Where's My Happy Ending? by Anna Whitehouse

Author:Anna Whitehouse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

6

Hump Day

Does sex matter?

Matt

Well, this is awkward. No one wants to hear another couple talk about their sex lives – there’s something dogging-ish about it, like they’re trying to flash your subconscious.

My friends very rarely tell sex tales now because married men don’t tell sex stories about their wives, and my single friends think it’d be cruel to gloat. On the rare occasion that I do hear a sex tale from a friend, the surprise insertion of their swinging bits into my mind’s eye feels like an intimacy too far.

But to truly consider ‘happily ever after’, we need to consider real ‘happy endings’ because lustiness shifts over time, interests change, enthusiasm peaks and troughs.

So what is enough? How do people keep the lust alive? And does it matter if they don’t?

It seems to me that the best people to answer these questions might be in a free-love commune in southern Portugal, but more of that later.

First, a little reassurance for those suffering from diminishing sexual returns: you are not alone. We’re all having less sex, according to British newspaper the Observer, and the sex we’re having isn’t as good.1 That’s true for smug marrieds, free singles, and everyone in between. The paper quizzed 1,000 Brits in 2008 and then again in 2014, and saw the number of people who rated their sex drive as ‘above average’ drop by ten percentage points. More people said they were unhappy with the quality of their sex lives too. Maybe it’s the lingering woes from the financial crisis of 2008, maybe it’s the cost of living, maybe they’re too busy watching YouPorn, but in the bleakness of the early twenty-first century, most of us aren’t getting enough.

One in four couples in their thirties have a sexless relationship, according to Relate,2 and it’s even more pronounced among the young adults who should be enjoying their rampant years. Some 13 per cent of British millennials are still virgins by age twenty-six, according to University College London.3 In the US, millennials are 250 per cent more likely to be celibate than Gen Xers were at the same age.4 This seems like a terrible waste of firm flesh.

Because sex is good for you. Orgasms flood the brain with dopamine to make you happy and oxytocin to help you bond with your partner. The few researchers who have managed to convince their bosses to let them watch people wank in MRI scanners have found that the positive impacts of orgasm are similar for both men and women.

For women, climaxing has a painkilling effect too. In 1984, renowned orgasm researchers Beverly Whipple and Barry Komisaruk got women to masturbate with one hand, while the other was gently squeezed in a compression device (Bev did that part). They found that pain thresholds doubled nearing orgasm.5

But it doesn’t take the people in white coats to tell us that sex feels nice. Most of us guess that before we’ve paid our first tax bill.

Aged about fourteen, I had a paper round that started at 6a.

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