On MSNBC.com recently, there was an article on a scientific study done on booty calls. Yes, booty calls – which the study defined as ‘late night calls to arrange sexual rendezvous’ – have come under scientific scrutiny.
I am not going to regurgitate the article here. You can read it for yourself on MSNBC.com. What I am going to ask is, would you, could you, if you were a scientist, study booty calls? And not in a prurient sense, but as an actual event worthy of documentation and scientific discussion?
The reason I ask is because when I got to the bottom of the article, the first comment I saw basically said, “Who the hell thought THIS would be a good idea? I hope they didn’t get a government funded grant for this!” Because god knows, it would be absolutely horrible if the government paid anybody good money to study how human beings negotiate their sexual relationships. Why, if we did that, we might learn all sorts of horrible things, like how often are condoms and other birth control measures used in booty calls? And do the participants discuss their sexual history before getting involved, to insure no one passes on an STD to their partner? Well, we wouldn’t want to understand something like that!
Honestly, I think it’s assinine to assume that because the subject is sex, it’s not worthy of serious scrutiny. Personally, I would like to know how these relationships form and how they end. How do the participants feel about preventing the spread of disease? Are booty calls a wide-spread phenomenon in college-age people? Does participating in a booty-call relationship have any impact on the ability of participants to develop longer lasting romantic and sexual relationshpis later on?
Further reading of the comments did get into some interesting discussion as people talked about romance vs. quick sex, why women who have sex on the first night with someone are cheap but men who do the same aren’t, why booty-call relationships are better than one-night stands, etc. So it was good to see an active and usually thoughtful discussion going on in the first page of comments.
Think about it. Is the booty-call worth scientific study? Is any relationship worth scientific study? Let me know your thoughts.
