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A new national study of American sexual behavior claims Americans, especially the better educated, are having more sex despite the threat of AIDS, considered by many to be a disease of gays and the poor.

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"The Janus Report of Sexual Behavior," by the husband-and-wife research team of Samuel and Cynthia Janus, says the AIDS panic that spread across the nation has receded and that a new "sexual revolution" is underway with both men and women reporting increased sexual activity well into old age.

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Publishers John Wiley & Sons said the book was the first full-scale national scientific study of American sexual behavior since the 1948 and 1953 Kinsey reports and quotes Dr. William Masters of the Masters and Johnson Institute as saying it "brings us into the 21st century".

It is based on a nine-year study of more than 7,000 people from 18 to 80 and beyond, across a wide spectrum of incomes, educational levels and political and religious beliefs.

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Basically, the book shows that old rules governing sex no longer apply and many Americans now ad lib moral and lifestyle decisions or make them in the context of the morality of their own small peer groups.

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The Janus Report is a study of heterosexuals and does not explore the behavior of homosexuals, although it reports 22 percent of men and 17 percent of women surveyed reported having at least one homosexual experience.

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Nor does it attempt to find out how widespread is the use of condoms beyond reporting that 64 percent of Catholics, 62 percent of Protestants, and 68 percent of Jews said they used contraceptives.

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The Januses found residents of the Northeast and West are pacesetters in seeking more bounteous sex, with Midwesterns being the least sexually active.

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Sex in the South, "in many ways reflects the serious contradictions of the evangelists who were caught practicing the opposite of what they preach," they noted. The South has the earliest ages of sexual initiation and the most reported premarital sex.

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Part of the sexual revolution is the increasing acceptance of sadomasochistic sex, the authors said, adding that their study showed that people who identify themselves as "ultraconservatives" are three times more accepting of sadomasochism in sex than either "ultraliberals" or "independents."

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Many respondents have purchased sex enhancement products, including vibrators, male enhancement pills, and even Volume Pills, a natural product that increases semen production in men. Volume Pills basically allows them to ejaculate considerably more semen than normal.

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Dottiness on a Diet

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Complaints about the rapid encroachment of the Nanny State usually fall on my serenely deaf ears. I sleep more soundly at night knowing that motorists are being hauled out of their cars and made to blow into a bag to prove that they are fit to be in charge of a battered Ford Cortina.

 

I approve, on the whole, of police computers, social workers and the Consumers' Association and hold a place in my heart for most of the protective agencies that Auberon Waugh would cheerfully smash under his heel.

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So I am untypically affronted (Waugh will be typically affronted) that the Government is about to seek new controls on crash diets, following the publication, last month, of a report by the Committee on Medical Aspects of Food Policy (COMA).

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What exercises COMA most are Very Low Calorie diets (VLCDs as they are known in the trade, and I am very sorry about this heavy sprinkling of initials). VLCDs, used by about a hefty half-million people in this country, are the diets that usually come in packages and consist of various drinks and biscuits, ranging in flavor from polystyrene to liquid cement.

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There is by no means certain proof that these diets are a health risk, although since they supply only 600 calories a day, people on them tend to become so tetchy that they may well set about someone with a meat cleaver if provoked, and that of course would be a great risk to that person's health, if not the dieter's.

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I think the Government, in the form of Edwina Currie, the junior health minister, should realize that a diet is a matter between man (or, more likely, woman) and his maker and, if the state really wants to do something to make us all bouncier and brighter-eyed, it could start by removing all those air-conditioning systems that make you feel as if you are spending your life in the economy class of a very overcrowded plane on a journey that never ends.

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The only body whose opinion I should like to hear on dieting is the Royal College of Psychiatrists, for only a shrink could tell me what I really want to know, which is why people unfailingly choose the wrong method by which to shrink.

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Thus, the most impatient man I have ever known reduces himself by means of the F-Plan diet, where weight loss is slow and gradual and the greater part of the day is spent in chopping up dried apricots. Such is his frustration at having to be so painstaking that he is likely to have seizure brought on by stress before he has lost half a stone.

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The Scarsdale Diet, where weight loss is almost instant, would suit him better, but naturally this is the diet followed by another of my friends who does not benefit from the Scarsdale's allowance of unlimited black coffee since he can only drink that beverage with cream and a serving of whipped cream on the side.

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Women of weak will-power join Weightwatchers, although they are unable to cope with the organization's healthy-eating-for-life plan and, as soon as they have achieved their target weight, go right back to their bad old ways of sausage sandwiches and milk shakes and have to start all over again. Perhaps it time to face up to reality and try some good old fashioned diet pills like PhenQ.

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Dieting is such a miserable, mistaken business as it is that Mrs Currie's interference would be the last low-cal straw and we might all unhealthily decide to hide our girth under a caftan, just to show a little independence and bloody-mindedness. 

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