I can't believe in over 2 hrs since this posting I'm the only one to respond. Talk about lobbing a softball! (is this fig. of speech familiar to Aussies?) Oh well, it is late friday/early sat. in USA-I guess I'm the only guy home alone while the other guys are seeking females in need of mood-altering!

Edited by - menace on Jun 29 2002

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Jebus made me do it!

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Superfly--I just looked at BBC as you suggested-it says more testing needed to determine how effective oral & anal are, but they suspect it works too. Oh boy.

Edited by - menace on Jun 29 2002

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Even the study's author, Gordon Gallup, urges caution in interpreting the results. "These data are only suggestive," he has stressed. "They're hardly conclusive." See this article from Salon.com for further information.

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any girls reading this should ignore YogaGrrl's comments.

now repeat after me ladies:

sperm is good for me. sperm is good for me. and so is anal sex.

[REPEAT]

;p

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LOL! Actually, all that is completely true, just not for the reasons given by the study.

I haven't read the original paper, but based on the reports in the media (damn press, always jumping on initial findings and reporting them as facts, I hate that!), there are several potentially serious flaws in this research. The first one that jumped out at me is that the sample population is rather limited. A few hundred college women is not a very good representative sample of the entire female gender. More importantly, as the article in Salon has also pointed out, the researchers have not adequately accounted for the intimacy factor. It could well be that women who have a more intimate and trusting relationship with their male partners are also less likely to use condoms. Better designed studies may well show that a sense of happiness arises from a sense of intimacy, while the hormones in the semen have little if any effect.

Albert Einstein once said that explanations should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. The notion that semen reduces depression just strikes me as an absurdly oversimplified approach to human psychology.

But then again, I'm a feminist, and I'm considering the political implications of this research. It's already been suggested that semen acts as a drug in the female body, and once we get a little, it becomes increasingly addictive—our happiness is dependent upon it. That's an extremely disempowering idea for women everywhere. Not just women, but men, too. Do you guys really want to believe that the more testosterone you have, the happier your woman will be? What if your testosterone level is only average or (gasp!) less than average? How does that affect your hopes of keeping a woman satisfied?

I'm well aware, though, that philosophy is not science. If further studies confirm the initial findings, I'll just have to suck it up (so to speak) and accept reality. If they're right, the one good thing is that they may be well on their way to an alternative treatment for depression, which is a very serious illness.

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A Planet Sex-sized penis would surely makes any woman feel good!

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Hardware

"Murder is the sincerest form of criticism!" the Pagfeek Papers

Edited by - hardware on Jul 2 2002

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