There’s never a dull moment when you work for a major research university. Someone is always publishing major research findings and students are running about and shouting and protesting and it’s all higgledy-piggledy and that’s the reason I like working here.

Then there are times when things get publicized that just make me kind of want to hide under my desk, because I know that it’s going to pop up on John Stewart, and we’re all going to be embarrassed for a while to tell people where we work.

Today’s post concerns one of these.

Two of our esteemed faculty in the Department of Psychology (read: gets lots of funding) have engaged upon what the Office of Public Affairs enthusiastically describes as one of the “most comprehensive studies about why people have sex,” and they have uncovered … I kid you not … 237 distinct motivations for doing the nasty.

Now, I pause for a moment to quote from the actual press release announcing this particular study:

[The researchers] conducted two studies. In the first, they asked more than 400 men and women to identify reasons people have sex. In the second, the researchers asked more than 1,500 undergraduate students about their experiences and attitudes.

The Texas psychologists identified four major factors and 13 sub-factors for why people have sex:

• Physical reasons such as to reduce stress (“It seemed like good exercise”), feel pleasure (“It’s exciting”), improve or expand experiences (“I was curious about sex”), and the physical desirability of their partner (“The person was a good dancer”).
• Goal-based reasons, including utilitarian or practical considerations (“I wanted to have a baby”), social status (“I wanted to be popular”) and revenge (“I wanted to give someone else a sexually transmitted disease”).
• Emotional reasons such as love and commitment (“I wanted to feel connected”) and expression (“I wanted to say ‘thank you’”).
• Insecurity-based reasons, including self-esteem (“I wanted the attention”), a feeling of duty or pressure (“My partner kept insisting”) and to guard a mate (“I wanted to keep my partner from straying”).

“Why people have sex is extremely important, but rarely studied,” Buss said. “Surprisingly, many scientists assume the answer is obvious, but people have different reasons for having sex, some of which are rather complex.”

I guess there’s a science here, but it really just sort of codifies what desperate creatures we human beings are.

Sex is … let me be perfectly honest, here: sex is, in my mind, one of the clearest signs that, if there is a God, he (she/it) has a profound sense of humor. Sex is ridiculous. Think about it! Sometimes when I’m being deep (but not too deep), I wonder who the first human was that thought to him or herself, “Hmm. Let’s see what happens if I put Tab A into Slot B … wait, there’s a Slot C, too. Hmm, I wonder …. Hey, you! Hold still. I want to try something.”

And shortly thereafter, the first early precursor of pepper spray was invented.

I dunno. I guess it’s nice that someone out there gave our Psychology faculty loads and loads of money to study this, but we know what the ultimate result of having sex is, and — with all due respect to my much better paid colleagues over in Psych — we probably could have saved them a lot of trouble by putting a bunch of guys in a room with a bottle of vodka and a 12 pack of beer and had them brainstorm — the list would have looked pretty similar to the one their exhaustive study came up with, doncha think?

What we ought to be researching is why people are so freaking uptight about sex, and what we can do to get them to unclench.