SEX IN AMERICA

Here is one of the most unintentionally funny things I’ve ever seen.

This is from Reuters:

Men's testosterone levels declined in last 20 years

Tue Oct 31, 2006 2:23pm ET

By Anne Harding

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A new study has found a "substantial" drop in U.S. men's testosterone levels since the 1980s, but the reasons for the decline remain unclear. This trend also does not appear to be related to age.

The average levels of the male hormone dropped by 1 percent a year, Dr. Thomas Travison and colleagues from the New England Research Institutes in Watertown, Massachusetts, found. This means that, for example, a 65-year-old man in 2002 would have testosterone levels 15 percent lower than those of a 65-year-old in 1987. This also means that a greater proportion of men in 2002 would have had below-normal testosterone levels than in 1987.

"The entire population is shifting somewhat downward we think," Travison told Reuters Health. "We're counting on other studies to confirm this."

…

They hypothesized that the rising prevalence of obesity as well as the sharp decline in cigarette smoking might help explain their findings, given that testosterone levels are lower among overweight people and smoking increases testosterone levels. But these factors accounted for only a small percentage of the observed difference.

It's likely that some sort of environmental exposure is responsible for the testosterone decline, Travison said, although he said attempting to explain what this might be based on the current findings would be "pure conjecture."

…

"I think like most things that are complex, it's likely that there is no one cause," he said.

SOURCE: Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, January 2007.

You can read the entire article *HERE*.

Wow, what a mystery. And they looked everywhere and couldn’t find any clues. This then is a group of researchers who are, by definition, CLUELESS.

Okay. I’ll help them out. Here are the findings of a Stanford study:

The Porn Business

Sex sells. As the number one income generator on the Internet today, pornography is a ripe business that will continue to grow along with the advancement of technology. With a reported annual growth rate of 40% since 1997, and the status of being the most queried subject on search engines, pornography is a thriving industry and one of the only successful e-businesses.

This is a very interesting article. You can read it all *HERE*.

Then there is this report from two years ago by CBS News:

Porn In The U.S.A.

Steve Kroft Reports On A $10 Billion Industry

Sept. 5, 2004

(CBS) Selling sex is one of the oldest businesses in the world, and right now, business has never been better. One of the biggest cultural changes in the United States over the past 25 years has been the widespread acceptance of sexually explicit material - pornography. In the space of a generation, a product that once was available in the back alleys of big cities has gone corporate, delivered now directly into homes and hotel rooms by some of the biggest companies in the United States

This is another interesting report. You can read it all *HERE*.

So those researchers into testosterone levels looked everywhere for a cause, except into the sexual habits of the American people. Do you think that might have something to do with it?

In a related story, here is an article from Slate:

How the Web Prevents Rape

All that Internet porn reduces sex crimes. Really.

By Steven E. LandsburgPosted Monday, Oct. 30, 2006, at 2:22 PM ET

Does pornography breed rape? Do violent movies breed violent crime? Quite the opposite, it seems.

First, porn. What happens when more people view more of it? The rise of the Internet offers a gigantic natural experiment. Better yet, because Internet usage caught on at different times in different states, it offers 50 natural experiments.

The bottom line on these experiments is, "More Net access, less rape." A 10 percent increase in Net access yields about a 7.3 percent decrease in reported rapes. States that adopted the Internet quickly saw the biggest declines. And, according to Clemson professor Todd Kendall, the effects remain even after you control for all of the obvious confounding variables, such as alcohol consumption, police presence, poverty and unemployment rates, population density, and so forth.

You can read this article *HERE*.