Showing posts with label life. Show all posts
Sunday 16 November 2014
Lion gives birth to 3 cubs at Cincinnati Zoo
Zoo officials tell The Cincinnati Enquirer that she is not letting anyone near her or the cubs to check on them, and they haven't determined whether the cubs are male or female. But officials say Imani has been doing all the right things for a first-time mother.
The lion gave birth Thursday. Zoo officials say Imani showed signs of being pregnant in the weeks prior to giving birth and hormone tests indicated a pregnancy.
Keepers and scientists at the zoo's Center for Conservation and Research of Endangered Wildlife could not be positive that she was pregnant until the cubs were born.
The first cub was born in a breech position, but was apparently unharmed.
AP
Wednesday 8 October 2014
First lady: Fashion about more than pretty pumps
(AP) — Pretty pumps and perfect hemlines are nice, Michelle Obama says, but young people interested in careers in fashion should expect to work hard, take risks and even be rejected.
"We want you to see firsthand that a solid education and the willingness to work hard is really at the core of what it's going to take to achieve your goals," the first lady said Wednesday after opening the White House to student fashionistas for workshops and networking with industry professionals, including designers Jason Wu, Lela Rose and Zac Posen and Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour.
"Education and hard work. It's that simple," Mrs. Obama said.
People too often think the fashion industry is all about catwalks and red carpets, she said.
"The truth is that the clothes you see in the magazine covers are really just the finished product in what is a very long, very complicated and very difficult process, as I've come to learn working with many designers," the first lady said.
One of those designers is the Taiwan-born Wu, whom Mrs. Obama chose to design the inaugural ball gowns she wore in 2009 and 2013.
The first lady also noted that the fashion industry is important to the economy. She said Americans spent $350 billion last year on clothes and shoes, a sum that helps keep 1.4 million people employed by retailers and others with ties to the world of fashion.
"Fashion is about so much more than just a pretty pair of pumps or the perfect hemline," Mrs. Obama told more than 150 students seated in the East Room for a lunch of chicken taquitos and mini red velvet or vanilla mint cupcakes. "For so many people across the country it is a calling, it is a career and it's a way they feed their families."
The first lady spent a few minutes making the rounds at two of five morning workshops, which covered such topics as fashion journalism, construction and wearable technology. She wore a navy blue sleeveless dress with a racer-style front and full skirt that was made by a Fashion Institute of Technology student who won a design competition and attended the workshop.
Mrs. Obama exchanged cheek kisses with Posen as she entered one clinic, looked at a design mock-up on a mini mannequin on a table and said it "looks like something I would wear."
In her formal remarks, Mrs. Obama singled out the travails of designer Maria Cornejo, who spoke no English at age 11 when her family left Cornejo's native Chile for England but now has a company in New York, and Sara Blakely, who repeatedly was turned down before her idea for the now-popular Spanx undergarments, into which Blakely poured her life savings, got off the ground.
"I want these stories to show you that there's no magic to being successful in fashion or anything else," the first lady told the students.
The fashion workshop was the latest in a series of similar career-oriented events Mrs. Obama has held for students since becoming first lady.
Tuesday 7 October 2014
DNA linked to how much coffee you drink
(AP) — How much coffee do you drink every day? One cup in the morning? Or do you gulp it all day?
Scientists have long known that your DNA influences how much java you consume. Now a huge study has identified some genes that may play a role.
Their apparent effect is quite small. But variations in such genes may modify coffee's effect on a person's health, and so genetic research may help scientists explore that, said Marilyn Cornelis of the Harvard School of Public Health. She led the research.
The project analyzed the results of about two dozen previous studies with a combined total of more than 120,000 participants. Those participants had described how much coffee they drink a day, and allowed their DNA to be scanned. The new work looked for minute differences in their DNA that were associated with drinking more or less coffee.
Researchers found eight such variants, two of which had already been linked to coffee consumption.
Four of the six new variants implicate genes that are involved with caffeine, either in how the body breaks it down or in its stimulating effects, the researchers said in a paper released Tuesday by the journal Molecular Psychiatry.
The two other newly implicated genes were a surprise because there's no clear biological link to coffee or caffeine, Cornelis said. They are instead involved with cholesterol levels and blood sugar.
Marian Neuhouser, a nutrition researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and study co-author, said identifying genes related to consumption may one day help doctors identify patients who need extra help in cutting down on coffee if recommended. For example, pregnant women are advised to consume only moderate amounts of caffeine because of risk of miscarriage and preterm birth, she said.
None of the identified genetic variants was related to how intensely a person tastes coffee, and Cornelis said that surprised her.
She doesn't drink coffee, she said, because she can't stand the stuff.
Talking to your car can be dangerous, studies say
(AP) — Just because you can talk to your car doesn't mean you should. Two new studies have found that voice-activated smartphones and dashboard infotainment systems may be making the distracted-driving problem worse instead of better.
The systems let drivers do things like tune the radio, send a text message, or make a phone call while keeping their eyes on the road and their hands on the wheel, but many of these systems are so error-prone or complex that they require more concentration from drivers rather than less, according to studies released Tuesday by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety and the University of Utah.
One study examined infotainment systems in some of the most common auto brands on the road: Chevrolet, Chrysler, Ford, Hyundai and Mercedes. The second study tested the Apple iPhone's Siri voice system to navigate, send texts, make Facebook and Twitter posts, and use the calendar without handling or looking at the phone. Apple and Google are working with automakers to mesh smartphones with infotainment systems so that drivers can bring their apps, navigation and music files into their cars.
The voice-activated systems were graded on a distraction scale of 1 to 5, with 1 representing no distraction and 5 comparable to doing complex math problems and word memorization.
The systems were tested by 162 university students and other volunteers in three settings: a laboratory, a driving simulator and in cars while driving through a Salt Lake City neighborhood.
Apple's Siri received the worst rating, 4.14. Twice test drivers using Siri in a driving simulator rear-ended another car.
Chevrolet's MyLink received the worst rating, 3.7, among the infotainment systems. Infotainment systems from three other automakers — Mercedes, Ford and Chrysler — also were rated more distracting for drivers than simply talking on a hand-held cellphone. Most of the cars were 2013 model year vehicles.
"What we continue to see from customers is that they demand this level of technology in their vehicles, that access to music and access to calls is now a critical part of the driving experience and so we're looking at innovative ways to provide that," said Chevrolet spokeswoman Annalisa Bluhm.
Apple noted in a statement that researchers didn't use the company's CarPlay or Siri Eyes Free, which are designed for use in cars. However, David Strayer, the University of Utah psychology professor who led the two studies, said researchers consulted with Apple before beginning the study. The study used an iOS 7 version of Siri that was tweaked to be nearly identical to the iOS 8 version, which was just recently released, he said.
The systems with the worst ratings were those that made errors even though drivers' voice commands were clear and distinct, said Strayer. Drivers had to concentrate on exactly what words they wanted to use and in what order to get the systems to follow their commands, creating a great deal of frustration.
For example, an infotainment system might recognize a command to change a radio station to "103.5 FM," but not "FM 103.5" or simply "103.5," he said.
Siri sometimes garbled text messages or selected wrong phone numbers from personal phonebooks, Strayer said. During one test, Siri called 911 instead of the phone number requested by the volunteer driver and the driver had to scramble to end the call before it went through. Siri found the number in the driver's phonebook because the driver had called it once before.
"When these systems become more complex, like sending text messages or posting to Facebook, it pushes the workloads to pretty high levels and may be dangerous while driving," Strayer said.
The studies contradict claims by automakers, who have been pitching the voice systems to car buyers as a way they can safely enjoy social media and connectivity. Safety advocates say drivers assume that such systems are safe because they are incorporated into vehicles and are hands-free.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which regulates vehicle safety, has issued guidelines to automakers for dashboard systems and is working on similar guidelines for cellphones and voice-activated systems, but the guidelines are voluntary.
"Infotainment systems are unregulated," said Deborah Hersman, president of the National Safety Council and former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. "It is like the Wild West, where the most critical safety feature in the vehicle — the driver — is being treated like a guinea pig in human trials with new technologies."
Two of the infotainment systems were rated relatively low for distraction. Toyota's Entune received a 1.7, the distraction equivalent of listening to an audiobook, and Hyundai's Blue Lin Telematic System received a 2.2.
"The good news is that really well-designed systems offer us the possibility to interact in ways that aren't so distracting," Strayer said.
Monday 6 October 2014
Room escape attractions growing in US
(AP) — I like to think of myself as relatively quick-witted, but I started having serious doubts about my cleverness as I stood handcuffed to my new Russian friend, trying get out of a prison cell.
It wasn't a real prison cell, which is why I wasn't having a panic attack. But the handcuffs were real, and being chained to another person while searching a small room for keys and clues as a clock ticked down became frustrating pretty quickly.
Believe it or not, this was all part of a game. Real-life room escape attractions began opening nearly a decade ago in Asia and Eastern Europe, but they've been popping up in North America over the past few years. The attractions trace their origins back to escape-the-room video games, where players were trapped and forced to use clues and objects in their surroundings to get out. Now that concept has moved into the real world.
Escape the Quest opened in Miami Beach in July. They offer two games — Apartment 101 and Prison Escape — with Mental Hospital coming soon. Groups of two to four have an hour to solve the puzzle and win their freedom. I participated in Prison Escape, joining a group of expat Russians in their mid-20s — Alex Belousov, Konstantin Elizarov and Lucy Omelchenko — who moved to South Florida within the past two years. Their English was heavily accented, and my Russian is nonexistent, adding a language barrier to a challenge that only about 20 percent of groups complete successfully, according to Escape the Quest manager Yuliya Pashkevich.
As Konstantin later remarked, "You don't understand us, and we understand 50 percent of yours."
So we were off to a good start.
To begin, Pashkevich explained that Prison Escape actually includes two rooms and that my new friends and I would be paired off, one pair locked in each room. We would first have to get all four into one room and then all escape together. Alex spoke the best English, so he went with me. We were all handcuffed to our partners and locked in our cells.
I promised Pashkevich I wouldn't give away any secrets, but I will say Alex and I did eventually find a handcuff key, probably much later than we should have. By working with Konstantin and Lucy through a wall, we even managed to get them into our room. And by briefly speaking in their native tongue, Alex and Konstantin figured out a math riddle that set us free with about 5 minutes to spare. I felt useless at that final math part, but even the third-string quarterback gets a ring when his team wins the Super Bowl, so I'm counting it as a win.
After escaping, Alex, Konstantin and Lucy donned old-timey, black-and-white prisoner outfits for a photo op. They agreed they had fun and that it was a unique experience they'd recommend to others.
"It was the first time seeing something like this," Konstantin said. "It was very good."
Pashkevich said the escapes, which start at $60 a group, were designed to appeal to people of all ages and backgrounds. Besides groups of friends, Pashkevich said it's also common to host families and even co-workers using it for team-building. But she added the potentially stressful room escapes can be poison to a budding romance.
"You know when it doesn't work?" Pashkevich said. "On a first date."
While room escape attractions are more stressful than actually scary, they're catching the attention of more traditional haunted house operators and theme parks.
Brett Hays, a board member of the Haunted Attraction Association and director of Fear Fair in Indiana, said he expects room escapes to feature prominently at a national trade show in St. Louis next spring. "You're going to see a lot of overlap, where companies and individuals doing haunted attractions are also going to be doing these types of events in the off season," Hays said, adding that room escapes can be popular year-round, not just around Halloween.
The challenge of room escape attractions is volume. "You have to get a lot of people through in a night to make the finances work," Hays said.
But traditional haunted attractions often feature multiple events, which could easily include a room escape, Hays said.
Dennis Speigel, president of International Theme Park Services, Inc., believes the room escape concept can be modified to accommodate more participants.
"We see it as something that will come into the parks bigtime," Speigel said. "It will come in on a larger scale. You'll have large teams of people coursing through different games."
Theme parks are always looking for new ideas, Speigel said, and the critical thinking and interactivity featured in room escapes is appealing.
"The concept is limitless to the story," Speigel said. "So as long you have creative people, this can go on forever."
Saturday 4 October 2014
Medical first: Baby born to woman who got new womb
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(AP) — In a medical first, a woman in Sweden has given birth after receiving a womb transplant, the doctor who performed the pioneering procedure said Friday.
The 36-year-old mother received a uterus from a close family friend last year. Her baby boy was born prematurely but healthy last month, and mother and child are now at home and doing well. The identities of the woman and her husband were not disclosed.
"The baby is fantastic," said Dr. Mats Brannstrom, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Gothenburg and Stockholm IVF who led the research and delivered the baby with the help of his wife, a midwife. "But it is even better to see the joy in the parents and how happy he made them."
Brannstrom said it was "still sinking in that we have actually done it."
The feat opens up a new but still experimental alternative for some of the thousands of women each year who are unable to have children because they lost a uterus to cancer or were born without one. Before this case proved the concept can work, some experts had questioned whether a transplanted womb would be able to nourish a fetus.
Others have questioned whether such an extreme step — expensive and fraught with medical risks — would even be a realistic option for many women.
Dr. Glenn Schattman, past president of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technologies and a Cornell University fertility specialist, said womb transplants are likely to remain very uncommon.
"This would not be done unless there were no other options," he said. "It requires a very long surgery and not without risk and complications."
For the proud parents, the years of research and experimentation were well worth the wait.
"It was a pretty tough journey over the years, but we now have the most amazing baby," the father said in a telephone interview. "He is very, very cute, and he doesn't even scream, he just murmurs."
He said he and his wife, both competitive athletes, were convinced the procedure would work, despite its experimental nature.
Brannstrom and colleagues transplanted wombs into nine women over the last two years as part of a study, but complications forced removal of two of the organs. Earlier this year, Brannstrom began transferring embryos into the seven other women. He said there are two other pregnancies at least 25 weeks along.
Before these cases, there had been two attempts to transplant a womb — in Saudi Arabia and Turkey — but no live births resulted. Doctors in Britain, France, Japan, Turkey and elsewhere are planning to try similar operations, but using wombs from women who have just died instead of from live donors.
The Swedish woman had healthy ovaries, but she was born without a uterus — a syndrome seen in one girl in 4,500. She received a uterus from a 61-year-old family friend who had gone through menopause after giving birth to two children.
Brannstrom said that he was surprised such an old uterus was so successful, but that the most important factor seemed to be that the womb was healthy.
The recipient has had to take three medicines to prevent her body from rejecting the new organ. About six weeks after the transplant, she got her menstrual period — a sign the womb was healthy.
After one year, when doctors were confident the womb was working well, they transferred a single embryo created in a lab dish using the woman's eggs and her husband's sperm.
The woman, who has only one kidney, had three mild rejection episodes, including one during pregnancy, but all were successfully treated with medicines. The research was paid for by the Jane and Dan Olsson Foundation for Science, a Swedish charity.
The baby's growth and blood flow to the womb and umbilical cord were normal until the 31st week of pregnancy, when the mother developed a dangerous high-blood-pressure condition called preeclampsia.
After an abnormal fetal heart rate was detected, the baby was delivered by cesarean section. He weighed 3.9 pounds — normal for that stage of pregnancy. Full gestation is about 40 weeks. The baby was released from the neonatal unit 10 days after birth.
"He's no different from any other child, but he will have a good story to tell," the father said. "One day he can look at the newspaper articles about how he was born and know that he was the first in the world" to be born this way.
Details of the case are to be published soon in the journal Lancet.
Some critics have said that taking a womb from a live person is unethical and too big a risk to the donor for an operation that isn't life-saving. But Brannstrom said there were too few deceased donors to consider that option in Sweden.
"Most couples will do just about anything to have a baby. We need to see this happen a little bit more and see how safe it is," said Dr. Nanette Santoro, obstetrics chief at the University of Colorado in Denver. "It's not clear to me how many women would choose this, because it seems pretty arduous."
Brannstrom said he was concerned he might have hurt the womb during the C-section and said they would have to wait a couple of months before knowing if the mother would be able to keep the uterus for a second pregnancy.
For the new parents, the thought of a second baby right now is a little premature.
"We will definitely think about that," the father said. "But right now, we're very happy with just one baby."
Wednesday 1 October 2014
Global spa, wellness industry estimated at $3.4 trillion
(Reuters) - A growing middle class and consumers' evolving attitudes toward health and travel have fueled a global spa and wellness industry worth an estimated $3.4 trillion in 2013, according to a report released on Tuesday.
Nutrition and weight loss, preventative and personalized health, complementary and alternative medicine, and beauty and anti-aging treatments were the biggest growing sectors, the report compiled by the non-profit research center SRI International showed.
"All across the world we have seen, from Asia to Europe to Africa to North America, more and more people are consciously thinking about healthy food, exercising, looking to nature, getting massages and doing yoga," said Ophelia Yeung, a senior consultant for SRI International who led the study.
Spa treatments and products, alternative and complementary treatments and weight-loss programs once considered beyond the means of many people, she added, are becoming more mainstream with a growing middle class.
While medical care treats illness and disease, wellness is focused on prevention through a variety of healthy habits, nutritional eating, exercise and treatments.
To compile the report researchers looked at wellness sectors ranging from mind and body fitness to beauty and anti-aging, spas and workplace wellness.
The global spa industry generated $94 billion last year, according to the Global Spa and Wellness Economy Monitor report, up from $60 billion in 2007.
With more than 32,000 spas, Europe had the highest revenue of $29.8 billion, followed by the Asia-Pacific region with $18.8 billion and North America with $18.3 billion.
Emerging markets in the Middle East and Africa have been growing the fastest in terms of adding spas. In Asia, China and India are leading growth, while in Europe it is Eastern Europe, Russia and the Baltic states.
Thermal/mineral springs generated $50 billion worldwide but the biggest industry sector was wellness tourism, or travel associated with maintaining or enhancing one's personal well-being and health, which accounted for $494 billion.
"Wellness travel is a very fast growing segment within travel. That's because as people become more conscious about a healthy lifestyle they naturally want to extend that when they travel," Yeung explained.
The report showed that the number of people taking international and domestic wellness tourism trips grew by 12 percent from 2012 to 2013. That was 36 percent faster than overall tourism trip growth, which is estimated at 9 percent.
The SRI report was commissioned by the annual Global Spa & Wellness Summit. More than 400 wellness industry leaders from 45 countries attended the 2014 summit in Morocco earlier this month.
Sunday 28 September 2014
why is Britain having less sex?
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Recessions come with
plenty of side-effects. If you read the small print of the credit crunch
malaise and its painfully slow recovery you would no doubt discover that it
brought along with it the increased risk of all manner of physical disorders:
anxiety, sleeplessness, panic attacks, depression and, therefore, as your
pharmacist might advise, a predictable loss of libido. Certainly that would
seem to be one interpretation of the results of the Observer’sSex Uncovered
survey. Before George Osborne’s age of austerity the average British adult
enjoyed sex nearly seven times a month; in 2014 that figure has apparently
double-dipped to a miserly four times – less than once a week – with a full
third of the population admitting to no sex at all in those 30 days and nights.
Previous Tory administrations may have been able to boast that you have never
had it so good; one legacy of this limp coalition era might prove to be that
you have never had it so infrequently.
The last time the Observer snuck under the
nation’s duvet and asked a representative sample of consenting adults those
$64,000 questions – How many partners? How satisfied are you with your love
life? Do you use toys? – was in September 2008, just days before Lehman
Brothers filed for bankruptcy and desperate queues began to form outside
Northern Rock. The red blood of a decade of debt-fuelled priapic growth was
still pumping in the nation’s veins. There is no direct line of cause and
effect, of course, but still, six years on, the nation’s male population in
particular appears to have lost a significant amount of horizontal confidence.
In 2008, more than half of the sexually active considered themselves to have
above average prowess as lovers; now that figure has declined to little more
than a third. Along with the GDP figures, everything appears to have been
shrinking. The average British man’s approval of the size of his manhood has
drooped somewhat alarmingly over the last half decade (though it has stayed
robust among the wealthiest category of respondents to the survey, further
proof perhaps of the growing gap in perception and optimism between the haves
and the have-nots).
You could argue that the desire for greater financial security
has invaded our fantasy lives also. At the same time as Booker prize judges
have been complaining that sex has all but disappeared from the nation’s serious
fiction (perhaps because of fears of ridicule in the Bad Sex Award), a whole
new category of bonkbuster (adult erotica) has emerged. One new question for
this year’s survey sample concerns the reading ofFifty Shades of Grey – an extraordinary 43% of
people owned up to at least thumbing through the trilogy (or its many
imitators). Its popularity, however, perhaps owed an equal amount not to its
slap-and-tickle raunch, but also to the fact that the sex came complete with
first-class travel and the temporary suspension of money worries.
EL James may have been whipping up the repressed bondage
fetishes of a receptive audience (in which 90% of Brits don’t view their actual
sex life as “very adventurous”) but at the same time she was secretly appealing
to a make-believe in which financial insecurity was suddenly a thing of the
past – her writing shared that much with Jane Austen, at least. As Andrew
O’Hagan put it in the London Review of Books: “The expensive silk
tie on the cover tells you everything about the acquisitive vibe behind the
whole thing, the appeal for mothers who wouldn’t mind a slightly naughty
son-in-law if he also had tousled hair, an Audi R8 Spyder, several apartments
and a general handiness with the black Amex … many comforts [are] offered for a
life of mild depravity: people in these novels don’t wear underpants they wear
Calvin Kleins; they don’t drink wine they have Pinot Grigio; nobody wears
sunglasses they wear Ray-Bans … It’s not that having these things is at all
unusual, but the specificity implies a desire much larger here than any desire
people might have for kinky sex. They are buying the books because the books
invite them to be submissive too, not to punishment, but to a 1980s-style
dominance of money and power and products.”
Other observers have seen even greater significance in the Fifty
Shades…phenomenon, which quickly went global. Earlier this year writer Lori
Gottlieb (bestselling author of Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr
Good Enough) created a Twitter-storm of controversy with a front-page New
York Times Magazine article that asked the question “Does a more equal
marriage mean less sex?” Gottlieb offered evidence that the more couples share
childcare and household jobs – the more progress that was made toward breaking
down sexual imbalance in all things – then the less sex they were likely to
have. Fifty Shades…in this context was escapism for a generation of
women who had won the battle of having husbands and partners share domestic and
family responsibilities, but who perhaps lusted toward them a little less as a
result.
Gottlieb’s argument was supported by a study called
“Egalitarianism, Housework and Sexual Frequency in Marriage”, which appeared
last year in the American Sociological Review. This research found
that when men in heterosexual couples did what researchers characterised as
“feminine” chores – folding laundry or vacuuming – then couples had sex 1.5
fewer times per month than those with husbands or partners who did what were
characterised as masculine chores, such as heavy lifting or mending the car.
The study showed that it was not just the frequency of physical intimacy that
was affected – at least from the woman’s point of view. The greater the
husband’s share of masculine chores, the greater his wife’s reported sexual
satisfaction – what you might call the Lady Chatterley argument.
The study concluded: “The less gender differentiation, the less sexual desire.”
In other words, as Gottlieb claimed, “in an attempt to be gender-neutral, we
may have become gender-neutered”.
In this context the allure of Fifty Shades… is
seen, counterintuitively, as an expression of feminism, a victory for work-life
balance and the merits of “leaning in”. American psychologist Pepper Schwartz,
of the University of Washington, argued, that, paradoxically, such fantasies of
submission reflect how much relative power women now have attained in real
life. “The more powerful you are in your marriage, and the more responsibility
you have in other areas of your life, the more submission becomes sexy,”
Schwartz claimed. “It’s like: ‘Let me lose all that responsibility for an hour.
I’ve got plenty of it.’ It’s what you can afford once you don’t live a life of
submission.”
That kind of conclusion would seem perhaps to be supported in
two other findings of this latest survey. The sexual revolutionaries of the
1960s and 70s, you imagine, would be profoundly shocked by the responses to the
question of whether it is possible to be in a happy relationship without sex
featuring at all. Just about two-thirds of British adults apparently believe
that such a relationship is perfectly feasible. Whatever became of that
philosophy expressed, for example, by the indefatigable Norman Mailer, a
vigorous exponent of marrying for passion and divorcing when it disappeared,
who contended, looking back, that “orgasm in a certain sense was the essence of
the character [and] when your orgasm was improving, you were improving with
it…”? In a list of priorities for relationships in 2014, sex comes out on top
for only one in 50 people.
And how do such findings square with the overriding anecdotal
feeling that society, on the surface at least, is becoming ever more sexualised
– that the media are saturated with sexual reference, and that our children are
confronted with twerking and worse everywhere they look? Parents – like a
proportion of all parents before them – who fear their teenagers are growing up
much too quickly might take comfort from that fact that in London, for example,
the average age for the loss of virginity is quite an abstemious 19 years old.
Is sex losing out to the virtual reality of it on smartphones and laptops?
The current survey suggests that the invasion of internet
pornography, particularly into male lives, continues its territorial advance. I
was reminded, reading some of the findings of this survey, of watching Beeban
Kidron’s fine film about teenagers and the internet InRealLife, which came out this time last
year. In particular I was reminded of her young interviewee Ryan, who quite
sweetly talked the film-maker through his ritualised internet porn habits,
their menus and the sheer volume of graphic high-definition choice that was
presented to the formative adolescent mind, and accessible any time of day or
night. Ryan, aged 15, was quite evangelical about the possibilities that had
been opened up for his viewing pleasure, but he feared seeing so much so young
“had ruined his whole sense of love”. Kidron’s camera followed Ryan out into
town, watched him chatting up girls, all the time comparing the reality with the
fantasy he shared with his computer, always feeling a little let down.
Is the digital commodification of sex ruining the real thing on
a wider scale? There is plenty of anecdotal and research evidence to suggest
that it is. Is the kind of disjunction between fantasy and reality experienced
by Ryan responsible for the falling rates of sexual satisfaction, both in the
“performance” of a partner (the word itself is loaded with depersonalised
baggage) or in yourself? Certainly there has never been a moment in human
history when we have been surrounded by so much idealised or extreme sexuality
to live up to.
Three-quarters of men (and a quarter of women) admit to looking
at online pornography. And when nothing seems off-limits online – not to
mention the intimate moments of any celebrity under the sun, or the private
photos Jennifer Lawrence makes for her lover’s eyes only – does the proper
fleshy privacy of sex with a partner lose its glamour? You would hope not.
Readers of Mariella Frostrup’s column in this paper over recent years would
have to conclude otherwise, however. A decade or more of listening to
relationship troubles led her to observe recently: “The access to and
availability of sex onscreen is, I believe, the biggest seismic change to
society in my lifetime. We should be analysing and learning from what we
discover before sex becomes simply a spectator sport, totally adrift from the
intimacies of a loving relationship.”
In our work-obsessed, time-poor culture, it would seem that
regular sex is one of the “luxuries” that we are prepared to dispense with. As
various recent reports have suggested, women in particular, given the roles and
responsibilities they have to juggle, are as likely to fantasise about proper
rest as about physical intimacy. Sleep we are told, in many working lives, has
become the new sex.
And as the boundaries between working lives and home lives are
dissolved by technology and email, the mental space in which sex exists would
seem to be constantly under threat. Perhaps not surprisingly, given our cultural
addiction to ever-longer working days, one of the few rising trends since the Observer surveys
of 2002 and 2008 concerns the fact that a greater number of people are finding
lust (and maybe love) in the workplace – often literally – and not only that,
one in five people say they would sleep with someone to further their career.
The other side of that particular work-life balance points,
however, to the office colonising the bedroom – email and text follow many of
us everywhere, more global working practices mean communicating across many
time zones. Though all sleep counsellors suggest that the bedroom should be
reserved for sleep and sex, more than half of British adults admit to taking
their technology to bed with them. Which bedside table these days isn’t a
scramble of chargers and wires? In austerity Britain in 2014 a smartphone may
well be the last thing you caress at night – and, it seems, increasingly, the
only thing that gets turned on in the morning.
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