Come On Time

DOMINIC CADDEN combines sexology, metaphysics, anthropology and the odd penis joke to illustrate thatwhen it comes to sex, theres an optimum speed and time for everything. As the world speeds up, readers can havea laugh as they learn how to improve the quality and quantity of time spent having sex.

- Dominic Cadden

In the USA, adults spend only four-and-a-half minutes a day on average having sex, claims James Gleick, the author of Faster – The Acceleration of Just About Everything. Gleick's concern is that as everyone gets busier, and there are more constraints on time, people are finding ways to do everything faster – including sex.

Dr John Marshall, New Zealand's, Sexual Physics expert, examined the prospect of this trend when taken to the ultimate extreme – sex at light speed. He wasn’t exactly lit up by the prospect. For a start, as the penis approaches 99 per cent of the speed of light it will shrink to less than two centimetres, but still emit an impressive but deafening sonic boom with every inward and outward thrust. Your moisture-seeking missile will be subjected to huge resistive forces, with the friction heating it up enormously proportional to speed. When it hits light speed, the temperature inside your heat-seeking moisture missile will be so high, that its molecules will undergo a phase transition into a gas, vaporising it almost instantaneously. In the unlikely event that you could ejaculate, the relativistic semen will create enormous air resistance, burst into flames and generate enough force to pierce a small hole straight through your partner’s lower torso. Double-bagging won't help. And you thought the odd bit of premature ejaculation was bad.