Link: The Standard | Online Edition
Last Updated on June 18, 2007, 12:00 am
Dr Frank Njenga:
It is an old
phenomenon that is
now looking for new
vents and it will keep
on mutating.
Technological revolution in the last few decades has effectively redefined human relations and blurred the necessity of physical space and contact.
One can send voice and text messages or images to people thousands of kilometres away, read today’s Moscow daily newspaper, shop in the comfort of your sitting room, send money via mobile phone, find out how much a bag of potatoes costs in Eldoret or behold the world’s largest library at the click of a mouse. Indeed, it is a whole new world that would have sounded like futuristic science fiction when Kenya gained independence in 1963.
But just like in Robert Louis Stevenson’s story, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the technological revolution has also evolved with traits that threaten the conservative and traditionally held views of life. And, true to form, the devil is in the detail. Intertwined with this technological revolution is an online sexual revolution that has generated a newfangled genre which answers to the name ‘Virtual sex’.
Described in Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, as “a form of non-penetrative sex where two or more people gather together via some form of communication equipment to arouse each other by transmitting sexually explicit messages”, virtual sex is slowly finding its niche in the relatively conservative fabric of Kenyan society as more people explore the possibilities of the world wide web and continue relying on mobile telephony for communication.
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Link: Just 4pc of US teens stay virgins: study | NEWS.com.au
June 23, 2007 07:22am
Just four per cent of US adults are virgins, but a fifth have tried hard drugs such as cocaine and crack, a new study shows.
What most alarms researchers is how young they start.
“We still have a public health problem in that we still see a lot of adults reporting their sexual debut at a pretty young age,” said Dr Kathryn Porter of the United States’ National Centre for Health Statistics, who led the survey of more than 6,000 people.
“That is an area of concern because risky sexual behaviours can result in sexually transmitted diseases and unintended pregnancies,” she said in a telephone interview.
Ninety-six per cent of US adults have engaged in some kind of sex - including oral and anal sex - by the age of 20, according to the study published today.
The researchers believe they have one of the most honest assessments yet of sexual behaviour and drug use because they used a new method to do the survey.
“They answered this in complete privacy,” Porter said.
“They have a headset on, they touch a computer screen. This is the first time we just looked at statistics for sexual behaviour and drug use alone.”
There were no surprises, Porter said, but what researchers already know is troubling.
“Among non-Hispanic blacks, 28 per cent reported having first had sex before the age of 15,” she said. The number was 14 per cent for whites.
“It seems we still have areas to kind of work on,” Porter said.
The survey, done between 1999 and 2002, also showed 46 per cent of black men said they had 15 or more sexual partners in a lifetime.
Overall, 17 per cent of men and 10 per cent of women said they had two or more sexual partners in the past year.
The younger a person was, the more likely they were to have had multiple partners.
The survey found Mexican-Americans were the most likely to report never having had any form of sex, with 24 per cent of men and 45 per cent of women in that group claiming to be virgins.
For all men, the median number of sexual partners was 6.8.
“If you ask women, it is less - it is 3.7,” Porter said.
A history of drug use was most common among middle-aged adults.
More than 19 per cent of those aged 20 to 29 said they had tried cocaine, crack or another street drug, excluding marijuana.
This rose to 27 per cent for people aged 30 to 39 and nearly 26 per cent for those in their 40s.
But just 9.6 per cent of those aged 50 to 59 acknowledged having ever tried street drugs.
“That number might be different if we had included marijuana,” Porter said.
“When you look at the overall prevalence of adults ever having used one (street drug), it is still over 20 per cent.
That is a lot more than I would have thought.”
