Your iPhone Is Killing Your Sex Life

Apparently more than a quarter of women surveyed are blaming the internet, particularly email and smartphones, for a decline in the quality of their bedroom action. Well, duh.

In a wide-sweeping survey on the state of sex lives, women cited exhaustion, long workdays, and busy schedules as detrimental to physical intimacy — but 28% also blamed iPhones and Blackberries. What’s not included in the data, or the reports I can find, is how men are feeling about things. Of course, this is a survey that was conducted by the pharmaceutical company Bayer, which, not coincidentally, just bought the rights to a drug being developed for female sexual dysfunction. (So take a pill, and you’ll be so hot ‘n bothered that you’ll just do it with that iPhone!)

I find the nature of this study — even if it is quite likely going to be used for Bayer’s marketing purposes once Lady Viagra hits the market — a bit too limited, at least in regards to heterosexual relationships. One interpretation of this is that men are more work-obsessed and distracted than women. But most management-level women I know are constantly checking their texts and emails during the majority of their waking hours (sad but true, even if it’s a tick of the urban-workaholic life). iPhone-tethered women are as much to blame for diminishing intimacy as are their male partners.* Of course, this could be a matter of women blaming the problem on their own smartphone use, but the study doesn’t say. Either way, everyone’s too plugged in to get laid.

On the bright side, if you’re not in the mood your significant other may be a bit less bruised by a glued-to-your-Blackberry bedroom rebuff than they might with a blanket “not in the mood” excuse (depends, I guess, on your partner’s work attitudes). I would think a preoccupation with an “important work matter” is a hell of a lot easier than faking a headache. And then you can secretly play Bejeweled.