“A study of sexual and romantic relations at a high school found students connected by long chains, rather than in a tight network with a core group of a promiscuous few. Sharing of partners was rare, but many students were indirectly linked through one partner to another and another. The unexpected result could help shape strategies for combating sexually transmitted diseases among young people… In the most striking chain, 52 percent of the romantically involved students were connected in a manner of student A having relations with B, and B having relations with C, and so on down the line over the 18 months of the study… The research reveals a semantically complex rule that seems to guide adolescent sexual conduct. Here goes: A girl is loath to date her old boyfriend’s new girlfriend’s old boyfriend.” —LiveScience.com (US)

Sometimes PervScan finds himself waiting on a subway platform for the train to come. He stares at the map of Manhattan with all the train routes mapped out in different colors. And then mentally he starts to fill in the outline of Manhattan with the itinerary of a more personal journey. “I had sex there,” he thinks to himself, looking at some part of the map. “I had a lot of sex in that neighborhood. A few times over there. Oh yeah, and that was fun, over there.” Soon the map fills up with imaginary pushpins such as generals use to mark the advance of a military assault. But in this case Manhattan — and the occasional part of Brooklyn — takes on the contours of an individual sex map. And sometimes, if the train is really slow in coming, the camera zooms back and PervScan sees not just New York but the rest of the country too, and sometimes even a few foreign countries.

It can tell you a lot about your life to see the geographical concentrations and dispersions of your sexuality. You see where you lived and loved and played and worked. (Hm, you’re not supposed to have sex in the workplace!) You see how far you were sometimes willing to travel to visit somebody, and it reminds you that that person must have been really special to be worth the effort — that, or you were just horny and desperate.

At any rate, these researchers have indulged in a different sort of sexual cartography. Rather than map their sexuality onto any given region, they’ve discovered a regionality of pure sex. Go look at the full-scale image showing those chains of relations. Really — go look at it. Contemplate it for a few minutes. Take the time to understand the significance of the repeating figures, or the distribution of pinks (girls) and blues (boys). For example, see the little triangles with the numbers 12 and 9? This shows that it was more common for a boy to have slept with two girls than for a girl to have slept with two boys. Look how those basic configurations become parts of larger ones, such as the Y-shaped figures to the top and left. It’s really fascinating.

Wouldn’t you love a map like that of your own sex life? Of course, it would be uncomfortable filling in all the nodes. You might find out that you slept with somebody who slept with your brother or sister, or with someone that you despise, thus connecting you to your enemy by a trail of semen and blood. But then again, if you did it you did it, and if you are you are, so what’s the harm in knowing about it? Know thyself, as the Oracle at Delphi said.

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