(LiveScience)

My friend Monica sent me a link to this MSNBC story: Post-coital blues plague a third of young women. Based on a very small sample of 200 young Australians, researchers at the Queensland Institute of Technology found that 1 in 3 women had felt post-intercourse melancholy at least once, and 1 in 10 experienced it regularly.

It’s easy to point out the obvious problem with the study: the sample is very small, for instance, and the focus on intercourse to the exclusion of other forms of sexual activity is problematic. But the real impact of these studies is in how the mainstream media report them, and the danger here is that a small and relatively inconclusive project can get framed as “sex makes women sad.” Read More >>