05-20-2004, 02:35 PM
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#50 (permalink)
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Sky Piercer
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From snopes:
http://snopes.com/pregnant/nosex.asp
Quote:
Sex is a subject which, because it has long been considered an inappropriate subject for public discourse in our society, is a particularly favorite topic of non-public discourse. We gossip about people who are having sex, we gossip about people who aren't having sex, and we gossip about people who are having too much sex. We titter about people who know too much about sex, and we chortle at people who know too little about sex.
The latter point is well-represented in urban folklore, which abounds with tales of sexually naive adults who don't understand what sex is, have sex the "wrong" way, or don't grasp the rudiments of birth control. Thus we have tales of childless couples who discover their infertility is due to either a complete lack of intercourse or to the husband's mistakenly penetrating his wife's urethra (because no one ever explained sex or proper sexual techniques to them), couples who use prophylactics by placing them on the ends of bananas or broomsticks (because that's how condom use was demonstrated to them), and women aghast at finding themselves pregnant even though they've been consuming contraceptive jelly.
(In Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22, Doc Daneeka reminisces to Yossarian about his days in private practice, and he talks about a couple who once came to him because they were unable to conceive a child. Despite the couple's claims of regular sex, the doctor discovered upon examination that the wife was still a virgin. He used plastic models to demonstrate to the couple how to have sex the "correct" way, and a few days later the husband returned and punched him in the face.)
In May 2004, yet another news article reported the classic "couple discovers they're childless because they're not having sex" tale, this one supposedly involving a German couple who reported to an IVF clinic at Lübeck University for infertility testing, where the staff determined the cause of the couple's childless state was their having "never made love" — they thought all they had to do in order to conceive was "to lie next to each other and let nature take its course." (Their ignorance of sex was attributed to their having been brought up in a "strict religious environment.")
As far as we can tell, this recent version of the story originated in the 18 May 2004 edition of the UK newspaper The Mirror and was picked up from there by other news sources, including UPI. The article looks to be either a spoof or a hoax — the type of story one would expect to find in a supermarket tabloid — not only because it repeats a common urban legend motif, but also because:
* It has a lack of detail common to tabloid or spoof articles: The couple is identified only as a "husband" and a "wife" (with no quotes from either), and no name or title is provided for the article's single source of information, a university representative (he's merely an unnamed "spokesman").
* The spokesman states that it was only after the couple "were subjected to a battery of tests and both were found to be perfectly fertile that we asked them how often they had sex." In-depth questions about frequency and nature of sexual activity are generally asked of couples well before any actual fertility testing is undertaken, in part for this very reason (i.e., nobody wants to run a battery of expensive tests only to find out that some external factor was responsible for the couple's failure to conceive — like maybe the couple is engaging in sex infrequently, and always at a time when the woman is probably not ovulating.)
* The article includes some way over-the-top, buffoonish statements (ones not befitting a medical professional) based upon information supplied by the putative spokesman, such as: "We're not talking about retards here, but a couple who were brought up in a strict religious environment" and "The couple had read up about in-vitro fertilisation treatment but believed it was something to do with a 'turkey baster, a mattress and a woman standing on her head.'" (Would a couple so ignorant of the basics of sex and pregnancy really understand the concept of IVF?)
* No one we contacted at Lübeck University (at least, no English-speaking personnel — my command of German is nicht so gut) had any knowledge of this story
The Mirror hasn't responded to our inquiries yet, but we'd be quite surprised if this report turned out to be anything but a fictional bit of humor.
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So although it's not definately false, that's where my money is.
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Last edited by CSflim; 05-21-2004 at 11:11 AM..
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