Skip to main content

Let's hope these findings are premature...

It's taken until 2009 to prove something that any upstanding member of the establishment could have told us back in 1889: excessive how's-your-father or indulgent self-abuse is bad for your health. A new study from Nottingham University suggests that men with active sex lives or prone to onanistic extremes in their 20s and 30s are more likely to develop prostate cancer.

This finding - which is perhaps easier to accept at the age of 40 than the age of 14 - raises all kinds of difficult issues.

Let's say we discovered that nookie was as dangerous - and as life-shortening - as smoking. Thankfully, both activities are already banned in public places. But we might have to consider further measures. Warning teenagers in schools, for instance, of the dangers of what tabloid newspapers euphemistically describe as "solo sex". Placing prominent health warnings on copies of Zoo and FHM.

I can see the agony columns of magazines changing radically in the future. Some bloke will write in worrying that he only enjoys relations with his girlfriend once a month. Instead of receiving advice on how to "spice up" activity in the bedroom, he'll be told that he's probably got the balance just about right. In fact, he should maybe consider cutting it out altogether.

It can only be a matter of time before patches are produced. Or we're carrying around chewing gum that reduces our testosterone levels. It will be distributed free at the beach volleyball during the 2012 Olympics.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Becoming a Twister board

I spent yesterday evening in an old factory building off Brick Lane playing kids' games with an organisation called Fun Fed. The idea is that a bunch of adults get together and act like children for a couple of hours. We played tag and stuck big coloured discs on ourselves so that we could become human Twister mats. There was an awful lot of running around and I was thinking that I ought to get to aikido a bit more often. Being a child is very hard work.

Captain Birdseye and other people of rank

Regular readers may recall that I once doubted the existence of Yeo Valley. I'd never heard of the Yeo mountain range and I therefore rated the likelihood of there being a valley at somewhere between 0 and 5%. Of course, I had yoghurt all over my face when I discovered that the place really does exist. Somewhere in Somerset, I seem to recall. Today, having read an article in the latest edition of The Marketer magazine, I'm astonished to discover that there really was a Captain Birdseye. Well, I need to qualify that just a little. There was a Mister Clarence Birdseye who invented the fish finger back in 1955. The avuncular, uniformed figure who dominated our TV screens for about thirty years may have been an invention of over-eager advertising creatives, but he didn't blow in on a trawler during a squall. There was actually some connection to a real human being. These revelations about fish and yoghurt are causing me considerable disquiet, because I'm wondering h...

When one name isn't enough

You may have heard the news reports about the turmoil in Kingston, Jamaica, resulting from the government's attempts to pin down a notorious drug lord on behalf of the US. I was struck by the number of self-styled monikers this guy has given himself. He is, depending on the channel you listen to, known on the street as 'Dudas', 'The Big Man' and 'The President' - worshipped by many impoverished Kingston residents as a benefactor to slum dwellers. It's his real name that seems most appropriate, however. If you were a drug baron called Christopher Coke, wouldn't you leave it at that? It's certainly not a name to be sniffed at.