by a sexually transmitted disease, had no bearing on prostate cancer risk.

A total of 12 per cent of the group reported having had at least one sexually transmitted infection (STI) in their lifetime.

Professor Parent added: "We were fortunate to have participants from Montreal who were comfortable talking about their sexuality, no matter what sexual experiences they have had, and this openness would probably not have been the same 20 or 30 years ago.

"Indeed, thanks to them, we now know that the number and type of partners must be taken into account to better understand the causes of prostate cancer."

On the question of whether promiscuity might now be recommended in health advice to men, she said: "We're not there yet."

The research is published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology.

What makes a slut? The only rule, it seems, is being female

It's a warning more than a word: a reminder to women to adhere to sexual norms or be punished

• 
• • Jessica Valenti
  •  
  • theguardian.com, Monday 23 June 2014 12.30 BST

Being called promiscuous is sometimes just a way to excuse the behavior of others. Photograph: Josh Reynolds / AP

Sandra Fluke heard it when she talked about insurance coverage for birth control. Sara Brown from Boston told me she was first called it at a pool party in the fifth grade because she was wearing a bikini. Courtney Caldwell in Dallas said she was tagged with it after being sexually assaulted as a freshman in high school.

Many women I asked even said that it was not having sex that inspired a young man to start rumors that they were one.

And this is what is so confounding about the word "slut": it's arguably the most ubiquitous slur used against women, and yet it's nearly impossible to define.

The one thing we do know about "slut" is that it's the last thing a woman should want to be. Society is so concerned over women and girls' potential for promiscuity that we create dress codes, school curricula, even legislation around protecting women'ssupposed purity. Conservative columnists opine that women having sex is tantamount to a "mental health crisis", and magazine stories wonder if we're raising a generation of "prosti-tots".

Leora Tanenbaum, the author of SLUT! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation, told me that "a 'slut' is a girl or woman who deviates from norms of femininity. The 'slut' is not necessarily sexually active – she just doesn't follow the gender script."

This nebulous, unquantifiable quality of the slur is what makes it so distressing – there's no way to disprove something that has no conclusive boundaries to begin with. And because it's meant to be more of an identity than a label, it's a term not easily shaken off. "Slut" sticks to a person in a way that "asshole" never will.

So what makes you a slut? It seems the the only hard and fast rule is that you have to be a woman.

Men, of course, are immune – absent, really – from the frenzy of concern. For instance, a new study out of the University of Michigan showed that teen girls who "sext" are called sluts while boys who do the same remain free-from judgement. In another example, the American Medical Association breathlessly released a study in 2006 with the headline "Sex and Intoxication More Common Among Women on Spring Break", intended to warn women about their "risky" behavior while on break – but there was nothing about the men the majority of these young women would supposedly be having all this drunken sex with.

As always, women are sluts and men are, well, men.

For those who haven't had the pleasure of being called promiscuous, it may be hard to understand just how profound an impact it can have. Women's value and morality are closely – though wrongly – tied to their sexuality. So "slut" (or any of its variations) is an accusation with power behind it.

When multiple attackers videotaped themselves brutally raping an unconscious teen girl in California, for example – stopping to take dance breaks and find new objects to penetrate the young woman with – the first trial resulted in a hung jury because the defense argued she was promiscuous. "The things she wanted done were done", argued one lawyer. Another asked the jury: "Why was her vagina and anus completely shaved? Sex! She's a sexual person!"

The accusation doesn't have to be that explicit to have real power. Cherice Moralez –raped by her 49 year-old teacher when she was just 14 – was called "older than her chronological age" by the judge in the trial – a more diplomatic way of saying she had it coming. Her attacker was sentenced to 30 days in jail. Moralez later took her own life.

Multiple girls have taken their own lives of late after being "slut-shamed" – an indication that the slur shows little sign of waning in the damage it does personally.

Tanenbaum, whose forthcoming book is I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet, said that many of the girls she interviewed "had intentionally embraced the 'slut' label as a badge of honor to advertise their sexual empowerment."

But, she added, "they ended up losing control of the label when their peers turned it against them".

Broader efforts to "reclaim" the word – via marches like SlutWalks, for instance – have largely failed. While the anti-rape protests that spread across the country a few years ago were popular in terms of attendance and media coverage, and I was an early supporter, many women felt the word "slut" was irredeemable - especially women of color, for whom racist stereotypes about their supposed innate promiscuity always presented a unique danger.

The "slut" idea hurts women politically as well. A safe contraceptive and a cancer vaccinewere both held up for years because of fears they would make women "slutty", and anti-choice legislators and activists insist that that abortion providers are in the "business" of promiscuity – and use that accusation as a way to defund critical health care providers like Planned Parenthood.

So, what's a "slut", then? It's any of us, and all of us – especially those of us who step out of line in some way real or imaginary. It has little to do with the number of our sexual partners, or the way we dress or flirt, or if we take birth control or not.

It's a warning more than a word – a reminder to women that we must adhere to the narrow standards of femininity and sexuality set out for us, or be punished accordingly. And in that way, the real meaning of "slut" is terrifyingly clear.

Having 10 ex-lovers is the ideal number

By Cristina Odone

8:44PM BST 06 Sep 2012

It’s a crucial scene in Four Weddings and a Funeral, and for my money ranks with Meg Ryan faking an orgasm in When Harry Met Sally. Hugh Grant’s character, looking like the uncomfortable, repressed Englishman he is, fidgets and squirms at a table in a café as the upfront American he’s fallen for, played by Andie MacDowell, merrily lists her previous lovers.

There were various rolls in the hay (she was a country girl). One paramour had a hairy back. Another was a “shock”. There was a “disappointing” one and another, “who broke my heart”. Number 22 kept falling asleep (“that was my first year in England”). Number 27 was a mistake (“he kept screaming”); 28 was Spencer; 29, his father; 32 was lovely… and then there is the man she is about to marry.

That’s 33 lovers. “Not as many as Madonna,” she points out. But a great deal more than anyone should admit to – at least to a prospective partner. This is not my prudish hunch, but the very scientific finding of SeekingArrangement.com. The dating website asked 1,000 clients to name the perfect number of ex-lovers anyone should have, and the answer, from both males and females, was 10. Any more, claim the respondents to the survey, would be promiscuous; any less would betray an inexperienced fumbler, or a repressed loner.

So 10 it is, and I can see why. Nine lovers will have ironed out a person’s little idiosyncrasies, like popping in his mouth guard (“so I don’t forget”) before the first fumble. By number 10, she will have learned not to offer a running commentary during rumpy-pumpy. After 10 lovers, paranoia about one’s naked body disappears, and chatting to the opposite sex no longer unnerves. With any luck, out of 10 lovers, at least one will be great and inspire confidence in oneself – and thus in relationships.

By the tenth “friend”, even the most overprotective parents won’t pose questions like “are your intentions honourable?”. By then, too, nosy friends will have stopped studying each new candidate for sinister perversions or bunny-boiling tendencies. Ten previous lovers suggests a person is neither a commitment-phobe nor a desperado ready to hitch up with the first person who’ll have them. 

If 10 has been deemed a good rule of thumb when it comes to admitting to past lovers, I should point out that some of us would rather die than discuss (let alone list) our exes with our present partner. It was a lesson that girls learnt at finishing school, like getting out of a sports car without showing too much leg. Bad girls did, and talked about it; good girls did, and kept mum. These charm schools did not wish to promote goody-goody Victorian morality, they just wanted to maximise students’ chances of bagging an eligible bachelor: numerous exes would intimidate, but secrets would titillate the chinless wonder with a country pile but without a clue.

Mary Killen, The Spectator’s agony aunt and queen of etiquette, thoroughly approves of such discretion. “Who wants their friends or strangers imagining them having 10, or any number, of couplings? Mystery is always best. Once graphic details, or even numbers, have been spelt out, they can never be forgotten.”

True, but in today’s confessional culture, reticence is worse than a hairy back. Health and safety are as much a part of sexual etiquette as they are of employment regulations. With the rise of internet dating, sexually transmitted diseases such as chlamydia and chilling reports of jealous rows ending in murder, a secret past is a turn-off.

Suddenly, making inquiries about a suitor’s romantic history is part of every courtship, as awkward but unavoidable as the moment when the bill arrives, and you don’t know whether to reach for your purse: are you going Dutch or do you risk offending him by intimating that he can’t afford to keep you in style?

“How many have you had?” is no longer a lubricious question but a legitimate one. Some men, of course, don’t need this excuse to divulge how many notches they’ve chalked up on their bedposts. Casanova, the notorious 18th-century ladies’ man, boasted more than 200 conquests. Mozart’s Don Juan turned his long catalogue of seductions into a delightful aria. And Warren Beatty’s biography claims that the Hollywood heart-throb managed to bed 12,775 women. More recently, we’ve had the 69-year-old Tony Blackburn admitting to 500 women, while Bill Roache – Coronation Street’s Ken Barlow – claims to have had over a thousand.

In comparison, Nick Clegg, who famously confessed to having slept with “no more than 30” women, sounds positively virginal – if not a little “vulgar”, as Matt Warren, editor of The Lady, puts it. “Going public with the number of lovers you’ve had is unforgivable.”

Especially, I’d venture, if you’re a politician. I can no more dissociate Clegg from his 30 lovers than Gladstone from his prostitutes, or Berlusconi from his glamour models. Knowing about the Deputy PM’s bunga-bunga past dents his dignity. Frisky Nick is a lot less authoritative than devoted (if henpecked) father-figure Nick.

Clegg’s full disclosure did prompt many a dinner-party game among Westminster-watchers: which MP has had the most lovers? (Readers’ answers welcome.) Some argue that a “colourful” past is a plus in parliamentarians, showing that they have a wide variety of experience.

Indeed, the liaisons of such MPs as Alan Clark, Jonathan Aitken and Mike Hancock (who fell for an alleged Russian spy) – to name just a few – are well documented. Flesh-peddling is part of the job, after all; and a scattergun approach to frolicking is, perhaps, understandable, given that Westminster allows all the emotional intimacy of a Moonie marriage ceremony. Others counter that politicians who have over-extended themselves on the sexual front in the past become more vulnerable to humiliation (or blackmail) should a bitter and twisted ex decide to wreak revenge.

For even among phlegmatic Anglo-Saxons, jealousy of the ex should not be underestimated. This cuts both ways. I know couples who are so insistent about keeping their sexual past a no-go area that their current partner suspects a former lover in every friend and at every party. All encounters have the potential for sulks, inquisitions and rows.

On the other hand, admission of a particular number of exes can lead to questions about dates, names and – yikes – rankings. For these obsessives, there is no right number of ex-lovers: 10 is as intolerable as 1,000, and as offensive as “mind your own business”.

Perhaps it is best to accept Matt Warren’s advice, which is that “there should be no upper or lower limit to the number of lovers one can admit to; that would be too prescriptive. The essential thing is the state of your current relationship. And if your partner does ask, bear in mind how the information you share will affect them.”

In other words, lie.