Marshall Brain's Blog

One of the first and most popular posts in this blog is named Smoking and sex. It asks the question, "Why do we consider smoking to be sexy?" Smoking is a pretty disgusting habit when you get right down to it, so it seems very odd to associate smoking with sex. The answer to this paradox is simple: smokers are far more sexual. 19-year-old women who smoke are nearly four times more likely than non-smokers to be sexually active. See Smoking and sex for details. Cigarettes are essentially a marker for sexuality, so "smoking" becomes "sexy".

According to this article, cell phones are about to become even sexier than cigarettes. The article states: "According to The Mirror, the researchers, who questioned more than 10,000 youngsters between the age-group of 13-18, found that 60 per cent of teenagers who use mobiles a lot had sex, whereas, only nine per cent of the children who seldom or never used mobile phones had had sex."

It would be interesting to see this same sort of research applied to tattoos and other markers. And then there are the combinations: what does it mean when you see a tattooed teen with a cigarette in one hand and a cell phone in the other?